Hey my friend asked me to put a new stereo in his 85 seville. Now, I am not a professional, but a do like to think that I have a good grasp on car audio, but I could not figure it out for the life of me. I has a Delco Bose system in it. We pulled the old radio, and got the new one all hooked up. Turned the ignition and the display lit up a little, but no numbers or anything appeared. I rechecked everything, and then ran a voltometer on the wires. We were getting power from the ignition switch, but not from the 12V constant. Checked the fuse, and it was fine. The cigarete lighter had no powerto it either, or the lights under the dash above your feet. Couldn't figure out why none of them had power. Still can't. I don't know if there is some sort of fuse elsewhere, of master switch of some sort. I decided to stop messing with it, and so I just tapped into another wire under the dash that did have constant power, and just used that to run the cd player. Well, that did fix the CD player problem, but then nothing was coming through the speakers. Checked the wiring harness agian, it was good. Checked to make sure that there was in fact signal coming out and there was. The only thing I can think is that the speakers are all self amplified, and some how the power is not making it to them. Which would make sense because there was no power to a lot of the other stuff as I mentioned. Does anyone have any idea what is wrong. I would really like some imput. He bought all the stuff, and can't really return it, and doesn't want to waste it. We could just gut it and rewire the whole thing, but that's a pain, and time consuming, and even more expensive. Thanks, and I hope that makes sense.

 

I'm not sure about an 85. I do know that the 88+ had the factory amp at each speaker but not sure about yours. To test it, put a 9 volt battery on the speaker leads at the harness to see if you can hear them pop. To be clear, put the (+) speaker lead on one terminal of the 9v, and put the (-) speaker lead on the other terminal. If there is no factory amp and the speakers are good then you should hear the speaker "pop" faintly every time you touch the leads to to the battery. Make sure you have disconnected these leads from the radio first. Try all 4 sets of speaker wires and if they don't pop you either: have a factory amp in the car, all your speakers are bad, or the speaker wires in the car have been cut or shorted. If they don't pop and it says Delco Bose in the car, my guess is there is a factory amp in there somewhere. In something that old I'd start looking behind all the carpet on the sides of the trunk for it. Hope this helps.