Here it is! In this entry I will cov­er my expe­ri­ence installing this Ken­wood DDX593 head unit into my car, a 2012 Sub­aru Out­back. The rea­son­ing is that nowhere could I find a step-by-step set of instal­la­tion instruc­tions, and it was me sift­ing through tons of videos on YouTube and try­ing to find any­thing to help me out here. Maybe it will help some­one. Obvi­ous­ly, I am an ama­teur and have no expe­ri­ence at all doing this. Heck, I have nev­er even stripped wires before. The strip/crimp tool was com­plete­ly new to me. This is not a How-To arti­cle and in no way is it intend­ed to replace offi­cial instruc­tion man­u­als. Just some infor­ma­tion if you need it and hap­pen to have the same car I do and the same head unit. You know, just in case you find this blog entry some­how.

Items need­ed: Screw­driv­er (small and long han­dled), crimp/stripper tool, head unit and adapter + trim kits, zip ties, elec­tri­cal tape (opt), mag­net, pli­ers, crimp caps/caps, posi-tap­s/­sol­der­ing items, pry tools, small ring ter­mi­nal (if you wish to bypass the brake), patience.

I spent the days before install days look­ing into every­thing, try­ing to make men­tal maps, gath­er­ing nec­es­sary mate­ri­als (caps, ring ter­mi­nal, posi-taps, elec­tri­cal tape), and hook­ing up the  wires before­hand.

I referred to all the man­u­als, watched videos, and tried to fig­ure every­thing out before I’d start the install. Videos I’d rec­om­mend and referred to. Pac-Audio, Park­ing Bypass, Con­nect­ing Wires, and more wires.

I’m going to say right now and here, though, that I would not rec­om­mend the Pac-Audio adapter as between me and my broth­er we could not get it to work. Not sure what I did wrong, but the instruc­tions were dif­fi­cult to under­stand despite the video and Pac-Audio instruc­tions and by the time we were hooked up and test­ing it all out I said “screw it” and I’ll just make do with­out the con­trols for the time being. …I do miss my steer­ing wheel vol­ume con­trols, though. If I were to make a guess I’d say it was a wiring thing, because there was one instruc­tion about hook­ing the white/orange to the chas­sis ground which I don’t under­stand.

OK. So. Series of pic­tures from here on out.

Pry­ing: Despite sev­er­al dif­fer­ent instruc­tions, I found that start­ing from the upper right area to be the most use­ful. Boy, those things are on there!!! Man­aged to scrape up the dark plas­tic a lit­tle, but not too badly…took me a good 15 min­utes to do this part. Saw a video where the guy put it inside the vent and after the fact, that was prob­a­bly a good idea. I tried to get good images of the clasps here. My poor fin­gers, lol.

Unscrew­ing and unhook­ing: 4 screws hold the orig­i­nal unit in place. This is where the long han­dled screw­driv­er and a mag­net to catch the screws is use­ful because as I was told repeat­ed­ly via videos, “if you drop them it will be lit­er­al­ly Hell to retrieve.” Tak­ing no chances here. Had a lit­tle bit of trou­ble with the upper left screw one, because the steer­ing wheel was in the way, but two it was ON THERE. Need­ed some seri­ous oomph and I am so glad I have nice tools so noth­ing stripped.

As you look at the pic­tures, you’ll see that the space to reach behind and unhook the wires is…very small. Thank­ful­ly being a female, I have small hands and was able to smoosh my hand into the air vent hole to help. Look­ing back, remov­ing the screws and pan­el for the air con­trols would have been much more use­ful if you have big hands. Might need some help hold­ing the unit, though.

^ Here I was try­ing to show you the small view I had of the cords behind the unit. You can see the 2 har­ness con­nect­ed to the unit there.

^Smoosh­ing my hand into the air vent. Ouch.

AAAAAAAND this is where I got my first major hang up. That lit­tle gray doohick­ey is the anten­na. Giv­en the space lim­i­ta­tions and the lack of lever­age it was near­ly impos­si­ble to unhook this suck­er. This was when I need­ed broth­er-back­up. So as I rec­om­mend­ed above he unscrewed and removed the  air unit con­trols (don’t try to remove the side pan­el­ing near your leg because those are held on my screws. We tried. Pret­ty hard. Thank­ful­ly noth­ing was broken…thank you Sub­aru plas­tic for not being super cheap) so that we had bet­ter lever­age. Even then he had to use pli­ers to remove the anten­na from the har­ness after unhook­ing it from the side of the pan­el­ing where it was hooked into.

^ SUCCESS. You can see the pli­er marks on the but­ton.

Here is what the back of the OEM unit looks like…which, btw, was quite unlike the dia­grams I was see­ing and shown. That blast­ed anten­na cable held us up for a long while and com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed.

Micro­phone Place­ment: The next on the list was decid­ing where to put the micro­phone for audio calls. I want­ed to clip it onto the head­lin­er after watch­ing this video and run the cord down the A‑pillar, but after try­ing and fail­ing to pry the trim (ANOTHER set of attach­ments that aren’t sup­posed to removed by ama­teurs methinks…considering the cur­tain airbags that make Sub­aru’s awe­some in crash tests and those hooks make it so that it does­n’t fly into your face), I decid­ed to go with what my broth­er said was rec­om­mend­ed to begin with and much eas­i­er which is to just mount it on the steer­ing wheel and run the line a short dis­tance behind the pan­els. Worked total­ly fine when test­ing out sound lat­er.

Next cou­ple steps were done in tan­dem and this is where I start­ed to for­get to take pic­tures because it was hook­ing up the last wires and try­ing to fig­ure out the stu­pid steer­ing wheel adapter thing. My broth­er was busy putting togeth­er the adapter kit for the unit itself. Ini­tial­ly (hav­ing read some reviews that com­plained about the qual­i­ty of the Metra plas­tic as com­pared to the hefty OEM met­al brack­ets) he placed the OEM brack­ets on it, which was great, but we found that then the trim plate for the front would­n’t secure to any­thing, so we switched back to the plas­tic which was per­fect­ly fine. Posi-taps were great.

After fid­dling back and forth (hook­ing and unhook­ing the bat­tery ter­mi­nal too…) and watch­ing videos again and hem­ming and haw­ing over the instruc­tions, we gave up alto­geth­er, zip­tied the adapter into one of those help­ful holes already in the car, zip-tied the wires to be more neat and to make sure there was no undue stress placed upon any wires. **huh. I just had a thought after look­ing at the above picture…I won­der if the prob­lem was that I had the green/blue wire from the adapter already con­nect­ed when I tried to pro­gram the thing, which seemed to be work­ing fine and accept­ing the commands…just would­n’t trans­late into the unit itself. I think the instruc­tions tell you to hook it up after wards. ** Before plac­ing the trim back on, we test the unit and fid­dle some more with the Pac-Audio to no avail.

Sound: Check. Blue Tooth: a lit­tle spot­ty, but check. Radio: check. It was on mute ini­tial­ly and we were scratch­ing our heads as to why audio was­n’t play­ing when BAM it came on and blew our ears off. Great! The sound was so much bet­ter than my OEM unit! Tried the call func­tion. Played with oth­er set­tings. Tried one more time for the steer­ing wheel adapter before call­ing it a day and trim replaced.

TADAAAAAA!!

We tried out Android, iPod, USB, micro USB, charg­ing, CD and of course, even DVD:

Park­ing brake bypass: Suc­cess!

And you can see the vari­able light fea­ture too which is pret­ty cool.

One of these days I’ll either try again with the Pac-Audio or try to find an eas­i­er-to-use adapter.

Oh here’s a sound test for you

So here’s a side-by side for com­par­ison’s sake:

Pret­ty proud of myself. 🙂 So over­all it was­n’t all that dif­fi­cult. Just a few things here and there, but all quite doable giv­en I don’t have nav­i­ga­tion or an amaz­ing sound sys­tem to com­pli­cate life. The steer­ing wheel con­trols were com­pli­cat­ed enough. We should be ready for the beach trip now and now I can cus­tomize pic­tures and songs for the road with­out a huge tan­gle of wires that my Sansa Clip+ gave me in the old con­fig­u­ra­tion. Also, peo­ple with fat fin­gers aren’t going to like the small access to the vol­ume knob, because of the way the Out­back has the con­sole on such an inclined angled. Me? I’m fine with it.