What are these 2 cut wires under the console?

[funola]

While working on my gear shift selector, I found these 2 cut pair of wires. One pair comes off of a black plastic barrel looking kind of thing (can't tell what it does from the looks of it) with gn/blk and blk/wh wires, the other comes off of the same kind of plastic barrel except it is white with red/wh and br/wh wires. Anyone know what they are for?

[compu_85]

Those are speaker wires.

-J

[vstech]

and whoever cut them, left you the connectors! so you can put the factory radio back in.
nice.

[Yak]

Does the white one say "L" and the black one say "R"?

They're probably the rear speaker connections downstream of the fader, labelled "four" in pic in post 31 in this thread: w123: Speaker Wiring Myths Debunked (Diagram) Bypassing the fader

Unfortunately, it looks like they were cut on the speaker-side of the connection, so you can't just plug things back in.

If you look carefully they unplug and the "barrel" is actually the male and female side of the plug. If you have the OE speakers in the rear, take a look there. You'll see the exact same setup.

[funola]

Originally Posted by Yak

Does the white one say "L" and the black one say "R"?

They're probably the rear speaker connections downstream of the fader, labelled "four" in pic in post 31 in this thread: w123: Speaker Wiring Myths Debunked (Diagram) Bypassing the fader

Unfortunately, it looks like they were cut on the speaker-side of the connection, so you can't just plug things back in.

If you look carefully they unplug and the "barrel" is actually the male and female side of the plug. If you have the OE speakers in the rear, take a look there. You'll see the exact same setup.

I'll take a closer look at the barrel connectors. The fader wires has been cut by PO and spliced to some non factory wires. Front and rear speakers works and is controlled by the radio.

[Yak]

Originally Posted by funola

I'll take a closer look at the barrel connectors. The fader wires has been cut by PO and spliced to some non factory wires. Front and rear speakers works and is controlled by the radio.

That makes sense with where the cut wire appears to be. The cut appears to be between the fader and the rears, which removes the fader from them and leaves the direct-to-rear speaker wires available for the new HU.

The fronts are hardwired to the fader harness, so if there's a cut on that end those should be the fronts.

If that's the case, it's probably a better install job than the recommendation to track down the common front/rear ground solder joins and cutting those. That just gets confusing and messy.