FutureOwnr

I am planning to purchase a LS400 and I hear doing a full blown audio upgrade swap is extremely hard.

All I want to do is upgrade the radio to a nice Alpine double-din deck with the garmin nav and all other nice stuff. I am a huge audiophile and in all prior cars I've upgraded the audio with new speakers, amps, subwoofer...Always tasteful, no ghetto nonsense.

Can anyone direct me/advise me as to how hard an install is for a double-din nav system for the LS400 from 98-00? Are there any specific things I need to purchase or look out for in order to keep the sound perfectly the same, especially if its a Nakimichi Lexus LS400.

Any relatively stress free audio upgrades that are almost plug and play that will give me amazing audio quality other than the already nice pioneer stereo or nakimichi.

Thanks everyone!

Sc0pe

iTrader: (1)

It's actually pretty easy to install a new radio in the LS. The fun thing about this car, is that the more custom you go, the easier it is to integrate! The easiest way to put a new radio in the car, while leaving things stock, is using a Beatsonic harness. Unfortunately, there is no harness for the Nakamichi system, so try looking for cars with the (Pioneer) Lexus Premium Sound audio system. The speaker boxes can be easily enlarged by way of a dremel tool, and some measuring, and pretty much any 20mm tweeters will fit in the stock pods with little, or no modifications.

Kansas

I had a Kenwood double-din installed to replace my Nakamichi headunit in my 2000 LS400: https://www.clublexus.com/forums/8219167-post329.html

No interface harness was needed. The Nakamichi amp and all the original speakers were used.

It works great!

Turbosauce

iTrader: (1)

I recently swapped out my factory player for an old pioneer double din,


I used the metra double din installation kit, and the only issues I ran into were that the speaker wires were run to the passenger side amp and just power wires to the head unit so i had to get speaker wire run up to the amp and bypass and run it as an complete independant system.

But the install was fairly straight forward beside that.

FutureOwnr

Thanks for the reply! What kind of double din kit did you use? I don't want to use a metra, it seems like the color of yours flows really well from the color of the climate control which is what I'm looking for.

Also, you said no interface was needed for yours, do you notice a difference in sound as if the new unit is over powering the factory speakers and sub? Do you plan on swapping out and upgrading?

Kansas

The dash kit is from Metra. None of the available dash kits including the expensive one from Beatsonic truly match the HVAC of the 98-00 LS400 since the HVAC (and OEM head unit) is painted with a slightly metallic paint. The color match is better in real life than in photos where camera flash can make the metallic paint of the HVAC look more different than it really is. The Beatsonic dash kit is superior but it comes with a huge price.

I suppose it might be possible to blow the speakers if I turned up the volume to a painful level. I don't do that. I have no wish to damage my hearing at my advanced age. The installer used special connectors on the Kenwood's wiring harness and plugged them right into the OEM audio system connectors. No wires were cut and I could reinstall the Nakamichi head unit in probably 15 minutes -- no one would ever know that the car ever had an aftermarket head unit.

I think the OEM Nakamichi head unit provided a little "warmer" sound. The Kenwood double-din provides more "precise" sound similar to the standard 98-00 LS400 Pioneer system. There may be a little less bass with the Kenwood but I don't do "thump-thump" music.

I have a massive amount of music stored on my phone but most of the music I listen to these days is streaming wirelessly from Pandora with a little from Slacker and iHeart Radio. I like Pandora a LOT and pay the $36 annual fee to get it commercial free and use it on a number of devices including on my "smart TV" that runs Pandora on Linux. I don't listen to much over-the-air broadcast radio. The radio I listen to is usually from the free Internet "tunein" service which has over 70,000 radio stations from all over the world.

IMO, a car interior is not a good place for trying to create a true audiophile system unless one is listening mainly while in their parked car with the engine off. My $498 Kenwood solution is more than enough in a nearly 14 year old, 176,000 mile car where almost all listening is done while driving with traffic and road noise.