I'll start with the CD player history....I had an '84
Tercel whose breaks went out causing the car to gently
SLAM into the back of a pickup. This was about two
years ago. Most of the things from that Tercel I left
because they were junk; however, I kept two things:
the snow chains (cause you never know) and the JVC CD
player which I received as a Birthday present one
year.

So I've been driving my father's '89 240DL which is
kept in very good condition (mainly by my father,
though he lives an hour away) and have developed quite
a love for talk radio (the only thing that is actually
worth listening to on a stock Volvo radio). The other
day my friend and I finally got the initiative to
install the JVC CD player in the volvo (this is after
2 years of having the CD player sitting in a desk
drawer) and this leads me to my problem.....

First we unhooked the wire harness from the original
volvo radio as well as the antenna and the other two
'mystery wires' that come standard with volvos (NB. I
say mystery wires because I don't know what the hell
they do). We then proceeded to connect the power, the
ground, and the speakers making sure that each was
aligned properly (black being ground, grey and gray
with yellow stripe being speakers and red being
power). Anyway, we hooked all these up and the CD
player cut on, and we thought, "Fine, now let's hook
it to the battery so that we can play the radio
without the key." My father has always thought that
it was so cool that you could turn the volvo off and
thereby kill all the power in the whole car. We
wanted to circumvent that. Because we could not find
a good place to run a wire straight from the battery,
we decided to run it from the fuse circuit that is
always on. I think it is circuit 8 that powers the
glove box, interior light, hazard lights etc. So we
hooked both the yellow (battery) and red (accessory)
power wires to this fuse. You may wonder wouldn't
just the yellow work? The answer is, "apparently
not", so we just hooked both to the fuse. Bingo! it
worked. With the key out of the ignition, we were
able to get the radio playing and blasting the only CD
in there (Nickel Creek) out of the left speaker (the
right speaker doesn't seem to work so well. So
Feeling good with our success, we merrily strolled
down to the pond where we went swimming, dodging
horseflies and picking up several chiggers (tenacious
little things inhabiting the Southeastern United
States) along the way. We got back to the car and
hopped-in to go for a ride. First thing we did was
turn the CD player on to listen to some good tunes.
And here's where the real conundrum begins:

When we turned the car on, the CD player cutoff (as to
be expected when the ignition is switched) then
subsequently restarted but missing one important
element-- SOUND. We tried turning the CD Player off,
starting the car, then turning the CD Player only to
find that no music would play. Then we turned the car
back off, and the CD Player worked fine. Now while it
is nice to have a CD player that plays while the car
is off, I would prefer it to work while I am driving
the car (remember, I like listening to talk radio as
well as music). After our little trip, we broke open
the fuse box thinking that the problem lay in the
powering (After all, we did do some wierd wiring). We
changed the power to go from fuse 8 to fuse 5 (what we
determined to be the spare) It still played no sound
out of the speakers. We then decided to wire it just
to the battery and see if that would work....so we
reconnected the wires straight to the wire harness and
succeeded in doing so (the CD Player powered-up) but
there was still no sound. We then began to check the
speaker wires, and we checked each wire, one by one
until we found which one worked. None of the
different connections made the CD Player work while it
was connected to the battery. By this point it was
dark and we were fed-up with the whole thing; so, we
reconnected the old Volvo radio. It is currently
installed and plays NPR through Both Speakers.

Any ideas, if so, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.





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