The mirrored layout, old-school Kenwood tape deck in the Pajero was neat, but it was getting time to expand my audio options in the truck beyond an old cassette of Springteen’s Greatest Hits I had found in the bottom of a storage bin and the NPR station from a city in the next state over, when I was in the right spot to pick it up. So, yesterday Crutchfield sent a modern receiver my way and I installed it after work yesterday evening.
Unfortunately I couldn’t use the factory radio connector with an adapter harness, as I learned that a 94 US market Montero has a different connector and completely different audio wiring scheme than a 94 JDM Pajero. Fortunately, I have an English language fsm and wiring schematic for the truck that made it easy enough to work around without guesswork. I’m sure an appropriate adapter harnesses exists, but I don’t read or speak Japanese to find one from a seller on the other side of the world. I did opt to wire things up with bullet connectors to allow things to be easily restored to an original configuration.
The end result came our nicely: a modern audio receiver that does all the basic audio things of playing music from digital media or a streaming source over Bluetooth, and it plays FM radio on the band used on this side of the world.
Navigating files and folders on a USB drive with only a single line of display text isn’t ideal, but is manageable enough, I guess. As a bonus, sound quality over the six (presumably) original speakers is much improved. Reading the manual last night gave me an idea of what all the fancy sound shaping options do, and some light fiddling with them on the way to work this morning improved sound a bit further. This is, by far, the fanciest thing on the Pajero.
...the new photo attribution is... le sigh...