Radio swap from a '94 to a '93

[red454]

I have a '94 Bonneville with a factory radio with the CD player.

I am ready to pass the car on to a relative and my '93 SSEi has the fancy radio with the equalizer and a tape deck (no CD). I would like to have the CD player in the '93.

Can I take the radio from the '94 and put it in the '93?

[John Deere Boy]

Short answer is no. The 92/93 style radio actually controls the backlights on the climate control headunit. I believe if you put a 94 radio in a 93 car, the climate control backlights will always be on full brightness at night. If your 94 SE happens to have climate control, i think you can swap in the climate control headunit and get by. Might also have to swap the HVAC programmer. There are a lot of posts about this so search around...I might be wrong about some of the points here but i do know there's a catch.

[John Deere Boy]

I did the searching for you:

http://www.pontiacbonnevilleclub.com/fo ... 53&p=62224
http://www.pontiacbonnevilleclub.com/fo ... 4&p=246842

Of course you can swap the radios and just live with a bright climate control if you want. Do you have an Ipod or other MP3 player? There's a way to hardwire a high quality aux input into your tape deck if you're interested.

[red454]

Thanks for the search - I tried, but depending on what search words you use, you may get a gazillion hits with little relevance, or two or three good ones...

The 93 has the fancy climate control (which I despise) and the 94 has the bare bones manual style (which I actually like).

But the swap sounds like it is more trouble than it is worth - and if I swapped, I would lose the steering wheel buttons (which I fixed last year and use all the time).

I do have one of those tape deck adapters that I can use with the iPod, and that works well. My wife wanted to keep the CD player since the factory ones seem to be hard to find.

Thanks again for the info.

[John Deere Boy]

You're welcome. If you get tired of the sound quality of the tape adapter, get in touch with me and i'll show you how to hardwire an input straight to the amp. If the steering wheel buttons were the last straw for the swap, jwickoff (i think, maybe it was jrs3800) knows how to make them work. The info got lost when we moved to this website.

[red454]

I made some little metal posts to fix the steering wheel buttons - and they all work fine now. Not sure how long we will keep the Bonnevilles. The red one (94) is showing its age, and the black one (93) only has 80K miles, but of course it is going on 20 years now...