What is the gray plug on the 92 lincoln town car stereo?

Question:

When I take out the stereo, there is the antenna and the stereo plug in (that I hook the wire harness to), but there is also a plug-in that is wrapped in gray rubber that plugs in to the left side of the factory stereo. I'm putting in a head unit and I don't know what to do with this chord.

Answers:

That cable has 8 very small wires that are basically the output of the head unit, which are then routed to the amplifier that is behind the back seat. The amplifiers don't go bad - it's the electrolytic capacitors in the head unit. You're probably only hearing sound from one speaker right? I've been through this, and I don't know of any head units, aside from the OEM Ford units, that have this type of set up, so you can't buy some kind of adapter. It's really best to replace the head unit with an aftermarket product, but you'll have to plug it into the factory wiring. In order to do this for my car, I obtained a section of OEM wiring, including the plug I needed, to make my own adapter and plug into the factory wiring. It really wasn't that difficult. I plugged it into a connection located at the base of the passenger side door pillar. I think there are pictures posted in the yahoo group Ford Taurus years 1986_2004 or something like that. I currently have a 35 Watt Alpine tape deck, and it makes plenty of power for me, so I'm not using an external amp, except to power the subwoofer. The JBL amplifier also cannot be used in conjunction with an aftermarket head unit. You'll have to by-pass the factory amplifier, which should send all output wires through a harness connector located at the base of the passenger side door pillar. When you make your own harness, you'll need to obtain a harness from a car in a junkyard, and cut out the section of wires that lead from the amp to the connector mentioned. You'll also need to bring a 12V battery to power the seat, so you can move it back and forth to remove the seat bolts to cut out enough length of wire (40 inches?). I plan on replacing the capacitors in my OEM head unit soon, and reinstalling it, and you could do that too, if you really want to keep it stock.

Is it the small plug? Some had the cell phone adapters, if your stereo is working just leave it off