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When I bought my first TR, 57 years ago, one of the factory options that was included was a radio. The Standard-Triumph radio (Photo 1) was an AM, tube type radio with an enclosed speaker mounted to the under-dash area and the bulkhead end panel in the passenger footwell. I wanted to add a newer radio but stay true to the original appearance. 

 I selected the Model One from RetroSound (Photo 2) AM/FM with connections for iPod, SD RAM, or USB key.

Both have chromed face plates, black knobs, and chromed escutcheons. The RetroSound can be purchased with either a black or chrome faceplate. Knobs and escutcheons are also available in black or chrome.

The original radio was installed with a 5” x 7” speaker enclosed in a casing mounted in the passenger footwell. Since I was not interested in mounting speakers in the doors or in the rear area, I went with a RetroSound Dual Voice Coil (DVC) speaker so that I could refurbish and reinstall the original speaker casing and have two channel (stereo) output to separate sides of a single speaker.

When the 61-year-old speaker was removed, it had worn through the sound producing material in areas where the material repeatedly flexed!

The original speaker casing was a black, wrinkle finish with a mesh cover. The box was given a fresh coat of wrinkle finish paint (Photo 3). 

While the mounting tabs line up with the posts inside the casing, two slight adjustments are necessary. First, the speaker surround will prevent the speaker from installing as it blocks the inside edge of the mounting tab. I used a Dremel tool with a grinding burr to create enough clearance. Second, the speaker is a tight fit and was persuaded into place with a few taps of a punch with a hammer on the outer edge of the four mounting tabs. The grooveless retainer rings from the original unit were mounted over the posts inside the casing and tapped into place with a punch (Photo 8). 

I will explore two possibilities for completing the electrical connections. If your existing wiring and fusing can support the demands of the radio, you can tap into existing wiring. To go this route, I would add in-line fuses to the radio circuits. I purchased modern blade fuse units (Photo 14) and installed 5 and 10-amp fuses. (Note: Current versions of this radio come with a 15-amp fused circuit for the radio power so the 10 amp fuse would not be required.) I then soldered bullet connectors onto the ends of the wires and covered these with heat shrink tubing. The bullet connectors will allow the wires to connect into existing TR wiring.

The green circuits on the TR come on with the ignition so are a good source to power the radio. The purple circuits are always on so are a good source to power the clock side and radio pre-sets.

In the passenger footwell are sources for both the green and purple circuits. There is a dual barrel connector with three of the four purple connections occupied. This is a good connection for the always on circuit.

Adjacent to the purple circuits is a green circuit. The various green circuits seemed to all have single barrel connectors, so I replaced one of the singles with a double barrel connector, placed the existing two wires into the new connector and then added my new power wire to the radio.

The main connections to the radio feed into the radio via a wiring module (Photo 15). The attached wires are colour-coded and tagged. Even though the radio can be disconnected by removing the wiring module, I decided to solder bullet connectors on the wire ends that were used and then covered them with heat shrink tubing. The unused wires were taped and bundled together. The bullet connectors allow for easy connection to the TR electrical system. The red lead powers the radio so will connect to the green circuit. The yellow lead powers the memory so will connect to the purple circuit. The black lead is the ground so will either connect to a black circuit barrel connector or via an eyelet connector to a grounding screw or bolt. The blue/white wire can be connected to a power amplifier should you have also installed one. The blue wire will likely go unused since it provides power to a power antenna.

A second module plugs into the radio and provides wiring to the speakers. If you are only using front speakers as in my case, you will only use the white and grey wires but there is a second set of rear speaker wires in case you want to add the rear speakers as Toronto Triumph Club member, André Fleury, shows in his article in an issue of Ragtop, the club magazine. Pay attention to the polarity of these wires so that the ones with the black stripe go to ground. Very small marettes were used to connect the left and right front speaker connections to the module.

A second possibility for the electrical wiring is to use a module that provides additional electrical circuits to your TR’s wiring. I used Advance Auto-Wire’s (AAW) Auxiliary Fuse Panel kit (Photo 16). If you read Let There Be Light in the Technical Articles section, you might remember I used an AAW Headlight Relay kit. The mounting panels for the Auxiliary Fuse Panel and the Headlight Relay kits are the same size so the attachment points to the horizontal section of the firewall in the passenger footwell allows the use of the same holes and fasteners to install both kits – one in the engine bay (headlights) and one inside the car (auxiliary circuits). You will get two always-on circuits (purple) and two ignition-on circuits (green). All four circuits are fused. If you use the AAW module for the radio circuits, the yellow wire picks up the power at the starter or starter relay and the white/green wire attaches to the green circuit in your car so that when the ignition is on, the relay on the module is triggered to provide power on the two green wires. You can use one of these two green circuits for the radio power and one of the two purple circuits for the radio/clock memory.

The finished product looks equally at home in a TR6 and I have installed one there as well (Photo 17), using the TR6’s console side panels to house a pair of stereo speakers. While the model shown here is no longer manufactured, RetroSound has several models that are similar in design and feature chrome/black knobs and faces as well as features such as auxiliary, USB, Bluetooth, Sirius XM, and Apple Play.