Over the weekend I installed an aux input jack in my center console following advice on the forums. Overall I'm very pleased with it, but there are a few quirks I was hoping for some help on.

Background information
The car in question is a 2008 C6 w/ Nav.

The version of the mod I performed was using the XM wires at the navigation unit, and wiring them to a Radio Shack 3.5mm jack which has 5 soldering terminals (2 for L, 2 for R, 1 for ground). I used individual wires for each terminal on the jack, since I had some 18g or 20g wire sitting around.

The left & right wire connections were soldered to the cut XM L/R wires, and the "ground" wire was spliced into the tan/white XM wire using one of those red clips that you use pliers to clamp down on the 2 wires.

All of the solder connections are heatshrinked, so I don't think they could be touching anything.

The issues
I've noticed that with my MP3 Player (Zune HD) plugged into the jack through a 3.5mm cable, the audio will cut out or get staticy when I'm touching the wire and moving the wire around. This also seemed to occur for a moment when I engaged the hand brake when I parked this morning, which I thought was pretty odd.

When I'm just driving and not messing around with the wire, it works just fine with no static.

Any of you electrical/audio gurus have an idea of why this might be occurring? Should I try running the jack's ground wire to a chassis ground?

Thanks for any help!

 

poor connection somewhere or low quality cable

 

Check the 3.5mm plug that goes into the MP3 player, you may have one of the audio channel wires shorting on the housing. If that plug is factory made, make sure it's firmly seated in the player.

 

I'll try another 3.5mm cable and see if that makes a difference. The cable I'm using is your standard Radio Shack black stereo cable, and has been good in the past.

 

Looks like a poor connection is the cause. The patch cable is somewhat loose in the plug, so when I move the cable around it's slipping in & out of the plug a little.

I think I just need to get the plug to stick out more so the cable can sit in it a bit deeper.

Thanks for the clues