Cheap wiring causing subs not to hit?

[STONGE 10+ year member]

Well a little update!

Changed my RCA's. Unmounted the amp from the back of the box to the back of the seat. And was able to get sound out of the subs to be able to set the gain lower the max!

All is working well at the moment!!

I will post back if anything changes, so please don't delete this thread.

Thank you everyone here that helped me out!

 

[Team TH (Donny) 10+ year member]

No problem bud glad it turned out alright for ya!

 

[STONGE 10+ year member]

No problem bud glad it turned out alright for ya!

Well, subs are silence again.

I've tried so many different things today I honestly couldn't tell you all the variations I've done!

So it seems like if I have my Gain a little over half, the subs hit but are pretty quiet. If I turn up the volume to about 30 out of 50, they will go completely silent.

I did, however, go down to Home Depot today and get 25ft of 4 gauge copper wire to replace, what I think, my crappy power and ground. This is the kind that doesn't have that many strands (20 maybe?) and are thick. The wire is also stiff but not really a big deal for me. I hope to get 4gauge spade terminals tomorrow or Monday. Got 4 gauge ring terminals and they fix great on this new wire.

I took off the spade connector on the old power wire going to the amp and the connector was pretty loose on it. The wire felt pretty brittle and frail and right when I took the connector off, the wire was breaking into pieces like crazy!!!

So I hope this new wire will fix the problem!! If not, I really don't know what I am going to do. Could it possibly be the subs that are no good now? I have 2 12ohm Jl 10w012 I wish I could use but don't have 3 of them to get the impedance down to 4 ohms.

Thanks.

 

[IonRL205 10+ year member]

Does your amp go into protect mode when your subs go silent? You could have your gain up too high and your amp is going into protect mode.

 

[STONGE 10+ year member]

After looking at the details on Crutchfield about my amp, it says:

Power Indicator: When the amplifier is turned on, the power indicator lights up. This indicator turns off with the amplifier and will turn off if the amplifier goes into protect mode.

Protection circuitry: The amplifier features protection circuits that will turn the amp off in case of the following events to protect the amplifier and your speakers:

* Speaker wire short-circuits

* Speaker output contacts ground

* Unit malfunctions and DC is sent to speaker output

* Internal temperature is too high

* Loss of ground of head unit or amp

So I believe it actually IS NOT going into Protect mode.

 

[IonRL205 10+ year member]

Ok so your amp comes on but no sound is played to your subs? Have you checked the speaker wires on your subs? Like taken your subs out the box and checked if those wires are loose? That's all I can think of since you've tried everything else.

 

[STONGE 10+ year member]

Yep checked that today everything was tight.

I think I've mentioned already that my amp is a mono block and has two speaker outputs on the back.

I had them individually wired to the amp like + on sub to + on amp, - on sub to - on amp. But today I decided to run it in parallel to see if that would fix it but no luck there.

 

[IonRL205 10+ year member]

Only other thing I could think of is the amp itself is bad. If all your wires and connections are good, then that's really that could be left.

 

[STONGE 10+ year member]

Going out tomorrow to get new spade terminals so I can test the new Home Depot 4gauge.

If this doesn't fix the problem, does it have to be the amp?

I really hope not. I already went through an old Audiobahn amp that I was a real big fan of until I blew the outputs by having a shi**y ground. Hope this amp is still good!

 

[Imtjnotu 5,000+ posts]

try wiring the subs to 2 ohms and see...i think the fuse is the problem or check the fuse in the amp

 

[STONGE 10+ year member]

How exactly would I go about wiring my 2 SVC 10" subs down to 2 ohms final impedance on my mono amp that has two outputs?

I think I already have the impedance at 2 ohms. Just want to make sure.

Oh and the fuse in the amp looks good as does the one at the battery.

 

[IonRL205 10+ year member]

You just plug your positive wires in the positive terminals and your negative wires in the negative terminals. The amp bridges it internally so it would give you 2 ohms. Do you have any friends that could let you test one of their amps in your car? If another amp makes your subs work fine, then it would be your amp that is the problem.