How to check if your RCA pre-outs are bad

[Terranova 10+ year member]

So today I got around to figuring out what was going on with my speakers. What was happening was the left side would keep cutting out randomly. So I checked all my wiring and made sure the connections were good and it still was happening. I tried moving the channel 1 to channel 2 and visa versa and the left side would work but the right side would not. So after some more digging and removing the line driver thinking the RCA could be bad and even tried a different amp and it did the same exact thing. One side would work and the other side was just extremely quiet and distorted (you had to put your ear right next to the speakers) and low and behold the left side was bad from the deck pre-out itself. Now could it be the RCA cable or could it possibly be the deck itself? I have the iDA-X305 deck (not even 2 months old yet) and the Alpine PDX 2.150 with a Phoenix Gold TLD22 line driver. Any help would be greatly appreciated thank you!

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[spltuscon 10+ year member]

Disconnect the rca's from the line driver inputs. Put in a test tone disk (or mp3 file) and put on a constant tone (like 50hz or so) and turn the volume almost to maximum. Use a DMM and check for AC voltage at the end of the RCA's...you should get somewhere close to what the deck is rated for (like 4v pre-outs should be around 4v). If you don't get that, then the deck outputs are bad. If your voltage is fine then check after the line driver...etc, till you've tracked down the problem.