Alpine amp hates Pioneer deck?! Troubleshooting advice plz
 

Hi Guys,

Got a question for you guys, hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Been working on my install, and am getting pretty pissed off now.

This is what I've been working with:

http://www.canadiancaraudio.com/onli...hlight=pioneer

I got the CDT components mounted up in the doors/A-pillars, all my cables were run, went to hook the Alpine MRV-T757, and.... nothing. The amp's protection light is blinking. I checked the manual, the error message is "RCA Ground Floated". First I pulled out the multimeter, yup, getting 12V/13.8 when running. Try a few different ground locations, no difference.

So I did a bunch of reading... found an obscure reference to the fact that Alpine decks ground their RCAs internally or something, and many other manufacturers don't? You guys ever encountered this?

So first thing I did is hack up an old RCA cable, took the ground (shielding), and wired it into the ground on the amp. Sure enough, amp lights up fine, doesn't go into protection anymore. So, with the crappy mcgivered cable hooked into the pass-thru RCAs. Start getting some sound out of the speakers, but sounds like crap. The tweets are really powerful, but the mids are muddy and weak. Figure grounding the RCA might be screwing up the signal somehow.

I've got another amp handy (Rockford Fosgate, does 100Wx2 @ 4ohms as well), so I hook that up instead. Wire everything in, alright, getting sound! Still doesn't sound quite right... but figure maybe I just have to do some serious tuning. Turn it up a little bit, all of a sudden I see smoke coming out of the amp!! The amp is so hot, I can hardly touch it, and it wasn't running for more than 2 minutes.

So I shut it down, hook it up in my buddies truck... still works luckily.

So...

At this point, where do you guys figure the problem lies? Could the deck somehow be doing this? I'm at a bit of a loss... I've probably installed 5 systems in my different vehicles, about another 10 in friends. Never had a problem like that.

Any advice appreciated!

Dan

I currently have alpine deck with pioneer amps. In one of my old cars i had pioneer deck with alpine amps.
Never had any incompatability problems. Never had any ground problems.
Sounds like an install problem to me. Amps don't usually work after you let the smoke out. :sly: Check speaker wires, check gounds & power etc. etc.
I would try it with different speakers, differnt rca's, etc. etc.