Ok so a few months back i bought an amp off ebay Zed Audio Gladius, It appeared to have never been hooked up all new and sealed, I install it and it worked fine running my EDi 6500's suddenly one day i turn the system on and nothing, no lights, power or protection.

I tested it and power is going to amp but nothing coming out. So i call Steven at Zed and he tells me to ship it back to him,

I also buy 2 miniliths from him to use for my subs.

Everything comes back, Hook it all up amd it sounds awesome, start tuning it and all seems fine, turn it off and go in the house.

A few hours later, I go to turn it on and NO subs, I'm like WTF. go check the amps and both sub amps are in protect mode; I shut system down and begin troublleshooting and all seems to be hooked up right, turn it back on and no lights, no power on the sub amps.

Call Steven and explain this, his reply is that he does not understand what could have happened but no lights, no power usually means amp is probably fried. He advises me to pack up and ship them back to him.

Now in the meantime the protect lights came back on but if i turn the car off and restart there are no lights, only on those 2 amps.

The subs are a dual 4 ohm sub and not a very good one either (temporary till the real subs arrive) the current subs are MA Audio 12D4's which i had laying around, the real subs are Eclipse SW8200's which were in transit at the time.

Could the crappy subs have taken out the amps, a local shop explained that the MA subs may have had "unstable" voice coils and eventhough they were rated at 4 ohms each, when wired down to 2 ohm load per amp it may have actiually been feeding less than 2 ohms like 1.? ohms each.

The amps are stable to 1 ohm but when bridged you are not supposed to run less than a 2 ohm load.

Would this possibly have caused the amps to fry or could it be in the wiring which i have checkled atleast 10 times.

It seems a coinsidence that the first amp went south then now the 2 sub amps go south, meanwhile the first amp (gladius) to the fronts is running fine, no problems at all, i am really stumped here.

I know Zed amps to be super reliable and of GREAT quality, so i am sure it is not an amp quality problem,

I hope it is just the garbage subs from MA, but that seems odd to me, any ideas? I really wanna solve this before I damage anything else.

 

Have you checked the coils with a DMM?

 

yes, here are the readings:

Sub #1: 03.1; 03.2
Sub #2: 03.3; 03.2

 

And are you wiring everything in parallel?

 

all positives of one sut together and all negatives together, one sub goes to Master amp the other goes to Slave amp.

 

Ahh, so they're strapped.... and from the sounds of it, at a pretty low load... If the subs DCR sits around 3 ohms per coil, and all is paralleled, The amps are probably strapped around .75 ohm, which is then split in half because they are strapped, giving each amp .375 without accounting for box rise and whatnot.

 

I'd bet it all on that being your problem of fried amps

 

Actually I misread that... you just have one sub per amp, subs kept seperate from one another? The master/slave threw me off.

 

I wired everything per Steven Mantz instructions which were:

RCA into Master amp. Line out to line in of Slave amp with interconnect provided, Wire sub 1 + to + and - to - (both coils) to master amp wire sub 2 - to + and + to - (both coils) to slave amp. on slave amp depress bridged button leave master amp in normal mode, make all eq adjustments from master amp. hook up power ground and remote on both amps as usual. He was aware of the DVC 4 ohm sub maybe not the poor quality sub though.

Someone else told me also that the ground could have been bad causing the amp to try to ground thru RCA's and frying it.

The coinsidence here is the master amp is in the same position on the amp rack as the gladius originally was when the same thing happened - no lights no power. When all 3 amps arrived, i rearranged their position on the rack, so common denominator is that the same power, ground and remote was used on the first gladius amp when it blew, now it was used on the master minilith.

all wiring is knukonceptz. Power distro block and ground distro block, both blocks use compression fittings. 4 ga wire from battery to distro block and 4 ga wire from ground to distro block, then 4 ga runs to each amp of each.

fuse: 150 at battery and 30 amp at distro. no fuse in amps, only at distro.

I guess iwill not have the problem when i get the amps fixed cause the new subs are Eclipse SW8200's and have a single 4 ohm voice coil.