I have attached a rough diagram of the wiring in my car.

Just finished installing a 4 channel amp, i previously had a new head unit and front and rear speakers installed professionally. I bought the amp to beef up the system and thought I'd take a stab at installing it. Here's how i wired the speakers: for the rears i snipped the wires that ran to them from the head unit and spliced new wire into about a foot of old wire at the speaker and ran it to the amp. For the fronts, i located where they entered the harness before attaching to the head unit, I snipped the wires there and spliced new speaker wire and ran it all the way to the back. I then attached everything to my amp, set the high pass filter for the front speakers to about 70 and adjusted no other dials. I turned on my car and only the front left speaker is putting out sound. Solutions? Please help?

 

Did you test to make sure you grabbed the correct speaker wires before making your connections?. Did you solder your connections?..

Could be a million possible things wrong. Take it to a pro please before you cause any irreperable damage to your vehicle

 

rear wires are soldered and fronts are butt connected, any suggestions about easy things i can tweak that won't cause irreparable damage haha?

 

If you have to ask what steps to take to even begin diagnosing a relatively simple issue. You shouldn't proceed any further. I've seen way, way too many people do serious harm to their cars trying to save a buck....

I'll give the basic one.. Try swapping your RCA's around..see if a different speaker plays

 

Sure.....start moving connections at the amp.

Unplug all the speakers.....use a AA battery to confirm each speaker has a good connection. Hook the front left channel back up to the amp. Unplug all the RCAs.....leaving the balance and fader set to zero all the way around, try each RCA in turn into the front left to confirm a good source for each speaker.

Sooner or later at least one of them is not going to work......note which one and continue testing until you have confirmed which channels work up to what point in the signal path.

By this point you should be able to tell if there is a problem with the deck or amp.....cross-referencing like this will narrow it down and you can decide then if you want to take it in for professional help.....

HTH

 

thanks a lot for the advice, it seems so simple now haha, must have been that i was working in -28 for 3 hours, my brain must have slowed down. I'll definitely try all of those things when i can get in to a heated garage, or a garage for that matter. I was extremely careful and diligent with all of my wiring and whatnot because it was my first time installing something so i'm sure it's something minor. Thanks again!

 

YW.....they call it a "brain freeze".....in the summer I like to get 'em from a Timmy's XL IceCap.....hoovered back as fast as you can.....

GL with the testing.....

 

Alright, I've got an update on the situation. Note: i havn't messed around with the wiring to diagnose the problem yet, all the wires are still in their original places from yesterday. This morning I drove to the flower store with only my front left speaker working, just like yesterday. When i came out of the flower shop i started my car and to my surprise it sounded like all of my speakers were working. I played around with the fader and balance and discovered that all the speakers were now working, except the front left haha. As well, my head unit now reads DC error. when i was playing with the controls i set the fader all the way to the back and both rear speakers worked, then when i set the balance all the way to the left, the front right speaker came on instead, and then when i turned the balance all the way back to the right, the right rear speaker would go (as expected). I'm not sure if this narrows it down at all, put hopefully someone has come across this before or knows what teh problem may be. I'm most likely still going to take BigRedGuy's advise and re-secure and re-check all of the connections. Thanks.

 

I presume your head unit is still connected to the wiring harness which is still connected to the 4 pairs of speaker wires that run to the speakers.. With their ends cut.. WHat did you do to the ends? are they shorting? if so that may be why your head unit amp could be cutting out.

 

I was actually thinking of asking that in my last post if I should be disconnecting the clipped wires from my head unit, it made sense to me but i wasn't sure if would cause problems. Should i just unplug those extra wires from the harness and leave the ones going in to the harness where they are? or should i disconnect them from the head unit as well?