I just hooked up my factory deck to crossovers, amps and speakers.
At high volume, it sounds pretty good. But at low volume, i got a really bad case of noise, much, much worse with the lights on. Plus engine noise when the car is running.
The output of the deck was line level and balanced twisted pairs, so i extended them, put RCA's on them to go into the crosovers.
I've got good ground connections, checked that first.
Any ideas?

 

OK, So i finally gave up. Broke down and bought an interface. It works. Now i have some tweeking to do.

 

It's not wise to splice your own Rca's onto the ends of a line level signal...alot of noise can definatly be induced by it...most LOC's on the market today are deisgned to work without many problems arising.

 

Have you checked to see how old your battery is, and if the charging system is ok? How are the grounds from the chassis to the battery(under the hood)? Have they been upgraded to match the positive draw?
Is there a stiffening cap in the system?

 

I got rid of the noise problem by putting in an active interface adaptor - 39.99 at best buy, only because my local audio shop closes early.

It works, at first i was definatly not impressed, it added a hissing sound, but then i found out it came with the gain turned all the way up. reduced gain and it sounds good.

So far, it sounds way, way better than the factory amp. It was a little thing with Panasonic written on it. I still have the factory front speakers in the doors because the MA Audio's i ordered aren't here yet.

Made sure all the grounds are good. Car is almost 7 weeks old, it came with a 145 amp alt. Ran an extra ground from the battery, 0 gage to the fuse/distribution block with a 1 and a 2 farad cap, 6 gage to all 6 5100T amps.

Its not quite as good sounding as my alpine was, but i'll replace the factory deck when i get the right onstar/chime/rap interface.