just finished wiring up a 4-ch in my sister's car.

The setup is a Clarion 9575rz HU sending signal to a pretty ghetto old school Audiovox amp with Alpine Type-S 5x7's in the front and Infinity Reference 5x7's in the rear.

Now the problem is that when the volume is say below 4 (out of 33) the sound gets very distorted. When you raise the volume the sound is crystal clear. I used the deck in my car for a week and never noticed the problem.

My guess would point towards the amp as I bought it second hand and never tested it out in a different enviroment.

Any guesses? Anyone have this problem before?

Are all speakers distorted or just the front/rear or individual speaker?
A bad rca or a slighly cooked coil on the speaker can sound like that also.
Swapping in a different amp would narrow it down if you have one.

Whats considered low volume?? [img]graemlins/freak.gif[/img]

[img]graemlins/post.gif[/img]

who me??

no!!

seriously...how low is considered low??

seeing as how it's freezing outside I really haven't had the courage to fully troubleshoot the problem. Heck, it took me the better part of a week to get the sucker wired up, working on it bit by bit.

Here's what I can remember doing so far; I tried switching around the rca cables at the amp end (no way I'm pulling that deck out anytime soon) and it's still happening. Not sure if I checked to see if it's coming from all four speakers, but it's definitely coming from the front and I'm 80% sure it's also coming from the back. I know the speakers are good since they've been the car for a while without a problem. As I mentioned, I used the deck in my car for about a week and never noticed it, and it's probably something that I would.

Unfortunately I don't have a spare amp to check that, even if I did, I would probably wait around till spring to get around to doing it.

Oh and I mentioned this in my first post, but low volume as in below 5 out of 33 on the deck's volume level.

played around with it a bit more today.

The sound is definitely coming from all four speakers. I tried fading the sound completely to the back and there is still a slight distorted sound coming from the front speakers.

Still don't quite understand why it's only happening at low volumes (i.e. very quiet, just a bit above audible) and not at anything higher.

Anyone seen this sort of thing before?

That is pretty strange. I would check your gains. It is possible that the amp is distorting at maximum gain. Some lower quality amps will do this, try to lower the gain or change the sensitivity to see if it makes any difference.

When you say it sounds distorted, is it background noise like a constant hum or buzzing sound? or does it sound more like clipping? (more of a distortion of the music itself)?

nope, gain is barely above the lowest setting.

and it's definitely clipping, the actual music is gets garbled up, otherwise there is zero hissing and the such.

I was listening to it some more today and noticed that even when the volume is set high but the music output drops (such as say the fade at the end of a song) it will display the problem

Well in the past little while my tweeters are making a funny noise (kinda like a blown speaker) but they're fine themselves. Only audible at low levels. Had the HU checked as I thought it might be an output problem, it's fine too. New rca yesterday. Still there.
It did it when I put the system into this car but was fine in the previous car and soon went away around the same time I changed front stage amps so I thought that was it. Guess it could be the amp.....Hmmmm....
This is all your fault edgar! j/k :D