I am having a strange issue with my system. The subwoofer comes on and off randomly. My amp is recieving full voltage, and is not in protection. The subwoofer never works at startup, but sometimes after a while it will begin playing (with short burst of times where it will play). This leads me to believe that there is a problem with the pre-out on my head unit or within the amp, because a component needs to warm up for it to be functional.

At first I thought it might be a power supply issue because my battery was dying. But I had it replaced this weekend and the problem remains.

One other thing that warrents mentioning; I am able to 'jump start' the subwoofer sometimes by un-plugging and plugging back in the RCA cables. But this is often only temporary, and once the car is shut off the subwoofer will once again be inactive.

My stuff:

Kenwood KTV-817DVD
Fi Audio Q15
Ultimate T3-1000D

Any tips or troubleshooting suggestions are greatly appreciated!

 

Just a thought, but if you swap the amp out with something else and problem goes away.... Trip to repair / buy shop maybe in future . Opps

 

Unfortunately I don't have another amp to swap in at the moment. Maybe I can find someone later this week....

Any other suggestion?

 

Faulty RCA cables?.....

 

id go try a different amp but it can be rca related as well !

 

Yeah, RCA's might be a problem. The deck output has a mono, single RCA output for the subwoofer. I split the cable with a Y-adapter, but the cable connecting the Y-adapter to the amp is a twisted pair that was 4 bucks at London Drugs....

 

Ya thats true it could be any one of those things but i bet its gonna be one of the voice coil wires on the sub just check the back of the sub make sure all the connections and wires are tight...

 

pull the sub out and use a 9 volt battery (or even 1.5) and just briefly apply voltage to the speaker to see if the cone moves, if it is a dual voice coil try it on both coils... if it moves on both tests then likely you can eliminate the sub as the prime suspect, leaving the rcas as the next most likely candidate.

 

Maybe one of the tinsel leads connecting your binding post to the VC may be touching the basket?

 

Is there a way to test this without taking the sub from the enclosure (ie. measuring the resistance across the voice coils)? What effects would this potentially have on the system. The subwoofer was brand new when I installed it.