Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
How to Fix a Car Amp. Don't let troubles with your car amplifier silence your fun. Learn
how to troubleshoot your car amplifier to resume enjoying your music. You will need
Multimeter CD player Headphone to RCA cable Working speaker and cooling fans (optional).
Step 1. Unhook all cables and wiring from the car amplifier so that only the power,
ground, and remote leads are connected. Step 2. Check the connections. Make sure the amp
is grounded to a bare piece of metal free from rust, and that the remote wire is hooked
up and connected to the blue wire with a white strip on the head unit. Test the connections
with a multimeter set to measure volts. Step 3. Inspect the amplifier for loose hardware,
screws, or nuts. Step 4. Reconnect the speaker wires and RCA cables. Keep the speaker wires
from touching the vehicle as this can cause a motorboat effect. Step 5. Remove and check
any transistors that read zero ohms. Replace the transistor if it is defective. Step 6.
Turn down the gain. If the amplifier is getting hot and shutting down, the gain might be turned
up too high. Add external PC cooling fans to cool down the amplifier. Step 7. Using
a headphone to RCA cable, connect a CD player to the RCA input of the amplifier to see if
the amplifier has sound. If it does, the head unit's output or cable is bad. Step 8. Hook
a working speaker up to the amplifier if you are not getting sound. If you get sound from
the working speaker, then the speakers in your car are blown. Step 9. Take the amplifier
to a repair shop if none of these fixes work. Did you know In 1930, Paul Galvin and crew
of the company that would eventually become Motorola, built and installed one of the first
car radios.