Not sure how I did it... but I think I blew one RCA input on my amp

[gti6]

Hey there,

I have no idea how I have done this, but after I was fiddling behind my deck the other day I've noticed the front/rear fader doesn't work anymore. I was checking out the wiring and resoldering etc, and had the RCA cables off.

All the connections are fine behind the deck, and I'm getting signals from both RCA outputs from the deck.

I looked at the RCA cable connections on my Kicker IX440 amp, all the cables are in nicely.

The amp is only receiving a signal from one set of RCAs and then it is distributing it to it's 4 channels, instead of receiving from 2 sets of RCAs and playing through a pair of channels each. If I swap the RCA cables over, (ie swap front and rears) the same thing happens.

This leads me to believe when I was buggerising around, I've somehow shorted something out and have blown one of the RCA input connectors on the amp - is this possible?

Can it be fixed easily?

The amp is not under warranty anymore I don't think, I'll have to check.

Cheers,
Adrian

[gti6]

I've played around on the amp a bit more, and have narrowed it down to the rear RCA input on the amp. If I feed it any source (that I know works), nothing happens... but if I put the same source on the front RCA inputs all speakers sound (as I said before, like a normal amp it sends the signal to all 4 channels).

The gains still work on both sides, so I can adjust the sub volume and split volume independently. But I want to be able to fade the volume from the deck when sub levels rise in certain tracks :(.

Maybe I should take the amp apart and see if anything's visibly fried, or is this a bad idea? I'm sure it must only be fairly simple as the rest of the amp's functionality is still there, it's just it doesn't receive any sound from one set of RCAs.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Adrian

[teK]

You will probably find that the onboard "short" protection only covers the power cables, speaker outputs, but not usually RCA inputs. Perhaps the RCA leads touched each other whilst you had them unplugged from the head unit. All it takes is the center pin of one RCA touching the outer conductor of another RCA. I keep a set of plastic RCA plugs in my toolkit for preventing exactly this. This is always why manuals always say to disconnect amp power or even the battery whilst playing with wiring!

Probably not worth fixing, you amp can easily be picked up for $200 second hand. Do you mean the RCA inputs are fused together as if you were running your amp bridged? Well then congratulations you have made yourself a stereo sub amp :P.

[gti6]

LOL :) thanks for the reply, Tek I think this must be exactly what I've done - silly me taking shortcuts... :(

Not sure if it's totally rooted though, as the rest of the amp works fine through all 4 channels... just it can only recieve one signal.

Cheers,
Adrian