The stereo in my '05 sport wagon with Alpine sound is not working. I only have audio from the right rear speaker and some of the tweeters. Here is what I have done to troubleshoot with no change:

Replaced speakers
Replaced amplifier
Replaced headunit
No change at all. What could be the issue? Thanks for your insight.

 

bennett15ify, from what you describe, this really only leaves but one possibility left. I know you are not going to like the answer, but that would be that the factory wiring between the amp and the speakers is damaged, resulting in a loss of power to the speakers.

Now, to figure out where your problem lies, that is where some electronic knowledge is going to be helpful. I would say to start in spending about $20 on a device called a circuit tracer. This will allow you to input a signal on a wire and then using the "antenna" portion, you can hand over hand the wiring by picking up the signal the other half of the signal tracer makes. At some point, the signal is going to go away. that is going to be really close to where your wiring issue lies. Unfortunately, you are looking at a lot of removing of interior panels to access the speakers. If you can inject a signal at the amp and pick it up at the speaker, then you know the wire is good for that speaker. Test the other wire for the speaker to make sure you have a complete circuit. You cannot input the signal at the plug for the amp and read it all the through the speaker and back because the 2 wires are going to be very close to each other and you will not be able to tell whether you are picking up the wire going out to the speaker or the one coming back without ripping the wiring harness all apart.

If you prove all the wires good, then this really only leaves either the speakers (which you replaced) or the pins in the connectors (which, based on the problem, would most likely be the ones at the audio amp being corroded or bent).

Hope this is helpful.

 

Or the speaker settings in the touchscreen were fiddled with, lol

 

When I bought my '06 X-type three years ago I discovered on the ride home that only one of the door speakers was working. (I was more focused on engine and chassis sounds - and only briefly turned on the radio during the test drive.)
These were the Alpine units - and it turned out that the others were all blown out. When I replaced them I was shocked at how dinky they were - the paper cones were torn and they had TINY magnets about the size of a us Quarter.

I replaced with new marine-grade speakers and a Sony Bluetooth touchscreen head unit that replaced the radio/CD - all better - about $1,600 later.

 

Hi, all.

Thanks for the input. I took the car to an audio shop and they determined the speakers to be blown. After replacing, the driver's side speaker was still producing NO SOUND (this is what caused me rule out the speakers as the original issue since I replaced only the driver's side and it made no difference). Frustrating but I considered living with it until today when ALL of the speakers suddenly stopped working... What now? Radio still powers on, no faults shown.

Any guesses?

 

I worked in a audio/video shop in college. We fixed everything from band boards to radio station equipment to home audio and car audio. We were a certified Alpine repair shop as well as dozens and dozens of others. I will ask the owner if he wants to look at your head unit if you would like. I guarantee he could fix it.
Let me know.

 

Bennett, for the speakers to fail this quickly, you have 1 of 3 issues that I can think of going on. A common issue with older cars was getting the "alternator whine" on the stereo. Normally not an issue with modern day cars. But, if you were hearing the whine, this could be a sign that your radio has a fault and it is letting frequencies into the sound system that are destroying your speakers. The second possibility is that the new speakers that you had installed were not rated for what the stereo outputs, so, you essentially over drove the speakers and caused them to fail. You need speakers that are rated for 60 watts peak, 30 watts RMs for the X-Type based on the sound system. This is especially true if you drove around a lot with the system turned up significantly. If this is the case, I would be talking with the stereo shop asking why they installed speakers not rated for the car. The last possibility (never seen this actually happen) is that the amp section of the radio has an internal fault that is causing the speaker to receive a constant voltage whenever the radio is on. You would have heard the speakers make a popping sound when you either started the car or turned on the radio. This would have been the speakers suddenly pushing out to a max position. Unfortunately, this condition causes the coils to get extremely hot and cook the coils, leading to the failure.

If you need to know how to differentiate these 3 situations using a multimeter, let me know. A lot of them can be audibly determined. But, if you want proof, then a meter is the way to go.

 

Thank you for your detailed response, Thermo. Very insightful and helpful.

I've discovered something... If I turn the car off and back on the audio is immediately restored. It will play for a good while before cutting out and I have to shut the car off again. Turning the radio on and off by itself makes no difference. Would that indicate a bad head unit?

 

bennett15ify, with this new tidbit of info, I think you are running into an overheat issue. now, is it the head unit or the amp, Gee, could be either. This is where I would say that if you can access the amp again, I would try putting a ziploc bag of ice on the amp and see if you can listen to the music longer with that on the amp. If yes, then your amp is bad. If no, then odds are your head unit is bad. I guess another way of doing the test is to simply turn on your radio to a fairly significant volume. Does the sound fall away sooner or at about the same time? Same time, it is the radio that is the problem. If a much shorter time, the amp is the issue.

With all of this being said, as strange as it may be, I am wondering if you have a wire that is failing on your and is starting to develop a high resistance, causing the voltage to drop to the amp, leading to it cutting out.

 

Again, thanks so much for these suggestions. A new symptom has occured—a high-pitched whine/beep on just the left side speakers. I have attached a link to a YouTube video below.


The amp did not seem to react to the temperature test. The sound simply cuts out at random rather than falling away—no rhyme or reason, both high and low volume.

I will take the car back to the audio store next week to see what they say. If they are unwilling to help then I will swap the radio and/or amp again to test. After that...

​

 

Bennett15ify, actually ,that "squeaking" actually tells me a lot. I think what you are experiencing is a bad connection on the D2B cable. There is a fiber cable that connects the radio to the CD player (if equipped), to the voice activation module (if equipped), to the telephone module (if equipped) to the amp. If you look on the radio and the amp, you should see a 2 pin plug on each. This is the D2B network cable. Odds are, one of these two is loose and is causing intermittent sending of the digital signal. The beeping that you are hearing is the amp trying to take what information it is receiving, trying to make some sense out of it and as a result, it is that high pitch squeak/squeal.

 

 

Thanks for the new info, Thermo! Glad to have it narrowed down to one thing.

I have had the radio and amp out several times throughout this issue; they seem to be seated properly. I will try cleaning/blowing compressed air on the connectors and see if that makes a difference. If cleaning produces no result, what might the next move be? Does this "squeaking" sound rule out the head unit or amp as faulty? Am I looking at wiring a new cable throughout (yikes)? Additionally, is there any correlation between this "squeaking" sound and my original issue-the continual lack of sound from the driver's door speaker?

To recap, initially, audio played from only passenger rear speaker and all tweeters. Two weeks ago, an audio installer determined the three door speakers to be blown. After replacing all four door speakers, audio plays from everything except the driver's door speaker (tweeter does work). Shortly after this install, I discovered that audio cuts out completely after 30+ minutes of driving. Restarting the car briefly restored sound. Recently, the silence has been replaced by a sudden and horrible "squeaking" sound after 30+ minutes of driving. It seems to emanate from only the driver's side speakers ( ). Restarting the car again briefly cures this.

FYI, my car ('05 wagon) has the premium alpine audio without navigation or phone attached. So, I assume the cable runs only between a head unit, cd changer, and amp. I assume D2B cables vary by car depending on the equipment package.

Thanks again for your help and suggestions!

 

Hi Bennett15ify,
Just building on Thermo's diagnostics to far....the symptoms you are getting seem to be hinting at a failed DAC (digital to Analogue Converter) within your AMP.
Basically the digital audio data goes into the audio processor, its job is to separate out the individual channel information and send it to each respective DAC which reprocess that specific channel data into a analogue audio signal which is then amplified to be sent to the speakers.
You can have multiple DACs hosted in a single chip package, but there is one DAC output per audio channel that is fed to its respective power amplifier.
DACs can fail of their own accord and can be heat sensitive. They can create distortion in audio, or no audio at all depending on how severely they are mis-decoding the digital information. Burps, pops and squeaks can be symptoms of a DAC failing.
If the DAC is screwing up, then quite possibly turning the amp off and on will reset the digital circuit and it may work again until it incurs another session corrupting error.

The tweeters and mid ranges in the front doors appear to be separately driven from the AMP via their own specific driver channel, whereas each rear door speakers (tweeter and mid) are driven from one amp and the tweeter is and mid are wired in parallel to each other.
Hence you can loose a tweeter or mid-range in the front doors and it can ba an AMP issue, whereas in the rear doors teh loss of one or the other will be speaker or wiring within that door linking to the specific speaker.

If it were just a final analogue output stage failure in the AMP, powering off and on again would likely not cause the audio to resume on that channel.
The channel would either be dead, distorted or heat sensitive (where if it was failing when warm a quick restart should not clear the problem for another predetermined period).

What I can't get my brain around is how 3 door speakers were dead in your car.....
Generally speakers only fail if they have been over-run. Their voice coil winding gets overheated, swells, eventually rubbing in narrow channel within the speaker magnet and either goes open or gets shorted turns.
This can happen over longer periods of time if they are run overly hard, your first indication is a scratchy/rasping sound as the speaker operates (or you manually push on the cone to feel and hear the cone is not moving smoothly).
Speaker coils can also fail in a virtual instant (blowing open) if the AMP output stage shorts and applies full DC supply to the speaker.

A speaker dying (if it internally shorts or goes very low resistance with shorted turns) can reflect a high load back into the AMP, damaging the output stage. But most output stages these days are self protecting integrated devices, so can often tolerate an issue.
I can't get from failed speakers creating a failure of digital processing....it is almost like you have two distinct problems which are not actually related to the same failure event or causality.

In you video, you are just using the radio as the input source. Do you get the same effect if using the CD input? (just want to determine if it relates to a specific audio source - I suspect not).

Next, when it faults, can you just interrupt the power to the AMP so it is the only device restarting rather than all audio system devices.....does the channel reappear just with AMP restarting or does it require head unit and CD changer to restart as well to clear problem?
If it just requires the AMP to restart and you are up and going again for 30 minutes, then you probably have a failed AMP and either it gets repaired or replaced.
If you need to restart everything, then I would try interrupting power to just CD changer and then head unit to see if you can perhaps determine which device is clegging out in digital the chain.

 

Sounding like the DAC's are your issue. I would follow what h2o2 said and go from there.

 

h202steam, this is really top-notch information. Thank you for this incredibly detailed response! I greatly appreciate the thought you put into explaining the audio system. I now have a much better understanding of how everything works. Even better, I feel I am much closer to a solution. Thanks to the unplugging method (never even crossed my mind), it appears the amp is the culprit for everything. I shall order another used component from eBay and see if that fixes it. Will keep all updated!

 

Fingers crossed the logic holds true and you will get the result you are hoping for.

I absolutely love this forum.......great bunch of people and everyone does their level best to chip in to help everyone else.
Nobody wants to see another member struggle.....but we might share a few laughs along the way ;-)
We all have different experience and although not all suggestions will work out, any suggestion does help with elimination as you try to find the way to your solution.

Good luck.