About a week or so ago I was headed to a rotary meet. At one point, I slammed on my brakes, causing the old battery that I still had in my hatch to crash into my amp, which is also in the hatch area. The amp screwed down, so it is immovable. Now, since that has happened the amp has been action strange on and off. It will work fine, then suddenly it will fade in and out. It will come on for about three seconds, then off for three, then on again, repeatedly, then stop. The head unit itself is working fine, the two 4" speakers that are connected directly to the head stay on all the time. The car's other electrical systems work 100%.

I've checked the wiring. I redid the connectors for the positive, ground, and signal connectors to the amp in case there was damage, and still nothing.

Amp is a Kenwood 4 channel amp. Positive wire is run straight to the battery, negative wire is run to a bolt in the back of the car under the carpet. The place where it is screwed into the car also seems to double as a ground also, I found that out by accident when I unplugged the ground wire and it still worked. The amp is powering a couple of 6 1/2" speakers on two channels, and a 10" sub bridged on the other two channels.

The only other thing I can thing to do is pull out the multimeter and start checking voltages on everything. Anyone else have any ideas on what my be the problem?

 

is it over heating?

 

Has the amp ever been overheating? Sounds like that little wack from the battery screwed up something internal. Try swapping a friends amp into that place, and see if it works. If it works perfect, something is wrong with the Kenwood amp.

 

I doubt it's overheating, it has open air surrounding it. I was messing with it some more today and found something interesting- if I unplug the speakers and leave the sub on, it works just fine. Also odd, it doesn't sound too bad with just the little 4" speakers and a sub going, heh. When it's not quite freezing cold, I'll double check the speaker wiring and see if that's really the culprit.