Radio turn on/off
 

Hey guys,

Recently I've been having having electrical issues. Keep in mind that I've already replaced the battery and recently the terminals. The radio would turn on and off, dome light (when on) would flicker to a dim along with my door light being on very dim. I have an aftermarket radio, bazooka sub and alpine amp. When the music would be on and turned up it would cut out when the bass hits or high treble levels. Now, it just turns on and off and doesn't actually play music anymore. Do ya'll think this could be the amplifier or the radio?

Definitely sounds like you have a wiring issue with your aftermarket stereo equipment.

Hard to say much else based on the information presented. Did you install everything?

I have not done it myself, no. My stepdad is the one who did it about 10-15 years ago. It always worked just fine until I brought the car down to FL.

Plenty to go wrong with electronics in 15 years. Could be that a wire became loose or expose depending on how the initial installation was done, and is causing a short.

Could be the radio is circling the drain, same could be said of the amp.

Depending on the setup, the amp could be drawing too much power if its wired directly to the battery or anything like that.

You'll have to do some troubleshooting or take it to an audio shop to get more information. Easiest thing to do would be to check the wiring on everything and make sure nothing obvious is wrong/exposed, all the grounding points are secured and not corroded, etc.

On that point, I'd check all the main grounding points for your wire harness too.

That's vague information, but that's the best I can do without seeing the install myself, or without any additional information. If the radio is turning on and off that's where I would start though.

The amp is connected right to the battery but I'm leaning for to the amp or head unit being bad. I'm going to upgrade both the amp along with the head unit and will see where that leads me.

Yeah, with a custom setup unfortunately there isn't any easy answers.

You could disconnect the current amp, and see if the radio starts behaving with the existing amp off the table. The on/off behavior definitely sounds like a short is causing the radio to get stuck in a protection mode loop, so I'd try to hunt that down if you can.

I'd double check all the wiring and make sure it makes sense before throwing new equipment on it. It sounds like it had some problems even when it was playing music. No sense in damaging the new stuff.

Something else to keep in mind is that the electronics/wiring can be finicky on these cars to begin with. You might want to try to diagram out the custom wiring and equipment specs you have and see if anyone has any thoughts.

Good thought. Let me try that out first and see what happens! Thank you!

I feel incredibly stupid. I literally replaced a fuse and everything started working just fine again. Actually, even better! The fuse was corroded and started to break apart. #fail