Problem: At all times that the car is on and the Empeg is on, there is a whining noise in the speakers that is constant with my acceleration. As I accelerate, the whining goes up and pitch.

Setup: Empeg is the only unit in the car. I only have rear speakers and a 2 channel amp powering them. Rear RCA's are connected to the amp.

When Tony Fabris and I installed the unit, there was also an equalizer hooked up. The RCA's ran into the EQ and RCA's then ran to the amp. The ground for the EQ ran to the ground screw on the amp, and also from the amp's ground screw, a wire ran up to the console to a screw - which we connected the Empeg's ground wire to. A week ago I ripped the EQ out (car was having power problems and I really don't need the EQ). That's when the whining started. Since the screw in the console is not a know ground point, I re-ran the Empeg's ground wire directly to the wire running up to the console and back to the amp's ground screw. Then from the ground screw I ran a wire directly to the battery's negative terminal. I still have the sound.

Tony and I also noticed a problem with the balance. When pointing all sound from the Empeg to the left or right, sound came from both speakers, although there was a slight change in the sound distribution between the speakers.

Could this be a symptom of a bad amp? Should I just save the headache and cruise into a stereo shop?

Thanks in advance.

-Christian

Did you check all the RCA cables running between the dash and the amp like we discussed?

The amp did seem to have problems, so I wouldn't discount that. You might also have a simple wiring problem somewhere. As I recall, you didn't have a lot of information about the way it was wired once the wires disappeared under the upholstery, so it might just be time to re-do the wiring to make sure it's been done right.

For those who are just dialing in, Christian's DeLorean had a previous stereo system which included an amp and a remote-control equalizer. Something was funny with the amp's wiring from the get-go, as the audio didn't balance L/R properly. We checked enough to determine that the balance problem didn't seem to be the empeg, and it wasn't at the equalizer. It was somewhere either in the RCA cabling running to the amp or it was in the speaker wiring of the amp. I didn't have time to concentrate on amp troubleshooting, we just concentrated on getting the empeg installed while I was there.

Yeap, well this morning the noise is now about 1000 times worse than it was. I'm sure it has something to do with the grounding since that's the only thing that I changed last night. Maybe I'll rip the entire center console out this weekend and do it up.

-Christian

Well that was easy enough. A 15 dollar noise-eliminator box from a local car stereo shop did the trick.

-Christian