Car Stereos: Chrysler 300 head unit, 2007 chrysler 300, acoustic amp

Question
I have recently installed a pioneer dvd head unit in my 2007 Chrysler 300 with factory 6 speakers and boston acoustic amp. After installing the unit my dash speakers work fine, the rear deck speakers work fine but the door speakers are barely noticable, almost as if there not there just very low sound. Did I wire something wrong? Everything works fine such as the steering wheel controls. I understand that the fade and balance will not work now seeings how it dosent. Prior to the new unit a LOC was used off the rear deck speakers to power an amp for a sub with the factory unit. I am just very confused because the system does not sound right. Did the LOC blow a channel on the factory amp or did I possible hook something up wrong during my install? I used a pac c2r-chy4 wiring harness.

Thanks very much for any help.

Answer
Hi Chad,

It's definitely an odd problem, especially since all the speakers--front door, dash and rear--are getting the audio signal from the same front-channel outputs at the head unit.  If there was a problem with the head unit connections, it's hard to see why it would affect only the front door speakers and not the other speakers as well.

The factory system just uses the front door speakers for bass--the high frequencies are directed to the dash speakers by the factory amp.  The rear speakers play the full audio range.  This means that if there's something limiting the bass output on the new deck's front speaker wires, it would be most noticeable in the front door speakers.  For example, if your new head unit has a high-pass filter setting, it would cut the deep bass out of the front speaker outputs, and result in less sound coming from the door speakers.   Also, if you mixed up the positive and negative wires on one side when connecting the new deck's speaker wires to the C2R-CHY4, it would result in mid-bass frequency cancellation that might make the door speaker output sound like it was greatly reduced.  One way to test this would be to adjust the balance all the way to one side or the other--do you seem to get a fuller sound when it's playing from only the left or right side?  If so, that would indicate a wiring polarity error.

I doubt very much that the LOC connection on the rear speaker wires could have damaged the amplifier, especially in a way that affected the front speaker output.

Hope this helps!

Brian