Car Stereos: stereo, speaker connection, speaker wire

Question
hey i bought a new head unit and hooked it up and the speakers wont put out any sound and the speakers and head unit are brand new please help!

Answer
Hi Mikel,

There are two possible causes for your problem:

1.  Your vehicle may be equipped with a factory amplifier.  In this case, you'd need to either integrate the amplifier with the head unit, which may require a special adapter; or you'd need to bypass the amplifier and wire each of the speakers directly to the head unit's outputs.

2.  You may have a shorted or grounded speaker wire.  This can happen if one of the connections at a speaker has come loose, and is touching the speaker basket or chassis metal; or if a speaker wire has gotten pinched somewhere. A problem with a single speaker wire will cut off the sound to all the speakers, as the internal amp shuts down for protection.

If you're certain the vehicle doesn't have a factory amp, then I'd pull the head unit and inspect all the wiring at the back.  Make sure you don't have any pinched wires or uninsulated connections.  Disconnect all the speakers except one.  If you get sound with just one speaker connected, keep connecting the others until you find the one that makes the sound shut off.  If you don't get sound from the single speaker, disconnect it and try connecting another.  Hopefully this will let you track down the speaker connection that's causing the problem, so you can check the wires and connections for that speaker.  If it won't work with any speaker, then there may be a problem with the head unit itself.

Hope this helps!

Brian