Expert: Cleggsan - 2/6/2009

Question
hi...first off everything was working perfect...until I was removing 15" kickers
L5's and speaker wire touched the casing of the amp(soundstream/trantula
1400.2) and sparked...then my 4ch mid amp started to distort and make
wining noises...tried mutiple amps,grounds, and RCA's and nothing but
worked to run mids straight to hu (pioneer avic z1) now the sub amp is
making sub distort like a static nosie and can hear some thumps when
turning on and off truck..I thought it was maybe the amp and subs so I
hooked them up in a friends car and it worked fine....I have tried new
grounds,isolators,new RCA, and ran out of solutions...please help thank you

Answer
What kind of vehicle are you installed in?  I am thinking the "sparking" event may have taken out a spark arrestor in the car or damaged the alternator/voltage regulator in some way.

Are you using a power cap?  Recharging it may be necessary as well.

If you have access to an oscilloscope it may be necessary to look at the dc line coming from the battery; if the voltage has spikes or dropouts on it that could be the cause and may be a result of the voltage regulating system in the vehicle.  

If you do not have a power cap anywhere in the system you might try one on one of the amps to see if that settles it down.

Also, you may want to do resets on the amp by just removing power from it for 15 or 20 minutes.

Finally, have you checked to make sure the signal coming from the head unit is clean?  Try feeding a separate mp3 or portable cd player into the amp directly to see if you get clean sound; then you know the bad sound may be coming out of the head unit...........

hope this helps.
c