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Awesome!! My Tantrum 1200.1 Stopped Working!

Discussion in 'General Car Audio Discussions' started by texcon, Jul 25, 2004.

  1. texcon

    texcon Full Member

    Sweet! This is the bestest news possible!! Arrrrgggggg!!!

    So on Saturday I began re-installing my trunk wall liner and adding vibration deadener to my trunk llid. Before that my amp/sub worked great. Today I get my trunk back together and my sub has ZERO output...nada, none, zilch.

    So here are the details and what I have tried so far. I have a Tantrum 1200.1 powering a first gen Solobaric sub. First thing - my amp powers up and the LED is on and the fan comes on. So I took my sub inside my house, hooked it up to my HT amp and the sub played sound. So the sub is not the problem.

    Next test - the RCAs. I took the RCAs going to my ZX400ti and hooked them to my Tantrum and there was still no output - not even a little. I know these RCAs are fine because my front stage comes on fine.

    The only other thing it could be, besides a bad amp, is the speaker wire going from the Tantrum to the sub, but that seems like a distant possibility.

    Other than that, I am out of ideas. It could be that the amp has an internal problem, but considering I have used it about 3 months and I don't abuse it (only have one sub that is 600 watts RMS hooked to it), I am surprised that it would have any problems.

    If anyone has any other ideas, I'd appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
     
    texcon, Jul 25, 2004
    #1
  2. _gonz_

    _gonz_ Full Member

    the only thing you did'nt mention was your ground... maybe it's corroded? loose?

    you did'nt change any sub wiring? accidentally lowering it to 1 Ohm load perhaps?


    Aside from that, if you have LED/fan on the amp, it's getting power obviously, so i'm wondering if your HU has a crossover in it.

    What i'm getting at is perhaps the "front stage signal" does'nt send any low freqs at all. Thus swapping RCAs from your front stage would'nt be giving you a useable signal. Follow me?

    Does the HU have a sub-out?

    I'd get new RCAs and run them, new power and ground and run them, and new speaker wire and run that. Even just a quick temporary rig job, to rule out any of that stuff.

    Do you have access to a friend's car, that you could swap out amps? To rule out the HU as an issue (subwoofer pre-out failure)

    Or, Real Simple Method-

    have you another amp of any sort.... that you can toss into your car,
    using the existing pos/neg RCAs/speaker wires
    to be damn sure it isn't something else besides your amp.

    I mean, if another amp won't work in the same conditions, then it's probably not two bad amps... it's a bad something else.
     
    _gonz_, Jul 26, 2004
    #2
  3. texcon

    texcon Full Member

    Well, I am pretty damn sure the ground is fine, since the amp powers up and its LED and fan come on. I have a 0/1 awg wire split into two 4 awg wires for the ground and the 0/1 has its own grounding terminal, so it's a very solid ground.

    As for the front stage signal, I have it crossed at 80 Hz since my mids can go down to around 50 Hz, so my Tantrum would still be able to push some sound using the front stage RCAs - but I am hearing nothing at all when I plug the front stage RCAs into the sub amp.

    As for the power, each of my amps has its own 4 awg wire coming from a 0/1 power wire. Both amps power up, but I will check and see if the power wire came loose on the Tantrum. I suppose it is possible that the Tantrum is getting enough power to turn on, but not enough power to produce sound???

    One thing I didn't try was to take the RCAs going from my sub and connect them to my front stage amp - I would only hear low frequencies in my front stage, but it could tell me if my sub amp RCAs are good or not.

    I don't have another amp unfortunately - maybe I can find one to borrow for a day.

    Thanks for the suggestions - it does help. I want to exhaust all possibilities before sending it off for warranty work.
     
    texcon, Jul 26, 2004
    #3
  4. texcon

    texcon Full Member

    One quick addendum - over at icixsound, some people said they had a similar problem with their amps and it turned out to be a poor connection with the fues in the dist block. Is it possible for an amp to receive enough power to turn on but not enough power to push any bass to the sub? I assume some amps have protection that will not allow them to operate unless it has a certain amount of voltage.
     
    texcon, Jul 26, 2004
    #4
  5. The_Ancient

    The_Ancient Full Member

    PG amps have lots of protection, however if it was a problem with Undervoltage, or any of the other the Protection Indictor would go off

    if this is not happening, your power input should be fine....

    Hook the Sub up and measure the Voltage and Load at the Amps Speaker terminal

    have you messed with the amps setting?? maybe the gain was moved
     
    The_Ancient, Jul 26, 2004
    #5
  6. _gonz_

    _gonz_ Full Member


    Well, LEDs and fans requires very little voltage, hardly no amperage. Fans will operate at 6v for example, but at about half the usual RPMs.

    I just made a list of troubleshooting ideas. Hopefully to give you some direction in narrowing down / ruling out possibles. It's often something you'd least expect, so try not to rule out any possibilities. Also, swapping this, that, and the other... can leave you chasing your tail for hours... The amp is in question here, so get it ruled out. Need to know, it works, or it don't.


    Since you mention distro blocks, sure, i suppose you could have a problem there. This is why i suggested dropping in new POS/NEG cables, bypassing the old stuff.

    I really think the easiest way for you to find out what's what...
    Is to swap your amp into a friend's car, and his amp into your car.
    That would rule out the amp right away. This is the main thing right? If the amp works for sure... you'll have an easier time finding the actual problem.

    Or, go to Wal-mart, buy a cheap amp, and test with it.
    Or, go to a local shop, and pay them $20 or whatever to test it.
    Or, use the sub amp on the front stage, just be carefull.

    Personally i would avoid messing with anything that works good (i.e. fronts), but hey, whatever ya gotta do. Good luck.
     
    _gonz_, Jul 26, 2004
    #6
  7. texcon

    texcon Full Member

    I am not sure if the Tantrum has a visible Protection Indicator like my ZX does. It has the one blueish colored power LED and that's it, as far as I know anyway.

    I really need to measure the voltage at the speaker terminal and go from there - that is really the only other test I can do before I start swapping amps and such.

    Also, the gain has not been touched, but good idea.
     
    texcon, Jul 26, 2004
    #7
  8. texcon

    texcon Full Member


    I think the easiest thing to try first would be to run the power and ground wires that are hooked to the ZX over to the Tantrum and see what happens - keep in mind I know my sub works, so I wouldn't have to run my front stage off my Tantrum. The amp is still under warranty, albeit through some vendor on Ebay. I took a gamble and I hope it doesn't backfire on me. It's just really odd that my amp all of a sudden stopped working after working great for about 3 months.

    Thanks for the list of ideas - it all helps. I will figure it out one way or another.
     
    texcon, Jul 26, 2004
    #8
  9. texcon

    texcon Full Member

    Also, I thought about the dist block being bad - I need to check it out and see of the side my Tantrum is using has a poor connection.
     
    texcon, Jul 26, 2004
    #9
  10. The_Ancient

    The_Ancient Full Member

    maybe your just tone deaf ;)
     
    The_Ancient, Jul 26, 2004
    #10