hey yall just put new memphis 5x7s in the front doors of my ranger ext. cab and then i put my old infinity 5x7s in the rear door. the infinitys worked fine when i put them back there. i hooked em all up and found that after a certain volume is reached they make a weird sound like a positive and negative are touching. traced it back to my left rear channel. i unhooked the speaker and tried it on a different channel and no problem. as long as the speaker is unhooked there is no problem at all so im rolling around with 3 5x7s for my mids and hi's was wondering if my left rear channel is fried? any help would be nice thanks yall
no i have not. i will try it when i install my tweeters so i dont have to tear everything apart 2 times.
You wouldn't really need to tear anything apart, just connect the wires that are currently on a "good" channel to the channel you think there is a problem with. See if the problem replicates itself. Also try the wires going to the problematic speaker on a known good channel.
well the speaker is in the rear door of my extended cab the door opens but the pannell is a P.I.T.A. to get off and back on.
You don't need to get to the speaker itself, just the amp. Change which channel the speaker is wired to on the amp so you can see if the speaker still gives you problems when powered by a different channel. You can also see if your other speaker (the one that currently sounds okay) sounds messed up on the other channel.
Take an AA or AAA battery, disconnect the wires at the radio. Hold the bottom of the battery to a ground and touch each of the eight speaker wires to the top of the battery one at a time. If you hear ANY sound at all from a speaker, then you have a shorted wire. The shorted wire will be the opposite one in the pair when you heard the sound.
Another battery trick......I used to use a battery trick to find stock speaker wire polarity back in the day before the interweb came along.
Oh yeah! I'd like to see what the new installers today would do if they had no color-coded harnesses and had to cut off the factory plugs and figure out where all the wires led like we used to do. Not to mention having to cut nearly all the speaker holes and half the dashes to fit a radio. We used to remove the entire dash from a Nissan pickup, clean to the firewall, to install the radio and put the dash back.
My first car was a 76 Camaro LT. I remember having to hack the dash pretty good and build an internal support cage to fit my first DIN HU in there.
