I installed my Clarion CD deck, my Pioneer TSW300R 12, and my Power Acoustik PWR 180 amp today. The deck is out of my old truck that I wrecked, but I never used the RCA outputs on it before. The amp is one my brother gave me, but he never used it in the time he had it. The sub is brand new.
Here's the problem, though. My sub is making barely any noise. If I unplug my door speakers and crank the deck, I can hear the sub and it pounds pretty good. but if I plug the door speakers back in, they drown out the sub at a regular level. Any ideas on what the problem is? There's two sets of RCA outputs on my deck, and the problem occurs with both.
That's not it, turning the gain down all the way just makes it almost entirely inaudible. The further I turn up the gain, the louder it gets, and at max, it's still extremely quiet.
At least I don't think that's it. Maybe it's just WAY quieter than what I expected from this system.
UPDATE: I just played with it for about an hour and in a desperate measure after trying everything I could think of that didn't involve removing the deck, I tried something weird. I left the sub hooked up, bridged across both channels, and I unplugged both RCA plugs. Then I put the L in the R jack. It pounded hard as hell for a few bass hits in the Jay Z song, and I immediately unplugged it. Did I just ruin my sub? I'm so confused. It can only pound too insanely hard or not at all.
Ok, in my excitement last night that I finally had some real sound out of it, I failed to realize it was just one big thump and then a smaller one, nothing from the music. I tested it some more and it continued to thump once really loud, then go back to playing at a barely audible level. It does this with the left or right channel audio cable plugged into the right channel jack.
Problem solved. It was either bad RCA jacks on my amp or deck, or a bad RCA cable. I'm now running my sub through the high input on my amp, and it's working great. Thanks for the help everyone.