today i was driving and i noticed considerable engine noise today. I dont see how it could be a bad ground all of a sudden. besides I have my entire car wired up (~75ft) in 1/0 and a bank of battery's in the trunk.
Is it possible its the head unit? like bad rcas or something, like the pioneers sometimes get? the amps are grounded solid directly from the rear bank. the head unit is grounded to the stock braided ground. The only way i could improve this is if i ran a wire from the fire wall to the head unit which would be a lot of work and it never used to have engine noise anyways so that's probably not the problem.
I have the same problem with a pioneer hu. I grounded the hu better, but it didn't get rid of all of it. I tried two different sets of rca's. No better. I put in a ground loop isolator and it took care of most of it. Just a suggestion. This is my first pioneer hu. Are they notorious for this?
Apearantly they are bad for this. Their tech support says there's an internal fuse that blows often. The solution is to wrap a wire around the outer (ground) portion of all 4 rca connectors (L + R on h/u and amp sides). Solder this on, then ground it to a ground source. That's what I was told by their tech people.
Has anyone else had problems with their pioneer h/u introducing distortion very early on? Like half volume even?
didn't mean to hijack your thread mark. kind of got on a tangent with the pioneer bashing. I was just following this thread cause I'm having the same issue.
Smart decision. In my experience most "high-end" car audio shops out here in SoCal. (the few that exist) they think that Pioneer products are a joke, and most won't carry their products and just refer people that want them to Wal-Mart.
i have some engine noise in my driver side, but thats even with all the amps out of the car the fuse for the power wire and the HU not connected to any thing. i quite like my pioneer it is about 3 years old before they started looking cheaper.
any way the moral of the story before you invest money if you have engine noise even with the radio off check your wiring, although my noise goes away (or i don't hear it) after ~19.
plug something like an ipod in to the rca's where the head unit is and see if you have the same problem if not then go get a new toy, other wise save your money.
i used to have a pioneer with no noise. i loved that thing. but i wanted blue tooth and dual usb which neither i ever use and regret selling the pioneer. although the jvc does sound a bit nicer i think and can change colors.
anyways. im pretty sure its the deck thouggh. whenever i push the skip buttons i canhear noise in mu sub. im going to try and ground it better hopefully it solves the problem.
so i experimented with headunit grounding and it seemed to do nothing. I was screwing around with a few things and when i went back to look and my front stage amp i touched it and it gave me a shock, this makes me think ground to my front stage amp is poor but would this affect my subwoofer having noise?
either way i dont have engine noise any more. I only have a popping sound when i hit the brakes and the gas which comes from the subwoofer. Not sure what i did to fix the engine noise but its gone for now.