I have an audio noob question.

I stopped by a (relatively) local car stereo place to have them install this little 1x10 JL audio sub & box I have had sitting around in my garage for a couple of years. Midway through, I asked if I could get a wire to hookup an ipod to the radio, and instead they sold me this cheap-a$$ JVC KD-s35 with an adapter that plugs into the bottom of my ipod touch (but won’t charge it, I found out yesterday…). They also sold me a cheapie 600W amp and installed everything. (in the end it turned out that the foam around the edge of the membrane of the sub was totally deteriorated, and when they first turned it on to test it totally fell into crumbs. So, they sold me another little sony 10” speaker (likely a POS, I’m sure…).

So besides it being a total friggin hack job (seriously it’s ridiculous; I had them re-do things about 4 times until I feared for the safety of my car), it now doesn’t send out stereo. I suspected it was mono, just because of the way the radio sounded, (all sound seems to be coming from the driveshaft area, not the speakers…). However, the little display did say “Stereo.” I went digging through the manual and found where I can flip back and forth between stereo and mono for FM radio, and it doesn’t change the sound at all. Seriously, not one bit.

So here’s my question: is there anything that they could have done wrong during the installation that would make everything mono? I’ve hunted through the owners manual of the deck and I can’t seem to find any setting or anything that I simply need to change, so that makes me think it’s something about the install.

Any thoughts about how to fix would be welcome.

(and yes, I realize that I didn’t go to a top of the line install shop, but I thought I was going just for an amp and sub install, not the whole 9 yards of crap that I ended up with. Had I known I was getting a whole system I would have chosen shops more carefully…)

 

Do you have an aftermarket radio installed in your car with RCA outputs on it? If not they could have tapped into your speaker wires for the sub and used a line-out convertor and they could have done it wrong and somehow caused your speakers to do that. I'd probably check out the connections that they made behind your radio. The only thing they should have done is run a 12V power supply in from the battery, ground the amp in a location close to it, run the RCA pair of cables from the headunit to the amp, and run a 12v switching source from the radio.So there isn't really too many wires in the system if you wanted to check it all over.

 

thanks, I'll take a look.

I guess it must be pretty easy to get the radio out of the dash???