First of all, I have to clarify something I did not consider I could make confusing. It occurred to me when you said there's two red wires. By two or four wires, I mean how many terminals there are in the connector. It sounds like there are two wires attached to one terminal. That is simply because it is a dual speaker. It has a woofer with a tweeter mounted in the middle, or over it and each speaker needs two wires. In that case the black plastic box bolted on has only three or four parts inside to form a crossover network. That is not an amplifier. The secret to knowing there is a bad connection inside that block is only one of the speakers will cut out. I just repaired three of the six speakers in my 1994 Grand Voyager last fall for that. On one of them, the woofer cut out most of the time and left it with just the barely-audible tweeter.
How you get that circuit board out depends on how rough you are willing to be. I broke part of the box away until I could loosen the board and pry it out, then the protective jell can be chipped away.
If you have four wires in the connector, one outer wire is the 12 volt feed, one is the ground, and the two in the middle are the speaker wires. If these are in a door, the first place to look for a problem is between the door hinges. Look for broken or frayed wires. The clue is missing any one of those four wires will result in the entire speaker being totally dead, however, broken wires can be hanging on by the insulation and the ends can make intermittent contact and result in scratching or static in that speaker. The clue is you will never hear just the woofer or just the tweeter. Switching speakers side-to-side will leave you with the same door still having the problem and the speaker will work on the other side.
It is important to note too, that when Ford or GM use a remote amplifier, their radios must be used with an amp, otherwise there will not be enough volume to hear it, and when they do not use an amp, you cannot use an amp or the sound will be way too loud and badly distorted. You must match the amps to the radios that need them.
Chrysler has never done that. ALL Chrysler radios will run speakers directly, and all Chrysler radios can be used with their remote amplifiers, whether mounted on the speakers or when an amp is mounted in the vehicle. Chrysler amplifiers never increase volume or power. They only modify tone conditioning for the shape of the vehicle. That is not true of aftermarket amplifiers, so those can not be used here.
An Infinity radio puts out much less bass, then it is made up in the amplifiers. If you install regular speakers, regardless of quality, they will sound tinny unless you turn the bass all the way up. If you replace the radio with a non-Infinity model, which looks and works exactly the same, you will have too much bass unless you turn it all the way down.
When intermittent connections occur in the speaker-mounted amps, some people cut them off and wire the woofer and tweeter directly to the connector. The radio will run the speaker that way just fine, but the tone response will change. Many people do not notice that or they do not care. That turns a $135.00 Infinity speaker into a ten-dollar regular speaker.
Besides the four wires in the connector, the second clue that you have a speaker-mounted amplifier is the black plastic housing, which is about five inches long, is sitting on top of a black aluminum bracket with cooling fins cut into it. Remove two tiny hex-head screws to remove the amp, then I use a hack saw blade to cut part of the plastic housing away around the silver metal clip that holds the output IC to the heat sink. That will get you access to a place under the IC where you can start to pry the board up to free it. Do that carefully because one end of the board can easily be broken, then there will be six copper traces that will need jumper wires.
Scrape the protective jelly from the bottom side of the board to expose the pins for the IC. You will find one on the end of the row with the bad connection. I had to do this on my Grand Voyager too. I found the bad connection, soldered it three times, and still had intermittent operation. Finally I figured out I had not peeled off enough protective jelly, so I was only seeing eleven of the twelve pins. It was that last one that had the really bad connection.
The pins should be resealed to keep moisture out. I do that by placing a strip of paper over them, then using silicone gasket sealer to close everything up. If it ever has to come apart again, the paper keeps the sealer from sticking to the pins where it would be almost impossible to clean away. The goal is to simply make a weatherproof cover, not to totally encase the pins. I used to work for a very nice family-owned Chrysler dealership so I am very familiar with their two sealers. The more rubbery black stuff works well for this.
Saturday, February 27th, 2016 AT 12:14 PM
