Hi Folks!

I am a recent divorcee and as I restart my life at age 55 I purchased a 2004 Acura TL with 200,000 miles for not a lot of money. Runs great! Had a few other issues but nothing much I can't deal with.

But the radio... The driver door speaker was blown when I bought the car (~6 mos. ago) but otherwise the volume of the radio seemed normal for a car radio. At some point my radio got super quiet, and I assumed it was because that speaker had blown fully or something. Well I put in new door speakers today and everything is still super quiet. Like volume needs to be at 15 to even hear anything, and even turned all the way up to 40 (max.) can barely be heard if the windows are open.

I understand electronic stuff, to a point, but I'm not a radio/stereo guy, and definitely not a car stereo guy, so I'm flying a bit blind here. I thought maybe there was a separate fuse for an amplifier that might have blown, but I was unable to find any fuse for the radio other than the single 20 under the dash that's marked (maybe spot 30?).

The car is a 2004 Acura TL, with I think just standard options. The speakers I put in today are 4 ohm speakers (apparently the ones I took out said 2 ohm on the back). JVC CS-DF620. They were cheap on Amazon. I'm half-deaf and just need them to be loud and clear enough to hear. My boss (who is a stereo guy, and physics professor) said something about 3 db or 6 db blah blah but it shouldn't make the whole system silent until the volume is turned to 40% of maximum, and "not at all loud" when turned to 100% -- which I'm in agreement with.

Thank you in advance for any replies! I hope I was clear with what I'm experiencing?

Mike

 

Good morning. Looks like I made an uninformed and redundant post.

Sounds like I need to take the amplifier out and replace all the capacitors. My apologies for not searching the forums well for a solution before I posted.

I doubt I'm take out the amp to replace twenty capacitors on it, so I guess I'll just have a quiet radio.

Thanks folks! Have a good holiday season!

Mike

 

Yup its the amp

 

It really isn't that bad to replace the caps in the amp. It will most likely continue to degrade more and more over time.

If anything, consider just buying another amp off of ebay to use as your test mule to figure out how to replace caps.