Well I finally got around to tinkering again with the audio. I've been trying to get rid of the noise from the instrument panel light dimmer and the engine noise. After 4hours of ****ing around moving wires, trying different grounds, undoing and redoing the EQ bypass, pissing on it, and a few other things, I decided to start playing around with gains on both the LOC's and the amp.

So far it seems like if I turn the LOC gains up all the way and the amp down to about 1/4, the dash light noise goes away. It's about 2:30AM now(and I have a buzz) so I have'nt driven the beast yet to see if this cured the engine whine, but I'm guessing it will.

Any thoughts, am I on the right track?

BTW,
I tested the system with the EQ back in the loop and boy that thing does some nasty stuff to the sound. I highly recommend to anyone that changes out their speakers to do this. One thing though, and I did'nt put a multimeter on it, but the EQ does seem to amplify the signal somewhat. Some kind of internal signal cooker.

Iggy

 

iggy.. that might make 'some' sense. if your LOC gain is up .. its pushing out more 'useable' voltage full of music information (assuming there's no noise getting in from the little distance between head unit and LOC) .. this way, you can afford to have the gains in your amp a little lower and you are STILL amplifying 'useful' music. the noise is still there, but its just that now you have so much more 'useful music' that you're not inadvertantly boosting the noise as well with the amplifier gains. Southbound, is this 'signal to noise ratio' ? I'm sure he can elaborate with the proper technical terms

Isn't this effect also the reason why eclipse head units have SIXTEEN volts of pre-out from their head units? My 4.5volts have done nicely so far..

I kinda discovered this back in the day when I used to connect two boomboxes together and I realized that if I turn the source boombox's volume up and the destination boombox's volume down, I'd have less noise/hiss on the recording. Careful with turning it all the way up tho .. because then it introduces distortion.. but I'd imagine this is just from a boombox's weak little amp and LOCs probably wont be victimized to this.