About two weekends ago I installed a Alpine MRD-M605 600 watt Mono amp and a Alpine SWR-1242D 12" 4 ohm DVC Sub in my 1999 Acura TL. All was fine up until last nite. I was driving around and I could smell either both the amp and sub, it wasn't a burning smell but I could smell the heat from them thru the ski hole. Then all of a sudden the fuse on the fuseblock blew out. I replaced and it was fine until I turned the radio to about 10 and it cut off again. Now the digital display on the amp is flashing "CUR". I read the manual and it says excessive current and i need to reduce the current. Not to sound like an ass but what exactly is current and how do I reduce it? I'm using a 4 Gauge Rockford Amp Kit but from the fuseblock to the amp it's only 8 gauge, should I upgrade that to 4 gauge... do I need to add a cap or does this have something to do with how the sub is wired? Any help would be appreciated, b/c as you see I am completely lost. Thanks in advance!!!

 

I would say yes you need to go with 8 gauge all the way to the amp. I am assuming that you have a 40w(or close to it) inline fuse but make sure the fuse it not to small...probably not the problem though. I am not great at troubleshooting but I have a decent amount of experience on installation...that being said, I would check all your grounds. And make sure you don't have any bare wires that can cross with anything else. A cap shouldn't be necessary but you should check the load your sub is pulling can be easily handled by the amp. Seems to me that the 600w amp should handle the sub but there is more to it than just that. Someone with more technical experience should be able to help you out a lot more than I can. Good luck and keep us posted.

 

CUR means that the protection circuitry inside the amp is "seeing" too low an impedance across the speaker terminals.

This could be for the following reasons (in order of rough probablility):

1) Your speaker wire into the woofer is pinched and shorted in some way. You can check this visually if you can see the whole length of wire. If you can't see the whole length of wire, take stuff apart till you do.

2) Your woofer is "blown" - in this case, the voice coil winding is shorted internally. If you have a friend with a sub box you can try as a test, that will tell you if it's the woofer.

3) Your amp is giving you an erroneous error message, and it's really the amp.

Please note that wire gauge isn't on there. The message does NOT mean "insufficient current IN", it means "over-current on the outputs".

 

Thanks for the suggestions....
Could this be as simple as the sub box sitting on the speaker wire and pinching it? B/c I think it is!!!

 

The (+) and (-) wires would need to be slightly touching each other or have a strand across them, or be pinched to metal which would act as the bridge.

 

I'll check on my lunch break to see if that's the problem. If not is all going back and I'll try again w/ new equipment. I got it from Best Buy and it hasn't been 30 days yet. But I want to make sure I know what the problem is before I install new equipment.

 

What happened to your fuse at the battery?

 

Good catch.

You powered this amp off of the fuse block?

 

I checked that too... the fuse under the hood was fine.

 

To Eldude and everyone thanks for all your help... I think the problem was #2 on the list. What I smelled wasn't just "heat" it was my woofer cooking. Once I took it out the box the answer was obvious. So I took it back no questions asked and got a new one, plus i added the 4 year Service plan to the amp and sub. This experience just made me a believer.
Now my next question is how exactly am I supposed to see the gain, bass boost, lp filter etc. on this amp. Its all digital am I'm just use to not going past 1/2 on the normal gain control. I think I had mine set at 0.1 for the gain and 6+ for the bass boost. Now i turned everything down b/c I don't want to cook another sub, but now I'm not hearing any bass until I turn my IVA-D300 up to like 28-30 and by that time by factory Blose are distoring like crazy. Any suggestions on an optimal setting for the amp?