Just a warning to anyone putting in new electronics in your car. Make sure everything is off before you move/touch anything. Here's my horror story from the past weekend. Shortly after I bought my XB I replaced the OEM head unit with Pioneer unit and installed the rest of my system. Well, as many of you have experienced, the FM reception went down to practically nothing. I have a 70 mile drive to work everyday. I can only pick up one station in the area of my home and one in the area of my work clearly. Fortunately they meet in the middle so I do have decent reception of one of them the entire way to work. I'm really sick of listening to those stations because they have the same format so the first half of my trip I hear a set of songs and the second half I hear them again in many cases.

I decided to go for satellite radio. Well I bought the Sirius Visor receiver Saturday, popped it in the car, activated the service and hated it. It had that digital music sound like listening to music on the Internet when the bandwidth is too low. My wife liked the prospect of having that selection of music and she doesn't care as much about the sound so she took it an approved me to get the wired XM unit that Terk makes.

Sunday we buy it. I come home very anxious to put it in. I take out the dash and everything. Find a suitable location for the units (receiver and adapter for Pioneer) and wire everything in. Well before I put everything back together I turn it on to make sure everything is working. Everything seems to be working just fine. While I'm listening to the demo channel I start thinking about putting everything back together and other things that I need to do. Well what was playing became background noise and I forgot that it was on. I put the dash back in place then reach in to make sure it didn't put any pressure on the new XM receiver. The only loose wires in the car at that point are my dash tweeters and I didn't think about those. Well I hit the wire, apparently grounded it to the frame and heard the most horrible thumps from my subs. Still can't figure that one out.

Well since this has gotten quite long I'll cut to the point. That one mistake damaged both amps in my car.

I can possibly see the Alpine I was using for my fronts taking damage, strange because they are built tough, but I can't figure out how it got my Elemental Designs amp I use for subs was hurt. The Alpine is trash. It's old enough that I'd be better of buying a new one. I'm not sure about the ED.

Now I have to find new amps. Great sound is my first priority, but I like it loud sometimes so I need some power too. No budget for it right now either. I need a sponsor!!!

 

rule #1 check you connections be fore you turn snything on...sorry to hear that story