So I picked up a 92 olds bravada not to long ago and wanted to put a nice system in it. Custom molded the rear door panels for a component system and made custom enclosers up on the dash. I installed the radio using only the power and ground wires, and ran RCA wires to amps for sound. My problem is I'm getting terrible motor hum/whine and I cannot figure out why. I changed all grounds on amps even ran the constant power and ground wire on the h/u straight through the firewall to the battery and still no difference. Tried grounding the alternator, no difference, bought a noise suppresor that took about half the noise away but made the music sound like ****. If anyone has any advise or tips please let me know. I've never had this problem on a system install and I'm shooting in the dark. Thanks.

 

What headunit did you install? I have a folding out screen in my other car that was on a 400 watt Alpine amp, had a horrible engine wine to it. Once I took out the amp and high end speakers it went away mostly.

 

Are your RCAs and your amp power wire(s) run together back to the amps?

 

My guess would be that you don't have shielded RCAs. If so, and ESPECIALLY if you're running them along with the power wires, that's 90% of your problem.

 

The h/u is a pioneer deh-p4900ib, all jl audio RCA wires. I don't really have anything inside the cab installed to permanatley, the RCA wires run down one side of the column and the amp power down the other, come to think of it the remote wire is run with the rca wires, that might be it, I've never had a prob with remote and rca being ran in the same spot. Could be used some cheap like 30 gauge wire out of an amp kit instead of just normal 16 g standard that I usually use.

 

30 is a little small, for remote I'd use 20-18. 16 is for speakers, not for a remote wire. There's not THAT much signal loss over 16 feet.

 

running the remote wire next to power shouldnt be causing the problem, usually its RCA's running next to power, pioneers are notorious for having RCA output grounding issues, a lot of people found out they have to ground the RCA outputs to the metal on the deck, here is a picture of what solves it if thats the issue



or your RCAs could be bad