June 2009 - Wheel Bearing & New Amplifier

If you live in the State of Washington you might see me at the 2009 Leavenworth Drive. There should be 300+ cars there so it should be awesome. This will be my third year going. Below are the pictures I took:

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While driving to Seattle one day my friend Erik pointed out that it sounded like I had a bad rear wheel bearing. I haven't had the best luck with wheel bearings. I think I replace all wheel bearings at least once on my previous 1997 VW Jetta VR6 . After taking it to Erik's shop it was the rear driver side bearing that was bad so I got that replaced.

Had my car realigned at Firestone since I have the lifetime Alignment service and the car needed it after the wheel bearing replacement.

Back in May I thought my old subwoofers were bad so I replaced them with a Alpine Type-R Series SWR-1242D. I don't drive the car a lot since my wife uses it for work, so I didn't notice that the new sub was sounding bad just like the old one. So I look at the amp while I'm got it running and notice the "clipping" light is flashing on hard beats. Typically clipping is cause by a poor grounding point. I did move the cable a few weeks past so I figure that might be the case. For testing purposes I ran a ground directly from the amp to the battery and still the clipping problem was still there. At this point my old Infinity 600 watt rms mono amp has had a good 5 year life so it's likely time to just replace it. Now I'm on a mission to get a good amp at the lowest possible price.

The Kenwood Excelon Class D Mono Power Digital Amplifier - XR-1S seem to be a nice little amp... because it's small in size but still matches the power I was running with my old Infinity amp. After going back and forth with 4 or 5 different companies I got one (ABT Electronics) offering to sell a new one to me for $280 down from $500.

A week later I got the new amp installed it and had a little more power but still had the clipping problem. I tried re-wiring the sub to 2ohms and got so more power out of it but still clipping. At this point I'm getting pretty frustrated. My last thoughts are that the RCA cables are bad. These were a nice pair of 4 channel JL Audio RCA cables so it seemed unlikely. Since there were 4 channels I tried switching the cables around. I took out the my radio deck and found my problem. One of my RCA cables was unconnected. The amp was clipping because I had the gained turned all the way up so it was like trying to run a pressure washer but the presume washer was working too hard because not enough water was getting to it to be pressurized. I reconnected all of the RCA cables and sure enough fixed the problem. I thought about sending back the amp since I didn't need it, but I did like the small size of it so I kept it. So in the end I bought a new sub and amp for almost nothing. I basically just gain some space in my trunk which is still ok. Anyway if you got audio problems check all of your wiring first. Take it from someone that learned the expensive way.

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