floating grounds

hi,

I'm a little confused as to exactly where i am to connect the floating ground wires on the RCA things... My amp is a PPI a204.

thanks,


ben
grymm
http://www.autosalvage.org

Connect them to the amp's ground terminal, as it says in the manual.

Hugo

hugo,

i actually did read the manual, believe it or not.

excuse my ignorance, but Wouldn't hooking the ground wires up to the amp's ground terminal be the same as hooking them up to any gound anywhere else on the car?

I'm a little confused...

Also, i dont' have them hooked up at all right now, and i'm not getting any noise whatsoever...are there any cases where one doesn't need to hook them up?

thanks,

ben

No, the ground around a car varies - not by much, but by enough that compared to audio silence on the empeg outputs, it would be audible.

If you have no noise, don't fit them. Wether you need them or not depends on your amp and installation - most do need them, but some seem to get by without.

Hugo

hugo,

thanks for the replies - I was unsure if amps in the UK may have some special "ground" point on them or something weird like that.

I'll take a wait and see approach...

thanks for the great product.

Ben

I had my amp and empeg installed today. When it was all done, the guy had read the instructions, but not quite followed them. The noise was horrible. He had plugged the supplied RCAs between the empeg and the amp cables, then wrapped the ground wires in tape...

I checked it out, and had him fix it. The RCAs are now plugged into the amp (in the trunk). From there, long RCA cables make the run to the front of the car where the empeg is mounted. I couldn't convince him to wrap the RCA jacks on the radio in tape, but they're isolated pretty well for now, and I'll tape them up later. The ground wires are connected to amp ground.

Anyways... There was this horrible high pitched, cycling squeal coming out of the speakers. If one of us grabbed the ground wires and moved them around (keeping them connected, just moving the wire around), the noise would go away. Eventually I found that if I wrap them up together, fold them over to take out the slack, and zip-tie them to the connectors between the short RCA cables and the long ones, the noise vanished. So that's where I'm at now. There's noise somewhere, but somehow by putting the ground wires NEAR the rca's, it goes away.

Any ideas? Was my description too convoluted?

brian