Bought a 99 WJ Limited about a month ago. It's got the Infinity Gold system.

I didn't pay too much attention to the sound system when I bought it - not that big of a deal - but I realized shortly after buying it that I've effectively got only one working speaker - passenger side rear. If I adjust the fade to front only, then turn the volume way up, I get really low and mushy bass, and that's about it. If I turn it to just treble, I get really low level sound out of the tweeters. Fade entirely rear, passenger speaker is fine, drivers side = nothing.

So I started tearing into it over the weekend. I thought at first it was a speaker issue. Took out passenger rear and tested it, nothing. Speaker's gone. Fine. Moved to the front, took both drivers and passengers out and they were both fine on another stereo.

At first I thought it was a wiring problem, but my wife suggested it might be a bad amplifier.

What's the easiest way to test for bad amp, and what's the best and cheapest (more emphasis on cheap than best) way to replace it. Again, sound quality isn't huge to me - I'm not going to spend hundreds for the best system ever - I just want something that works.

 

If i had to guess you have the stock radio? Stock radios are very bad about doing that, i never had a stock ampliflier in my jeep so i dont know exatly how there wired in.

 

Sorry!

Stock head unit, yes. With the cd changer in the back.

 

I would replace your head unit.

 

You could use a multi-meter and check for continuity from the head unit to amp and amp to speakers. Clickthisfor wiring diagrams. I'd also bookmark wjjeeps.com, it is a fantastic and thorough site.

 

Awesome resource for sure.

The HU is talking to the amp, and the amp is talking to the speakers, so I don't know what exactly is wrong where that is making the front speakers sound muddled.

I can get sound out of the 2 dash speakers and the 2 front door speakers if I turn the fade 100% front and turn the radio WAY up, but it's still muffled and "bassy" (lots of bass). They're only putting out maybe 10% of what the back door speakers do.

I came up with a solution that I'm going to try to do this weekend: clip the wires on the amp output, and splice the back speaker output to the front speakers. That way I SHOULD get good sound out of the front door speakers which I think are the most important.

Less than ideal, obviously, but it should improve my radio experience for what I have to spend on it - hardly anything.

 

I messed around with it over the weekend, and I'm not sure if I made it more complicated or what... but for me it's "better".

I went to swap the outputs coming from the amp so that the front speaker wires were going to the rear speakers, and the rear speaker wires were going to the front. I looked at the pinout from WJJeeps and clipped, stripped, and spliced. Tried it out about halfway through and much to my surprise not only were the front speakers working fine, so were the back! The fader even worked as it should!

This made no sense, but I continued.

At some point, I realized I was reading the pinout wrong. The pinout shows the FRONT of the plug. I was reading it looking at the BACK of the plug. So the wires I was carefully trying to keep track of - front right + to back right + , etc. - weren't what I was splicing AT ALL.

What I ended up with, though, was all 6 speakers working. Fade works front to back. Balance works left to right on the rear, but door to dash in the front. So right channel is coming out of right rear and dash, and left channel is coming out of left rear and front doors.

It's kind of an interesting effect.

If I get some time, I might try to figure out what I wired to where, and might even go back and "fix" it so it's wired correctly. For now, though, I've got sound coming out of all speakers, and it sounds pretty decent to me, so I'm happy.

 

 

IDK if this helps but my 97 ZJ had the infinity gold system and the radio was okay, not great, but okay. All the speakers, balance, and fade worked. When I flipped up the rear seat, there was the amp all black and charred with a rat's nest of spliced and taped wires. The PO had bypassed the amp entirely. It didn't seem to make a difference though. That was a POS jeep anyhow, run hard and put away wet too many times.