Kenwood HU Frustration

[colin]

I’ve been lurking the forum for a few weeks now and decided it’s finally time to post.Several months ago, I bought a used ’07 Vibe and to my delight found that it came loaded with the Monsoon sound system. Like many though I was frustrated that the factory head unit had neither an aux or USB input. I’ve swapped decks out of all my previous vehicles with minimal issue and figured the process would be even easier with the newer Vibe.Two weeks ago I ordered a Kenwood DPX308u from Crutchfield. Being a lazy idiot, I didn’t bother doing any internet research before the install and connected up the harness as per the CF instructions and stuck it in the vibe. What I didn’t know was that Vibe had an external amp and so I ended up driving my Monsoon amp with the Kenwood amp for a few minutes pretty hard. I’m somewhat of an audiophile so I noticed the oversaturation of the audio and the fact that they HU volume didn’t have to go past 8 to be unbearably loud. Time to start Googling.Anyway, to make a long story short, I figured out that I could splice in a pair of RCA jacks from the pre-outs on the HU (thanks to some intuition and confirmation from Genvibe) and a couple of ground loop isolators later, the Kenwood was working as expected.But there’s a problem. The quality of the audio from the Kenwood seems to be worse than the factory HU. At first I thought maybe the crossover for the tweeters wasn’t set correctly or that they blown but I don’t think they’d be working at all if that were the case. There’s sort of a 5-6K distortion or buzzing going on that I don’t remember from before and the audio sounds generally muddy and oversaturated.Is it possible that I clipped the amp by feeding it the amped signal from the Kenwood? Or did I somehow simultaneously blow all my speakers? They don’t sound blown as the mid bass and sub bass sound reasonable- muddy, but not “blown” sounding. The distortion is actually more audible to me at lower volumes when the highs are more pronounced (eg. cymbals generally sound awful and hissy).Hoping someone on Genvibe can diagnose my problem and that’s it an easy fix- I’m starting to lose sleep over this.

[MotoAce51]

Not sure if it even relates to your senario but I know when I had a truck with a pioneer HU in it I had the same issue. Something was causing the HU to ground out to the antenna. TO be honest I don't remember how I fixed it but figuring out the problem is 1/2 the battle. I remember there was a little buz you could hear and when you shut everything off you could hear a slight pop or clunk.