Hi all,

I've got a kenwood excelon x500-1 driving a pair of Memphis 10" subs and it stopped working the other day. This setup has worked fine for over 2 years now. The red triangle blinks rapidly when it is powered on. Main power fuse is good, as well as the two 30A fuses on the amp. Blinking light is on with or without sub speaker wire hooked up. What should I check next? Voltage on main power and signal wires?

Thanks for the help.

 

Check your ground wire, make sure it's making clean contact to bare metal. If all the other wires are good and so is the ground and the light won't go off even with no subs attached, it sounds like your amp has fried itself internally.

 

Good news! I don't think it is the amplifier. I took a look at it this evening again, without the subs wired in, and the blinking had stopped. I shut it off long enough to hook up the speaker wire and the system worked. Obviously this does not mean the problem is solved, but it likely means I've got a loose connection somewhere. I guess 2 1/2 years of bouncing around the backseat of an old work truck will do that. Once the weekend rolls around I plan on making sure everything is clean, bright, and tight.

Any further advice is appreciated, I will post again if I find anything out of the ordinary.

 

In that case, not only can a loose wire cause the problem but also having the speakers wired wrong as well. That amp is only stable down to 2ohms so make sure it's not wired to anything lower than that.

 

TL,DR- The problem was likely loose RCA cables, but will advise if problem persists.

The subs have been on and off here lately, so I finally found some free time and took a look at it. I pulled the box and checked the wiring on the subs themselves, but they seemed to be wired correctly. Ground was clean and solid on the backseat mounting bolt. Professional install was mostly professional, imagine that. Subs are Memphis 15-pr10d4v2 wired per the image below.



I found some of the speaker wire strands had broken so I redid those thinking it might be the problem, but when I put it back together again the subs still came and went with the same blinking light on the amplifier. I then noticed the blinking light was not steady, but blinked with the sounds on the radio. I unplugged and replugged the RCA audio cables and have not had any issues since.

I could not replicate the blinking light issue again by wiggling or loosening the RCAs so there might still be something wrong internally on the cord, but I am not going to rip that sucker out if I don't have to. Everything seems to be functioning again which is good enough for me, although I was a little disappointed to confirm I was only getting 300W RMS. If it acts up again I will investigate further.

 

Unfortunately your not even getting 300rms, your more than like getting about 2-250 clean out of that amp, so about half the rms power for each of those subs. Depending on where the gain is set, that could also cause the light to be blinking from the gain to be up to high. But hopefully the RCA's were the problem for you as those are a pretty cheap and easy swap if necessary.