Front right & rear left speakers not working with Pioneer head unit

[Darrell]

I have a Pioneer Premier DEH-P550MP that I bought in Feb 2004 for my previous car. I used it in that car until about a year ago when I installed it into my girl's mom's 92 Sentra that my girl was driving. When we returned her mom's car, I took out the Pioneer and installed the stock Nissan stereo. At that time, right before I removed it from the Nissan, I noticed that the right front and left rear speakers weren't producing any sound. So I just went to install the Pioneer head unit in my WRX tonight and it works fine, except for the same speaker problem; no front right or rear left speakers.

What gives? Is the head unit trash? Easy fix? Needs a service dept? Let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Darrell

[ynotajb]

it really depends on what went wrong,,, considering the same problem happened in two different cars it does not sound good and the unit may be garbage,,,

Its really hard for me to tell you anything since I am not sitting next to it with a multi meter,,

I would say check the harness going into the unit and look for any obvious problems and if you dont see anything get out a meter and start to check things out...

[Darrell]

The harness appears to be fine, but that's the first thing that I will check is the conductivity of the harness. It's a Metra Turbowire harness and I used the Pioneer-to-Universal harness in both cars, so that may be the culprit.

[Darrell]

Conductivity checks out on all wires in the harness. I guess the next step is to hook it up to the power supply and test the speaker lead output voltage directly from the head unit pigtail.

[JOHN91709]

thats the same thing that happened to my friends pioneer but to all 4 speakers.but i hooked up the rca's in the back to the speakers and they all work. pioneer sucks

[Darrell]

OK, so I hooked up the Pioneer pigtail that came with the head unit (the kind that has the connector for the back of the head unit but has loose wires for splicing to the vehicle's wiring), connected the power leads to my 13.8VDC regulated power supply on the bench and hooked up a single speaker on channel at a time. All four speaker channels work fine with the Pioneer pigtail.

The only difference between the Pioneer pigtail and and the Metra harness that I can tell is that the Pioneer has a yellow wire labeled "MUTE" and the Metra harness lacks this wire.

I can't figure out what the problem is, but I gotta think it has to do with the metra harness, which is a bummer because that thing makes hooking up the wiring a snap.

In this picture the Pioneer pigtail is on the left and the Metra gsxL Turbowire harness is on the right. And of course I friggin cut off the right side of the Metra harness from the picture when I tried to resize it. Oh well.

[ynotajb]

I would say go buy a harness for the wrx thats got open wires that connect to the original harness for the pioneer,,, Then you dont have to hack any wires on the car ,,, it sounds like something is wrong with your metra harness...

[Darrell]

Yeah, I agree. The old fashioned way is tried and true.

[ynotajb]

Yeah, I agree. The old fashioned way is tried and true.

go for it and let me know how it turns out

[Darrell]

I gave it one more shot.

Seems like the pins in the back of the head unit weren't contacting the wiring inside the black Metra connector, so I performed some minor surgery to pry the little metal contacts out a bit with a long pushpin and it worked like a charm.

[ynotajb]

I gave it one more shot.

Seems like the pins in the back of the head unit weren't contacting the wiring inside the black Metra connector, so I performed some minor surgery to pry the little metal contacts out a bit with a long pushpin and it worked like a charm.

good job