Problem 1

So I pulled the old Kenwood Unit (which was working great) and replaced it with an F90BT. I have the RCA's going to an ALPINE amp in rear. I connected the wiring harness and now I only hear full signal from the rear speakers! The fronts are tinny and sound like half signal (kindof like when you plug headphones in halfway.... no vocals, tinny instruments)

•I switched the front output to RCAs I know are working properly and the tinniness is still there. This proves the only thing possibly causing this is the wiring harness (all the pins look good) or the unit itself.

•I plug the front RCA's into the rear output and get full signal to the front speakers

Problem 2

I moved the yellow mute wire for bypass and grounded the black, yellow and light green wires to the wiring harness ground (same ground as the kenwood unit) I now have bad engine interference that gets more high pitched as I accelerate. At first I thought this must be ground so I redid the wiring but it didn't solve the problem.

•The interference is non existent if the car isn't running.

Problem 3

I purchased this unit from eBay and I know returning it is going to be a b***h. I'm hopeful I have hooked something up wrong or overlooked something.....

Problem 1

 

So I pulled the old Kenwood Unit (which was working great) and replaced it with an F90BT. I have the RCA's going to an ALPINE amp in rear. I connected the wiring harness and now I only hear full signal from the rear speakers! The fronts are tinny and sound like half signal (kindof like when you plug headphones in halfway.... no vocals, tinny instruments)

 

•I switched the front output to RCAs I know are working properly and the tinniness is still there. This proves the only thing possibly causing this is the wiring harness (all the pins look good) or the unit itself.

•I plug the front RCA's into the rear output and get full signal to the front speakers

 

Problem 2

 

I moved the yellow mute wire for bypass and grounded the black, yellow and light green wires to the wiring harness ground (same ground as the kenwood unit) I now have bad engine interference that gets more high pitched as I accelerate. At first I thought this must be ground so I redid the wiring but it didn't solve the problem.

 

•The interference is non existent if the car isn't running.

 

Problem 3

 

I purchased this unit from eBay and I know returning it is going to be a b***h. I'm hopeful I have hooked something up wrong or overlooked something.....

Thoughts as follows:

Problems 1 and 3 may be related; perhaps this is the reason this person sold the unit? Maybe the outputs were f'ed up and rather than fix it, they decided to hock it to someone like yourself.

Problem 2: The bypass probably has nothing to do with the engine ground you're experiencing. There are dozens if not hundreds of people who've done the bypass and none of us have encountered this issue. You've either botched the bypass by putting the bypass wire in the wrong parking spot or you have a flakey ground. Try grounding the Avic to the chassis (in a good solid place) rather than using the vehicle's ground harnass. You can also try unseating the parking brake and relocated mute wire and then starting the car to see if the whine persists.. if it does, you know its not something to do with the bypass.

Thats all I've got

You should try splicing onto the factory harness to fix that. In my car i originally had it hooked up with the factory system. after a month of that i switched over to the RCA outputs on my F900. you can get RCA crimps from radioshack. good luck

The micro fuse for the RCA's got blown out, use a quality 4 channel line output converter instead.

First, try grounding the shield of one of your rca cables - just jump a wire from a good ground location to the outer exposed end of an rca while it is plugged into the stereo and see if it helps the noise issues. This is a pioneer tech solution and has worked for me several times. Here's the deal:

Your RCA output is messed up. I don't know the technical term but basically the ground trace in the signal path (rca output of the stereo) is fried. The unit was probably like that when you got it if it was used. If it was new, your amps may have a bad ground or you may have plugged in the rca's while the radio and amp were on.

I've seen this problem multiple times in Pioneer stereos used in conjunction w/ certain amplifiers. According to Pioneer, this problem will not occur if using their amps.

If grounding the rca shield doesn't help, superjets fix should work as well. Or you could just send it back to Ebay. Good luck!

First, try grounding the shield of one of your rca cables - just jump a wire from a good ground location to the outer exposed end of an rca while it is plugged into the stereo and see if it helps the noise issues. This is a pioneer tech solution and has worked for me several times. Here's the deal:

 

Your RCA output is messed up. I don't know the technical term but basically the ground trace in the signal path (rca output of the stereo) is fried. The unit was probably like that when you got it if it was used. If it was new, your amps may have a bad ground or you may have plugged in the rca's while the radio and amp were on.

 

I've seen this problem multiple times in Pioneer stereos used in conjunction w/ certain amplifiers. According to Pioneer, this problem will not occur if using their amps.

 

If grounding the rca shield doesn't help, superjets fix should work as well. Or you could just send it back to Ebay. Good luck!

THANK YOU! I ran a wire from good ground to RCA and the interference was noticeably reduced. I now have full signal to my front speakers as well! Im wondering if the ground part of the RCA in the wiring harness isnt making contact with the unit. The newly relocated mute wire is right next to the ground wire of the RCA out in the wiring harness.

There has been an inherit problem with the grounds of the Pioneer units since the 80's. I had to ground the RCA's back then to get any kind of sound out of my unit.It was like I had the volume down to zero unless they were grounded. You would think they would have fixed them by now !!!