Help! Replacing ML stereo amp with aftermarket but volume control knob doesn't work now. (1 Viewer)

[krispykritter]

Hi all,

So, I've replaced my Mark Levinson amplifier with an aftermarket Alpine unit. Unfortunately, I have many wires that are different between what's in the 2004 EWD and what my LX.

I've gotten to the point that I have all the speakers outputting sound, and it sounds great - except I have exactly one volume. I'm assuming it's maybe a signal needs to be grounded and/or it's an AVC-LAN problem, but either way, I'm pretty stuck here. I don't have an o-scope, so hard for me to actually look at the waveforms on the wires.

The things that are different all all the signal wires from the radio to the amp. Some of the output to speaker wires (ie, on mine, the door woofer is on one set of wires, and the mid and tweeter are a second pair). None of the mute/beep wires are the same colors. Etc.

Has anyone done this before and got it working?

Thanks in advance!

 

[krispykritter]

Alright, well this is awesome. The volume control for specifically the 2006 LX470 is digitally controlled somehow. If I wire the factory amp back in, my volume control comes back but it doesn't actually change the volume going through the aftermarket amp. So that's cool. No idea where to go from here. Of course I did exactly what you're not supposed to do and clipped the factory harness. Ughhhhhh.

 

[01138lex]

I also had this issue. Ended up keeping the ML amp and piggy backed my PDX amp off of that to retain all the oe functions

 

[krispykritter]

I've decided to get a remote volume knob and mount that somewhere. We'll have to see if this works out for me or not. It'll eliminate my stock functions like balance, fade, and tone controls though, which sucks. I don't have room for both amps without a lot more work than I wanted to do here.

 

[01138lex]

I've decided to get a remote volume knob and mount that somewhere. We'll have to see if this works out for me or not. It'll eliminate my stock functions like balance, fade, and tone controls though, which sucks. I don't have room for both amps without a lot more work than I wanted to do here.

Yeah I got my amp rack and dsp mounted in behind the old sub location and bottle jack area.

 

[krispykritter]

Alright, well, I ended up doing similar to what you did. I moved the original amp back to the passenger side storage bin. I had to reconnect all the damn wires I cut, which took a few hours. Very frustrating to discover this issue AFTER I cut the damn plugs off, but I should've known better. I just was confident I had it all figured out thanks to tons time researching other people's amplifier installs. Too bad some 100 series have a different audio system than others.

 

[krispykritter]

Yeah I got my amp rack and dsp mounted in behind the old sub location and bottle jack area.

Did you figure out a way to disable the nav beep? Got everything working but that beep is obnoxious now.

 

[01138lex]

Did you figure out a way to disable the nav beep? Got everything working but that beep is obnoxious now.

Never did manage to find the beep wire... but someone did post a wiring chart from tech stream that was labeled “beep”.... I’ll look tmr for it. Mine is obnoxiously loud

 

[krispykritter]

Yeah that wire doesn't really exist in our wiring. Almost all the wires colors are different. I'm afraid it's probably another digitwl signal sent to the amp that we can't do anything about.

 

[krispykritter]

More fun. Realized on my way to work this morning that my mid and tweeters weren't working. Then I realized that the oem amp must filter the output frequencies for the two (per side) front output channels, rather than full range from each channel.

So, rather than try and rewire the amp, I simply Y'd the rear channels OEM amp output to feed both front and rear channels in the new amp, and used the OEM front channels to feed the subwoofer input on the new amp. This brought my mids and highs to the front speakers back, and allowed me to keep my line levels relatively high.

As a bonus, it eliminated the obnoxious beep noise, as that appears to only be output on the front channels of the OEM amp.

The only downside is I no longer have a fade adjustment. Or, more specifically, fading forward removes full range speakers, and fading aft removes subwoofer.