2KHarrier

So, my wife calls me and says the radio is crackling and then stopped working. I respond with "Yeah, right...."
After she gets home, I hop in the Lexus and turn on the radio, and ...... ....... ....... ........ Nothing.

The antenna goes up, the display shows what station I'm on, but the sound is non existent. If I turn it all the way up, I can just barely hear the radio.
CD player does the same thing.
No, the mute button has not been pressed.

I'm guessing it's the amplifier, so tomorrow I'll dig into it and see what I can find. I understand there is a wire which controls the telephone mute, if it has a phone ECU, so I'll see what i can find and report back...

sktn77a

iTrader: (2)

Yep, sounds like the amp. If you get stumped, just take it to a good auto stereo store and then can confirm this a couple of minutes.

2KHarrier

So this is really interesting.......

I start digging into this mess today and after opening up the rear cargo area, I see all sorts of standing water in the lower areas under the storage pockets on either side of the spare tire well. I pulled the drain hoses for the sun roof out, and about a gallon of water comes gushing out the bottom of the car from each side. I had the radio on the whole time I was pulling panels out to see if anything triggered a change and after a few minutes of the water being drained out, the radio comes to life!

After some more digging to figure out where the water is getting in, I see there's a slight gap in the area between the tail lamp housings and the body of the car. I then removed the taillamp housing, and I noticed the wire loom was caught between the lamp and the body, and the housing didn't sit all the way down against the body of the car when I was tracing wires to install those bumper LED lights.

Unbelievable. So, I dried everything off (the amplifier was dry and showed no corrosion or rust) and put it all back together. It seems to be working fine so far...

My question now is, why did the water sitting in those lower storage wells cause a short or grounding problem to prevent the amplifier from sending the radio signal to the speakers?????

2KHarrier

Drove to work this morning and the radio is working fine, we had rain last night, so I'm going to open up those storage compartments when I get home to see if there's any moisture in there...

Strange.

trhs75

Hey, 2K --glad you solved the problem! Was there bodywork done on the car at some point? I've seen cars put back together wrong before! Maybe when you moved the pinched wire from the taillight area, it eliminated a short? Just a thought.

2KHarrier

No, there's no accident history with it, just my carelessness with reinstalling the taillamp assemblies.

I'm stumped as to why the radio was shorting out. There's no wiring in the lower body wells where the water was sitting, so it may have had nothing to do with it.
When I was removing the metal brace that is bolted just over the amplifier area, the radio was cutting in and out, but there was no loose wiring, or loose grounds any where...

I guess I'll just have to be happy that it's working again..