Howdy y'all,

On my 01 LS430, the rear driver's side speaker isn't working: no sound at all.

I tried replacing the speaker and that didn't resolve the issue.

I've since re-foamed all the speakers and the sub in the car.

Is this an issue with the Mark Levinson amp in the trunk, or is it possibly something else?

Everything is stock and all wiring looks good.

Thanks for any and all help!

Cheers,
James

 

Could be the amp, but could also be a break in the wiring where it goes from the chassis to the door or else a bad connector somewhere.
Did you test the new speaker before fitting it to the car?

 

Thanks for your feedback. I took it to a local installer (who also did the other 3 door speakers after I re-foamed them) and they said the wiring looked good. Of course something could "look good" and not be, but they said nothing looked out of the ordinary or worrisome. The speaker itself was not tested by me, though I was told it was working when pulled from another LS. It's not 100% certainty, but it seems unlikely to me that my speaker and the replacement would both be entirely non-functioning, so I'm willing to chance that it's indeed a working unit.

The installer said a dealer would be able to make some sort of determination on whether it's the amp that's causing the problem or not... I don't know what that testing would be, nor would I want to go to a dealer for anything, haha. So I'm curious if I can bypass that and make some determination myself on whether it's the amp or not.

Thinking out loud here: do you think it would be smart to take the rear speaker connections to the amp, switch them, and see if I can reproduce the same issue on the other side of the car? If I can, then it would confirm that one channel of the amp is whack. Is that logical?

 

You'd be better off taking any known good 8ohm speaker and connecting that to the door speaker connector.
Just be careful not to short the speaker connector pins together.
Any decent audio guy can hook up a test speaker and tell you if the amp & wiring is OK.