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Today I bought a damaged Lexus LS460. It is my second car; my previous car was a Mazda RX-8, which I rebuilt and tuned myself.
One of the issues with the Lexus is the audio system. The 30A fuses on both the passenger and driver sides are intact (continuity), but the only speaker producing sound is the centre dash speaker. Even then, the audio is crackly and distorted to the point where you cannot recognise what is playing.
Has anyone experienced this before or have any idea what could cause it?
I have not inspected the amplifier too closely yet, but there are no obvious signs of corrosion, water damage, or grime around it.
Also Apologies if there is a similar thread I am missing.
Thanks in advance,
Ryder
Last edited by Ryder007; May 11, 2026 at 12:58 AM.
Whatever advice you receive, successful or not, will be lost to the forum for future searchers, because the search term "ML" will not produce a hit in this forum's search result.
It needs to incorporate the full term "Mark Levinson" for it to result in a hit.
Active forum membership participation in the LS460 sub-forum is declining.
The ability to conduct independent productive search activity will become more important the longer that this trend continues.
I plan on being around for a while, but many members have stopped participating, and will not be returning, as they no longer own a 460.
The moral of the story is "use full terms where possible, not abbreviations or acronyms".
Once the full term is used for the first time in the title or thread content, THEN abbreviations/acronyms can be safely used.
EDIT: Other abbreviations/acronyms MAY produce a hit, just not "ML".
Last edited by Leadfoot6; May 11, 2026 at 12:19 AM.
I’ve done some more testing and found that all speakers are producing sound, but there is a large amount of static/noise and very little actual music coming through. The static also appears to increase as the volume is turned up.
At this stage, I’m leaning towards a fault inside the amplifier, possibly related to the coupling or decoupling capacitors. My thought is that if some of the coupling capacitors have gone high-ESR or open-circuit, parts of the signal path may effectively be left floating and could start acting like antennas, picking up noise which is then amplified through the system.
The decoupling capacitors could also be an issue if they are no longer properly filtering the supply rails, causing noise or instability across multiple channels.
I’m planning to take the amplifier to my university lab and check the capacitors properly, hopefully with an ESR meter.
If anyone has seen this specific symptom before, or has suggestions for other likely causes on the LS460 Mark Levinson amplifier, I’d really appreciate the input.
I mean I'm all for saving money and trying to fix stuff for free, but also like just replace the amp with one from eBay and call it a day. If you throw a used known "good" amp in there and you still have audio issues it'll save you a bunch of time trying to replce the caps and/or reverse engineer the board. (if the issue is elsewhare) I've looked at the ML amp boards before and they are quite complicated... Its your free time so hope you figure out what it is! Having a code reader or Toyota Techstream scan would also help you locate possible issues as well.
Yeah, that would probably work best, but for me it would be close to half the cost of the car. I bought the car damaged, and I’m used to working on rotaries, so I usually fix things myself.
I’m also an electrical engineering student, so it’s a good learning opportunity for me as well.
Mark Levinson Audio issue.
