What could cause this?
 

Hi Audio guys,

I am in need of your help to see what has recently gone wrong with my system. I installed everything myself and have had amazing sound for over 2 years now.

These are the components at a glance for reference:

Pioneer AVH-P4400BH head unit
Boston acoustics 4 channel amp
Boston acoustics mono sub amp
2 sets of Polk audio db components.
JL 10w3v3 subwoofer

So I was driving home from work yesterday and about 15 minutes into the drive all of a sudden my JL sub made a loud pop and quit working. I didn't have time to research it last night so I was going to wait till tonight and turned the sub off from the head unit. I was driving into work this morning and about 10 minutes into the drive this very loud hum/Buzz sound constantly. This sound occured very loud regardless of the volume and the only way I could get it to stop was to hit the "off" button on the head unit. The mute did not work to stop the hum.

Does this sound familiar as to what is going wrong in my system? I am thinking it must be the head unit since it has caused this to 2 separate amps within a day. Could this have caused damage to my components?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Loose wires? I would check all the wires again. Worst to worst, isolate each individual piece of equipment and test them with a known working source.

YzGyz

Thanks. I'll be looking into all the connections this weekend. I'm thinking its the preamps in the head unit that might be going bad.

or an rca cable was damaged.

I would check the Head unit last since it requires the most work to get to. Everything else is "exposed" compared to the back of the Head Unit.

YzGyz

You need to make sure your amps are getting the proper voltage and grounded well. Then you can check the voltage of the pre amp at the amp just use a volt ohm meter.

The pop and loss of subwoofer could be: amp failure, driver failure, or a wiring problem.

The hum is most likely a wiring (grounding) problem - possibly a a damaged coax cable as per RonRizz.

Wiring seems to be the common element here; that's where I'd start.

Thank you everyone for your advice. I will be working on it tomorrow and will respond with what I find.

After some testing on another sub in my other vehicle, I found that it is my mono amp that failed.

Thank you all for your help!