I think you answered your own question on... if the headunit blacked out along with the sound cutting I would think it was safe to assume you had a malfunction in the unit.

Yeah but the whole process progressed... from the black screen, to erractic skipping, to the subs going out, then not long after that a couple days I'd guess the sound completely goes out..

I mean the deck was over 6 years old, soo Im just hopeing once I put the new deck in, its a cure all to my problems.

Ok, so I just got done installing the new Kenwood headunit, badass unit by the way, and initially I had the same problem, no sub or speaker output, but the tweeters were working, so I was like WTF, I broke out the multi-meter, and started testing all the connections, everything checked out good.

On the mitsubishi eclipse, under the hood, theres a fuse box where my isolator (which is used to run 2 batteries simultaneously) has a remote lead that has to run to that fuse box, I adjusted the wire, and BAM, I had sub & speaker output, so I believe thats where my problem was.

My Pioneer Nav died on me in my Z. Took out both door speakers with it and completely shorted all audio to the car.

I now have the stock unit and running new kenwood speakers.

I will eventually buy a new unit and use new speakers w/ sub & two amps.

Weird that our units had the same problem. Blacked out, speaker pops and sound goes out

Oh no sh*t, yeah it seems like we had the same issues, luckily I had the Best Buy warranty, I had the deck serviced a good 5 or 6 times, over 4 years. I knew I was gonna have to replace it eventually. What sucks the most is the fact that I really took care of the deck.

It just sucks. Im actually a pretty big Pioneer fan, but I thought maybe it was time to try something else. I do like this new Kenwood unit.