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So I’ve got me a 2002 Buick Park Avenue Ultra 3.8L Supercharged. It has the premium 9 speaker with factory amplifier set up. So, issue is, my right side door speaker (speaker not the tweeter) is pulsating only with the key off engine off. It seems to do it sometimes. And only does it with an aftermarket radio. Now my car was recently broken into and had everything stolen so I’ve changed radios quite a bit. Stock radio, everything is fine. They stole a Kenwood double din I had and it did the same thing. I thought maybe the radio was bad. Then I put in another aftermarket radio and the problem persists. I had changed the wiring harness because they cut up my old one, & the radio is brand new. So I’ve canceled out the radio and harness already. Now this car has the factory amp, if the solder got hot or something can something be shorting out internally? I plan to start get into this Friday, im just waiting to get some electrical diagnosing tools together. I’m typically good with electrical stuff. But I’m stumped on this. It works fine with stock, only acts up with aftermarket head unit. & only the key off. & it’s been killing my car every day causing me to jump it every morning which is becoming a pain. Any ideas or anyone had a similar problem? I don’t have a system or anything everything is stock besides the head unit. Also, when I play with the stock radio harness and instrument cluster harness, I get white noise from all of my speakers. Very very weird. I’ve talked to a buddy and he thinks I may have a bad ground. But if anybody else had a similar issue, some advice would be nice! Thanks in advance!
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On vehicles with bcm / CANbus control, signal to power and turn off your stereo is NOT managed through a solid state circuit, but through a data input from the body control module.
GM’s integration of body control modules / CANbus was not done on a single model year throughout all the brands, it happened piecemeal over generations. By 2004 all GM nearly all models had gone this route. I CANT say for certain your model / year – however in that the factory radio does stay on until a door is opened tends to make me believe yours may be.
Now, some questions I should have asked first.
DID you install a module for the aftermarket radio? Normally these connect directly to the vehicles factory radio harness and have a loose pigtail harness to connect to the aftermarket radio. The modules are ONLY required for vehicles that utilize CANbus.
How are you powering the aftermarket radio if your not using a module? A pigtail that plugs into your factory harness that supplies a postive, switched and ground wire? Are you using a proper antenna adapter to connect the aftermarket deck to the GM cable? Does any part of the the antenna cable or the adapter have metal exposed (if so it should be insulated).
The Red wire on the aftermarket radio’s harness is switched ignition – goes to 12V when the key is put in either the ‘on’ or ‘ACC’essory position. The Yellow wire on the aftermarket radio harness is constant 12V from the battery.
Now on to the rest.
1.3A is excessive parasitic draw. Typically, anything more than 500 mA (.5A) is too high. I would expect the maximum acceptable for your car is 450 mA.
No I actually bought a wiring harness. I wasn’t going to cut into the factory harness. But out of curiosity why do you refer to the wiring harness as a module? It’s just a harness from autozone. And yes I do have the antenna adapter and there is no metal exposed. But one odd thing, if I move the amp harness around, unplugged or plugged in, all the speakers makes a ton of static noise. The same happens when I move the harness at the radio also. Weird. Just noticed it the other day. Figured I’d bring that up.
Ok, after much research – Buick Park Ave is NOT CANbus. However, same model year LeSabre – IS CANbus.
Your Park Ave doesn’t need a module, a LeSabre would.
The Park Ave with the 9 speaker setup is an odd duck, most of the major car audio suppliers don’t even support it (Metra, Scosche), meaning there is no wire in place in your aftermarket harness to provide an on/off signal to the factory amp.
Therefor:
I believe that without an input from the aftermarket radio to turn off, the factory amp is staying ‘on’, causing the excess parasitic draw.
With respect to the static it sounds like there is a breakdown in the vehicles harness insulation – possibly a shielding issue, not necessarily an issue but just generally lower quality.
It would seem the easy and obvious answer is to go back to the factory deck.
Yes but I’m not an easy person lol. Well I am, but not when it come to music. What I’ll probably have to do is just unplug the amp every night before I lock up the car. It seems to have been working the past few days. But now my battery is done for. That’s my only problem now. Maybe I can run a switch between the feed wire for the amp? I’ll have to explore my options. I just don’t know anybody else with the same issue that has the same car. That’s why I thought originally the amp itself may just be bad.
As I said earlier, not a big fan of integrating aftermarket head units with OEM amps.
Options:
A. Jettison the OEM amp, add aftermarket amps as required – 1 for front, 1 for rear doors, 1 for sub / center channel. – Edit, if you love music, this is the route to go.
B. Buy an IPod and a set of Sennheissers.
C. Use the power antenna signal from your aftermarket deck to control a relay that powers your OE amplifier.
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