volume control

JaxPt · 09-03-2004, 08:12 PM

I just finished my system and for the most part everything works great. heres the basic layout, the puter/PSu are located in the subfloor/amprack in the rear , EQ is loacated in the glovebox.

DEI 600/5 amp 4 gauge ground to the chassis and 4 gauge power from the battery along the drivers side to the distro block, 4gauge from the distro to the amp and inverter using the other output from the distro block. the inverter is grounded to the same point as the amp on a seperate cable

PC: samsung board from a gatewayy 500 pc. 500 mhz, 256mb pc133
on board sound to a y adapter to rca input of a 5 channel kenwood eq with sub xover. 5 channels from the eq to the amp running along the pax side of the

lilliput touchscreen, currently not touchscreen due to cable problem, therefore the software is controlled by an IR keyboard with built in mouse
the keyboard has built in vol/track controls

software is mediaengines latest ver

I have a few problems however.

1: volume, when i turn on my system i can hear everything through the amp, hard drive spinning up etc and when i run winamp, mediaengine, mediaplayer the volume is really high. I cut the main windows vol to almost zero and still doesnt help, in media engine i can have either 0% vol or 2% if i put it at 2% its LOUD!!! only soultion i can think of is cutting the gains on the amp way back, hard to beleive that switching from a reg headunit to a pc soundcard that the gain would be affected so much...any other suggestions before i cut the top end of my system?

2: noise, humming and buzz through the speakers. its tolerable when something is playing but otherwise its drivin me f'n nuts. the sound system and inverter are grounded very well. i know my car audio installations. the rcas are all shielded and away from the electrical as far as i know, power is down the left side of the car and sound is down the right side. possibly EMI from the mobo and PSU near the amp? any suggestions of how to fix it?

also i need to fix my POS vga/usb cable for my lilli touchscreen. I read a thread here that said you could swap it to a DB9 vga extension, can i just hack one side of the DB and the cannon plug off the lilli and solder the wires and can someone give me the proper wire color connections to do this? I'm kinda confused on this one because of the vga/usb intergration in that cable

thanks

CHUPACABRA · 09-03-2004, 08:20 PM

You might want to spend the extra $30 bucks om a sound blaster mp3 (usb sound card)
or a sound blaster live!LS.It sounds like you have a high power on board sound card like some HP computers have cause thay didnt come with amplified speakers only those polk stand alone ones.Now Im not talking like 100w here only like 5w maybe,I had that problem before and it was the onboard sound card giving to much power to the RCAs.

5 watts is a lot to go through your RCAs.

Curiosity · 09-03-2004, 09:04 PM

First try lowering the gain on the amps. That should drop the noise level so much that you'll barely even notice it. Just make it loud enough for the quietest mp3 at about 80% volume and it'll sound great!

kingtut · 09-03-2004, 09:54 PM

This will answer your last Q http://www.tmz.com/wrx/lilliputLCD.html, it is the color code and other stuff.

JaxPt · 09-03-2004, 11:03 PM

Thanks for the help, I lowered the gains a little, that cured alot of the noise issues now i just have to tweak it. I plan on gettin another soundcard, i just had to use the on board sound for now.
kingtut thanks alot for that pinout for the lilli

hondaluder · 03-04-2008, 08:07 AM

Solder a jumper wire between the PS2, Sound and other blocks on the back of the bord to ground. When a motherboard is used in a case the back panel grounds via fingers, by removing from case, grounds are non existent thereby causing hum in audio levels