987.1 Boxster with dead amplifier needs help

Just bought a 2007 Boxster that has a Pioneer AVIC -Z130BT head unit. Bass speakers in doors no sound. Midrange speakers in doors sound terrible. Only one of the tweeters in dash works. Factory ASK amplifier must be dead because I took it out and nothing changed. My understanding is that the amp powers the bass speakers and the head unit powers the rest. Anyone have suggestions on how to fix this mess? I've attached pictures of the wiring for the dashboard tweeters and the amp wiring scheme. Can someone explain what's going on there? Any help is appreciated. Thanks, John

I had a car audio shop change the Amp. All speakers work now and sounds good

Thanks. Do you know what kind of amp they installed, for example the brand/model or the # of channels/power rating?

FWIW I recently replaced mine with a cheap JBL 2-channel amp ( JBL GX-A602, 60W x 2 into 4 Ohms). Anything with Hi-Level /Speaker ins will work and you won't need much more power than the above. Even with the gain just barely up from zero it's perfectly loud enough with my setup. The JBL I got happened to be JUST the right size to fit where the Nav DVD drive would normally go - I just made prodigious use of velcro tape to hold the carpet flap down and then velcro'd the amp to the carpet. This kept me from having to jerry rig it into the space behind the tire inflator kit, and keeps the adjustments for XOver and volume easily reachable. Nor did I have to drill into the metal anywhere. If all you care about are the door woofers and not the center channel speaker in the dash, you can get by with just a two-channel amp and the front L/R speaker in channels from the harness. Power and ground are up to you, but I just cut the factory wire and ran some 10-gauge up from the harness into the amp instead of going to the battery and drilling for a new ground strap. The midrange and tweeters run directly off the head unit, so you'll probably be needing a replacement tweeter to fix the one that doesn't work. Assuming the connectors are the same on each side you can swap the broken tweeter onto the working side real quick to rule out an issue with the head unit's built in amp. The factory midrange by themselves are pretty tinny, but if they sound rattly or distorted they may need to go as well. Not sure what you meant by they sound awful. As for wiring in the replacement amp, you'll need to use the front L/R inputs, the remote line (this works, but since it's not directly fed from the head unit power state, it takes a few minutes to shut the amp off after turning off the ignition), power, ground, and the big chungus woofer outputs. There are annotated photos of the wiring on the factory harness on this forum and elsewhere online (see ASK Amp Replacement DIY - 6SpeedOnline - Porsche Forum and Luxury Car Resource ). IIRC the order is, in your photo from left to right: THE IMPORTANT PART Brown/Red ---- +12V power Black/Red ----- Remote line Brown ----- GND Rest are speaker I/O. Striped wires are negative. Yellow, thin pair ---- Center out Red, thin pair ----- Front Right in Cream/White thin pair ---- front left in Blue/Green thin pair ----- Rear right in Pale yellow pair ---- Rear left in Thick white pair ----- Left sub out Thick red pair ----- Right sub out

Thanks, that is very helpful. Just to clarify, I have mid-range in the upper doors and tweeters in the dash that run off the head unit. With the 2-channel amp, are there separate hi-level inputs for the mid-range and tweeters or do I splice them together?

I don't understand the goal of what you're asking - do you want to run all the speakers from a new amplifier instead of running the midrange and tweeters from the head unit? This could be done, but it would require all new speaker wiring - likely with a pair of crossovers on each side to handle filtering the signal into the appropriate range for each speaker... If you just want to replace the factory amp and get woofers driven again, it's just the simpler process I outlined above. In either case, the head unit doesn't send the amp filtered signals - it's a full range speaker input for each corner of the car (e.g. front left, front right, rear left, rear right. The head unit doesn't care if the amp is driving woofers or tweeters, the amp gets the full signal range). The amplifier and any circuitry after would handle filtering and splitting signal to individual speakers. The stock wiring would only send signal from amp to the woofers, though. I'd recommend contacting a good car audio shop if you want to toss the stock system completely and wire everything up to an amp. Just getting it back to factory-ish with a replacement amp is pretty straightorward and you wouldn't need to touch the midrange or tweeters at all (save replacing the broken tweeter), but completely rejiggering the speaker wiring is a bit more work. EDITS: I missed that it has an aftermarket head unit already - I'd hope it was wired using a proper harness. It's entirely possible they goofed and messed up the polarity on the speaker outs from the head unit, which could cause the midranges to sound really bad. Wouldn't explain why only one tweeter works, which is again likely just a bad tweeter . In most cases the head unit will send out a full range signal then a crossover would split it out to the midrange and tweeter, so if the head unit was miswired neither speaker would work on that side of the dash. I also just noticed that looks like an aftermarket tweeter spliced into the wiring in the photo. Now I'm really curious what's in the doors and how this is all wired up...you may have more to contend with than I originally thought.

No, sorry for the confusion. I am trying to weigh replacing the amp myself and using the existing setup versus just taking it to a car audio shop and let them redo the whole system. I was looking online at the manual for your amp and it looked like there was only one set of left and right input for the hi-level so my question was do I plug the wires from the head unit for the left midrange and tweeter into the same hole together (and similar for right) or am I looking at it wrong? Or do I only need one set of hi-level wires coming from the head unit? I noticed the 4-channel version of your amp has left and right, front and back inputs. Would it work if I input the tweeter to the front inputs and midrange to the back inputs?

Gotcha. As far as I'm aware, there shouldn't be individual outputs from the head unit to the midrange and tweeters, rather a single pair to each corner, with a crossover somewhere in the dash splitting it between midrange and tweeter, or just a simple wire split somewhere in the dash (see CDR-24 Replacement issues ). This is roughly how the stock system is wired with the ASK amp: The head unit sends a full-range signal for each set of speakers (e.g. it treats the woofer, midrange, and tweeter in the left front corner as one single channel with just a single pair of wires that gets split later). The signal is split / duplicated AFTER the head unit (still full range) for each channel to allow sound to go to the amplifier as well as the midrange/tweeters. Signal goes to amp, amp boosts the power (and probably filters out some higher frequencies), amp sends signal to door subs and center speaker (Not sure on this, but seems the likeliest setup) The full-range signal going to the midrange-tweeters hits a crossover which has one input and two output channels. The crossover will filter all but the highest frequencies from the tweeter and low frequencies from the midrange. This could also just be simply wired up with the midrange and tweeter in series and a capacitor on the tweeter to act as a ghetto filter. There is a cap on the tweeter in your photo, which lends credence to this idea although it's a bit of a tossup since it's aftermarket. In either case, the head unit only has a SINGLE PAIR OF WIRES COMING OUT OF IT FOR EACH CORNER. It basically sees the left woofer, left midrange, and left tweeter as a single Left Front speaker. The signal split after that doesn't matter to the head unit. The complexity comes in with exactly how the aftermarket system in there right now was wired up. Do you know if the door speakers were replaced as well? If it were me, I'd just use the stock wiring setup and only run the woofers off the amp since it's the simplest way to get everything working. Again, you'll at least have to pull the head unit out to see how they wired it in and go from there. If they used a harness the stock wiring should be mostly intact, at least up to the individual speaker connections. Honestly, it's probably gonna require a bit of disassembly to even figure out what they've done. Assuming it's still pretty much stock after the head unit, just replacing the ASK amp, wiring it to the woofers, and fixing the broken tweeter would be my course of action. Even with slightly hacked wiring going to aftermarket speakers, as long as they just cut off enough to replace the speakers themselves it should be as easy as verifying continuity and polarity at each speaker. Tedious, but doable. You could shine a flashlight through the door speaker grilles to see if they look like aftermarket units (the factory speakers are just plain black paper cones, in my experience aftermarket units look a little flashier and may have visible branding). You'd have to pull the door cards to know for sure what's up. It's possible they just blew a tweeter out and replaced one or both with aftermarket units leaving the doors alone. IF I was going to just replace the whole shebang with all speakers running off a single amp (cutting out the amp in the head unit), I would do the following: Full range output from head unit into amplifier (ideally via RCA lines since you have an aftermarket head unit anyway). OPTIONS! Using a two channel amp, full range output from amplifier front L/R out into a three-way crossover for each front channel (e.g front left +/- into a crossover, front right +/- into a crossover) This will have a single +/- input, with individual outputs for woofer, midrange, and tweeter. Downside here is the woofers are a bit large and may not be punchy enough compared to the output into the mids and tweeters. You'd just run a pair of wires from each output on the crossover to the respective speaker individually. This ignores any rear speakers, but I think the boxster only has fronts anyway? The cayman has a small pair on the rear parcel shelf, but they don't do much anyway. I'd just run 'em off the head unit, or ignore them completely.... Using a four channel amp, run full range output from all four channels on the head unit into the amp as above. Wire the woofers into the rear channel directly and set the amp's built-in filter or crossover to low-pass on the rear channel. Wire the front left and right outputs into a two-way crossover on each side. This does pretty much the same as the two channel option above - one set of wires from the crossover would go to the midrange, one set would go to the tweeter This solution gives you more control over the bass response and overall system EQ since you can adjust volume to the woofers independently. In either of the above cases with a full rewire you'd probably want to have pros handle this unless you've got some experience, as at the very least you'd need to disassemble both door cards and possibly part of the dash to run all the needed wiring and mount the crossovers.

The woofers are Morel and so are the tweeters I believe. I couldn't tell with the midrange as I only used the flashlight method. The midrange speakers work but crackle and distort the music. In looking at Morel speakers on Crutchfield some appear to come with an external crossover unit. So your say that in my picture of the ASK harness the rear left and right wires (blue/green and pale yellow) are not connected to anything since I don't have rear speakers?

They're connected to the amp, but yeah. They shouldn't output anything anywhere useful in the factory setup It's possible the ASK amp uses the signal and merges it with the front input for the woofers (so you'd get bass regardless of where the fader was set), but since my amp was broken when I got the car I have no idea whether that was the case. Depending on how you decide to go, the rear outputs may be useful for splitting signal from a four channel amp to the subs alone as I mentioned earlier, but it's whatever. As for the midranges, it sounds like they may be blown. That or there's something up with the head unit / wiring. It's sounding like you're gonna have to start actually taking things apart and checking out how it's all hooked up, unfortunately. They could have been nice and kept most of the factory wiring, but it's also possible the previous owner had no idea what they were doing and hacked everything to bits. Depending on what all they did, you may have no choice but to run new wire to new speakers anyway. It really depends on how it looks behind the plastic.

Got it. Thanks for all of your help!!

I gotchu, fam. I was the dumb kid with an overly expensive car stereo system for a long time - not a pro, but I've done my share of installs over the years. It just takes one idiot with more confidence than brains to wreck the whole setup, so godspeed on getting it sorted. Hopefully they kept the cutting to a minimum and you can get a basic system up without having to rewire everything from scratch.

Me too.