Thread: All of a sudden a whining noise when the car is running

Lol I had the same problem you had at first. I first tried a few other amps i have laying around, and they all made the same sound. Then i tried a spare set of rca's i had and just ran them on top of the center of the car not undernieth anything. I also tried a few different ground spots for the amp, and also went through and cleaned up all the grounds on the car stereo related or not. Still had the noise, so i insatlled my original amp and went off to my friends audio shop.

He gave me crap about my old rcas. LOL So he sold me some new name brand twisted pair rca's at a very good price. He said if those didnt work it was most likely the deck.

I installed the 2 new pairs of rca's and the noise was a slight amount quieter, but still there. I then pulled the deck out and tried grounding that in different places with no luck. then i thought it may be in the rca plugs on the deck itself, and sure enough i touched a bit of 14 ga wire to the rca outputs on the back of the deck and the sound went away. Tried it multiple times with the same affect car running or not. So all i did was strip a bit of the 14ga wire off, wrapped it around one of the rca plugs on the back of the deck and left the other end taped up a few inches behind the deck plugged the rca's back in with the stripped part of the wire between the rca wire and the rca output on the deck.

It works great, and has been for a couple of months so far. I am gonna buy a newer deck sooner or later but for now the free fix works for me.

This is a new radio.
My old radio I know I knocked out the pre amp. Is it possible you grounded the RCA? My RCA's are not gounded. They run from the head unit to the amps straight.

Hmmm, got the same problem on a 94 es300...when I unplug the alternator, noise goes away. Aftermarket panasonic cdplayer, any thoughts? Ps, I have swapped out alternators for a new one, and swapped out stock amps for a used stock amp.

The alternator is making the noise but the radio should have a filter to "filter" out the noise. By grounding the RCA you are eliminating a difference in ground from the chassis to the RCA. The RCA's should be floating from the chassis and if the filters are working you do not get any noise. I have always liked grounding the RCA's to the chassis, makes things much quieter.

BTW, I have 1/2" nylon spacers in between the radio base and the chassis mounts. Would that hinder the chassis being grounded? I raised the radio to make it flush with the center bezel.

I think I got it. I found a loose ground wire off my 4 channel Amp and shortened it's length. I also seperated the power wire away from the speaker wires. And rerouted the power line. So far so good.