Dang man, I posted earlier I'm testing tonight. I do appreciate the insight so far. Got home from work last night at 7 and had to work outside. Didn't have the multimeter yet so I focused on the head unit. I wanted to make sure it was grounded right. That's why I took the photos of that.

I'm 99% sure it has nothing to do with my amp ground. I'll check that tonight but I started with the time I had last night with the biggest question mark in my mind. I'm not ignoring anyone's advice, but when time is an issue and tools are limited, you have to focus on what you can.

Car was not running when I took the video. When the car starts the whole thing goes ape nuts. So noise issues without the car running, crazy noise issues when it is.

Like I said before, I'll have more info tonight if we don't solve the problem. A local guy off diyma is gonna pitch in, and my buddy is letting me use his garage.

 

Remove a speaker from the door and hook it directly to the amp, use none of the stock wiring and disconnect every other speaker from the amp. If the noise is there, your problem is in the audio inputs. If the noise doesn't happen at all, it between the amp and the speakers.

Have you considered the amp itself is fried?

 

Tested everything last night, long story short, it was the rca's. Somehow the protective circuit in the pioneer head unit got fried. So the only way to fix that was to send it back to pioneer.

Or do like we did, grounded the shields on the rca's ourselves. Once we grounded those, everything was good. They were just circulating noise throughout the entire car. System is rocking now.

 

Here's the final thoughts for anyone out there with pioneer head units. One word, pico fuse. There is internal protection for the rca outs on pioneer head units called a pico fuse. Never under any circumstances plug in your rca's when there's power on. All the years I've been involved in audio, I never realized that rca's could be such and issue. But after researching after finding the cause of my problem, I've learned that a lot of people have had the same problem with Pioneer units. They blow their pico fuse and all of a sudden there's noise in the system. The solution is to ground the shields of the rca's to the head unit itself and you'll be good to go.

I've read where some people use a 1 or 2A fuse in line with their ground, but others don't. In my case I didn't do that. Just be careful handling your rca's if you're running a pioneer unit. Make sure it's powered down before plugging anything in and you'll be good to go.

If you blow the fuse, you can always send it back to pioneer, but I've read it's an $80 fix and around a 2 week turnaround. Hopefully my problem and resolution will save someone else some time if they come across the same issue.

 

Glad you got it sorted out.

And yes, you definitely should not be plugging stuff in while the system is powered up.

 

i've blown pico fuses before. it's a pain in the ***. how did you ground the RCA shields? I think I did something bootleg like wrap a wire around it.