Well the other day my friend gave me an alpine CDA-7873 radio. I installed it but my rear speakers don't work. The fronts work perfectly. I figured it was that the rear speakers finally took a dump on me (I've had problems with them before) so I went to the junkyard and bought a brand new set of pioneer 3-ch 6x9s for 20 bucks. Turns out it wasn't the speakers. These speakers do work if I plug them into the front channel. Its not a bad connection because I have jumped these speakers directly to the connector on the radio and still nothing. Does anybody have any idea on what might cause this? I would like to keep this head-unit for a while, at least until it gets stolen, so I would perfer not to hear any "buy a new head unit comments".

BTW, I have played with the fader, its not that

 

well if you tried using your own wire from the stero rear to the rear speakers and still nothing sorry to tell you then bud sounds like the rear channel of the stero itself is blowin meaning junk

 

Hmm darn. I was hoping not to hear that. Oh well, I can't complain since it was free after all. I guess I could just buy a 4ch amp and use the front channels for all four speakers. Its not like its surround sound anyway.

 

Might beable to take it to a electronics repair guy and see if he can fix it. I just checked that model out, looks pretty cool, I couldn't want to give it up either.

You might beable to have it repaired for less than a new lower model one.

 

If you buy an amp (which I highly recomend), then you wouldn't be using the alpines internal amp. You would hook it up from the pre-amp outouts on the back of the radio. This would keep your front/rear fading ability. I have the 7894 model and love it. I'm not sure of the differences in the two models, but adding an external amp will make your radio sound so much fuller and cleaner.

 

Well the CD's always skip. I cleaned the lens with one of those CD lens cleaner disks to no avail. It deffinitely is a cool head unit, but not if I have to listen to it through only front speakers. Plus, I deffinitely wouldn't want someone to smash my window in just to steal a half working radio. (I'm normally good about removing & hiding the face plate, but I know I'll forget sometime. And that time I'll probably be in the center of a bad neighborhood.)

I proabably could get a quote though on the repairs for those problems. For now I just threw my stock radio back in. Now I have much better sound with those pioneer rears in. The pre-amp outputs would be the RCA jacks, correct? I'm new to car audio, but not wiring or electronics.