Hey Guys
This might be a dumb question

But what are the chances of the plastic around the speaker wire melting, even if there was an overload in the system for about 5 seconds.

Thanks

depends on the nature of the problem and the power handling capacity of the wiring compared to the speaker power rating. Too much power through the wires feeding powerful speakers can easily melt the wiring if the guage is too small due to the wire's max current handling ability. If the speaker cannot handle the power however, the voice coil may s**t itself before the wires do.

but from your info, given it may be a possible short from +12 to chassis on a car battery, 5 seconds is ample time to fry speaker wire.

thanks for the reply mate.

the front speakers are stockies (98EL Futura),
and the rear are clarion 55W RMS, 280Wmax,
and the head unit is a panasonic, about 6 or 7 years old, max power is 50Wx4.

what happened was i pumped the volume very high,
just for a few seconds I think, as soon as I was about to turn it down
when the head unit s**t itself and turned off,
and there was a burnt smell coming from the head unit.

The sub and the monoblock are fine, and the head unit itself powers up, but there is no sound, except from the sub.

Would you say that its just the MOSFET transistor that has blown?
Or could it be that there is a short somewhere along the spearker wires?


Cheers

did it smell like burnt plastic or burned silicon? Sounds as though it's the output stages of the deck itself that have fried.

Sub runs on line outputs which come prior to the deck's output amplifers... so that would be why those still work. Decks nowdays tend to use single chip integrated amplifiers for everything so if all 4 outputs are dead it doesnt look good. You can disconnect all speakers and use a single speaker to test each channel if you like but i'd probably just look at a new deck... or run your speakers off the line outputs via a 4 channel amp or something. New deck is more fun though

I know what burnt plastic smells like,
so im pretty sure that it was burnt silicon that i was smelling

Ive already got a new deck, Clarion DXZ586USB,
however the only reason I havent put it in yet is
because I dont know if there is a short somewhere along the speaker wire
but in order to test that ill do what you suggested and test each channel,

Cheers Mate

Use a multimeter to check for shorts before installing the new deck, check to ground on both wires and with the speakers connected you should get around 3 ohms across the terminals.....