Can someone help me with alternator whine?

[jomor]

At my previous post, I forgot to mention something important. Alternator whine has two basic causes:

1) Ground loops.
2) Electromagnetic interference from the power cables to the rca (low level signal) cables.

To avoid ground loops, ALL devices should be grounded to the same point.

To avoid e/m interferences, the cables that give power to your amplifier, shoud be as far as possible from the RCA cables, no matter if your RCA cables have good shielding or not. The best technique, is to pass the power cables from the left side of your car to the amplifier, and the the rca cables from the right side of the car, to the amplifier.

[Timbers]

This may sound strange, but when I was routing my speaker wires from the front doors of the car, back to the amps in the back, I could hear alternator whine in the speakers, and the speaker wires weren't even plugged into the amp yet.

Is it possible that it was pulling the noise right throught he wire, and playing it through the speaker, without the speaker wire even being plugged into anything? Kind of an induced noise problem?

My battery is in the trunk. I haven't added any ground wires from my engine block to the chassis, but maybe I will try that, see what happens.

...Tim

[greg k]

I got the same problem =(
I had different head units in my car before and didn't have the alternator noise...and now I got the new radio and I got some really nasty alternator noise...
I tried everything and nothing seems to work...
Should I try getting the noise filter? and if I do would it decrease the quality of the sound?
Or should I try running both the positive and negative wires straight from the battery? would that help?
Someone please help...

[TO-3]

It is kinda controversial in the car audio world, but I like to run all my component grounds back to the battery. It may be redundent, but it got rid of my whine. Some cars have the chassis spot-welded together and it increases the chassis resistance at the back of the vehicle making the system suseptable to ground-loops.

[TO-3]

Originally posted by Timbers
This may sound strange, but when I was routing my speaker wires from the front doors of the car, back to the amps in the back, I could hear alternator whine in the speakers, and the speaker wires weren't even plugged into the amp yet.

Is it possible that it was pulling the noise right throught he wire, and playing it through the speaker, without the speaker wire even being plugged into anything? Kind of an induced noise problem?

Were the RCA's connected to the HU? Are you running the RCA's next to the power cables? Your long RCA will end up acting as an antennae