Everything is stock. 96 Ford Explorer radio has no audio. Display works, stations work, ect. Just no volume. | Ford Explorer Forums

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Everything is stock. 96 Ford Explorer radio has no audio. Display works, stations work, ect. Just no volume.

amandaskylor2000

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Joined
April 4, 2020
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City, State
Newport, NC
Year, Model & Trim Level
96, Ford Explorer
96 Ford Explorer is all stock. But the audio on my radio is NOT working. Everything else on radio works but audio. HELP?
 



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Your factory amp, or the signal that supplies it is probably failed.
 






It might help to know which radio you have, whether it has the additional amp in the rear right quarter panel. Audio is a low voltage AC signal so you can trace the signal at connectors, or even inside the amp (or head unit) with a multimeter, but if this is beyond what you're willing to do, then time to decide whether you want an identical factory radio pull from a junkyard, or a non-stock new radio, or used on craigslist or whatever...
 






I’m pretty sure all of the 96s has the separate amp behind the rear panel, and the subwoofer equipped models had two.
 






Ok so what I need to know is how I can try to fix it. I checked all fuses in panel also.
 






There’s probably not a whole lot to “fix”. You could remove the rear panel and verify you have power at the external amplifier. Other than that, I’m not sure how you’d verify it’s getting its signal.

Since the radio appears to work, I’d guess it’s more likely the amp that’s bad. I’d assume the replacement parts wouldn’t be that much.

Or, you could bypass the factory amp and replace the radio with something with a lot more features for a fairly small sum. Depends on how much you like the factory radio. Some people love them.

I cannot handle stock radios.
 












Ok so what I need to know is how I can try to fix it. I checked all fuses in panel also.
I can help you try to fix it, but don't know your electronics skill level. If nothing jumps out at you once you have the radio or amp open, then you'll need a multimeter and the ability to read diagrams and possibly component datasheets. I can assist with that but I can't solder it from here (lol) so odds are you'll need a soldering iron too. Before getting ahead of myself, I'd also make sure the radio has both of the 12V power inputs live. One is for the clock/memory/?? and the other for the majority of the radio power.

First you should get the wiring diagrams linked in my sig, and look through them to see if any of those seem to match your radio setup. Once we're on the same page with the diagram, I can suggest specific things to check with a multimeter.

Next you'd use a multimeter on low voltage AC to detect where the audio signal is lost. For example is it coming out of the head unit to an amp (if present) or not? If there is no separate amp, just for the heck of it I'd still check for signal on one of speaker wire pairs.

You determine if it's the head unit or the amp, then open it, power it up, hook an antenna up so it can tune a station, and follow the power rails and the audio signal chain to find where the fault lies. If it was just one channel out, I'd have guessed a blow output transistor, though the transistor(s) might be integrated into an amp IC, and a severe enough failure could have potentially taken out the whole IC. If you open it and find a big scorch mark on one, you could make the leap to assume that's your problem and not bother with powering it or the antenna. If you're in a strong signal area, a metal coathanger might work instead of fishing the antenna wire out to use it. If it's the amp that's the problem, you'll need to hook the radio up to it or an alternative audio line-out signal level to troubleshoot it. Without knowing any differently, a target for input signal level would be around 1VAC, and could be anything really, even the headphone out from a cellphone through a cable cannibalized off a pair of $1 earbuds if you have nothing else, or RCA cables from the aux out on a home stereo, etc. .

It is doubtful that Ford used something proprietary so you would note the IC pin count and functions on the respective datasheet to pick a functional equivalent if that exact IC is no longer available, or if there are no known good sources. Try to avoid sellers on ebay shipping from China, as they are often selling counterfeits of something that old, some cheap low power chip stuffed into a larger package.

I'm going off on a tangent since it might not be the amp IC. Good (well lit, high resolution) pictures inside the suspect radio or amp might help, but you'll need to post them on a hosting site like imgur.com then link them here because the image size limitations here are far too small for seeing detail on circuit boards.
 






@amandaskylor2000

Just sayin' - I've read what you wrote, BUT I'd suggest that you take a minute to either shoot us a picture of what's in there, or find a pic of what you have on Google Images and link us to that picture.

Your 25 year old Ex has probably gone through a number of owners - so it's always good to ensure that we're all talking apples to apples, and oranges to oranges...

For example: My Ex came from the factory with a stock radio (AM/FM).
But when I got my hands on it I upgraded it with another completely different factory stock radio (Mach 3 CD/MP3).
It was a "plug and play" simple swap...
 






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