Sound from front drivers door only - Intermittent

[With_him]

I have an 08 Eddie Bauer with Rear Entertainment System. I generally use Bluetooth to listen to my tunes through sync and occasionally the radio. Recently it will only play from the front drivers door speaker. Sometimes if I turn the ignition off, open the door and then start up again it will work with all 4 speakers but doesn't work all the time.

Do the smart people on here have any ideas?

FYI I do have a Viper remote start and aftermarket speakers installed. Speakers have been installed for more than 4 years and the remote starter was installed in January. It has been working fine up until recently.

 

[bobditts]

Check the physical connections. Could be the harness behind the head unit. Are the speakers externally amplified?

 

[Scorpion8]

Is it a selectable option? My Bluetooth set-up allowed for front-only playback or all-four-speaker playback. I guess the assumption is that folks in back may want to listen to their own stuff, so you'd playback as front-only. That or there's a short in your door wiring, probably at the bendable-pass-thru.

 

[With_him]

okay so I dug into it today and everything behind the radio was still plugged in fine. I pulled the door panel off and checked the speaker connection. It was corroded somewhat were the adapter connected to the factory harness. I pulled it out and sprayed a good deal of electric cleaner in there. I also tried to scrape the pins with a needle nose pliers and then turned the pins about 10 degrees and used copper anti-seize on the pins before I reassembled. It works now but I am looking at how cheap and small gauge the wire adapters are to the aftermarket speakers and I am wondering if I should just delete the whole quick disconnect adapted and go with a direct to the speaker with some decent wire.

My concern is that I am not sure what gauge to use for the wire. I am not currently using any amp and may put a small one in some day for the door speakers but not likely unless people believe I will notice a world of difference. The wiring doesn't scare me, but having enough space behind the dash is a little concerning.

Does anyone have recommendations on a small amp only for the 4 Door speakers? I currently have a factory head unit so the amp likely won't happen until I replace the head unit but I would like to pull the wire now if those here think it is a good idea.

So long story shorter it was the connections in the door to the factory plugs that were the problem. I have aftermarket speakers and wonder if deleting the adapters would prevent me from having any issues in the future? If I am going that far should I just pull new wire? If so what gauge wire should I use and do you have any recommendations?

 

[With_him]

Update. It wasn't the door wires as I thought. A couple of days later they stopped working but I didn't turn the radio off like I normally would have, I was distracted by actually driving. Then after 3 minutes or so the radio just started playing with sound coming out the speakers normally. What changed you might ask, well I had turned the A/C on in my hot car to cool me down. At this point, I am thinking there must be some capacitor or other wiring issues that acts up when the car interior us exceedingly warm. I haven't done anything to the system and I haven't had a problem in the past 6 weeks so I am going with when warm metal expands and the world stops inside the head unit. So at some point, I will update/upgrade the head unit and then they should solve the problem. I hope.

 

[With_him]

Just to close out the thread for anyone who reads later. Replacing the head unit solved it and now I can't live without my Waze App and Wireless Apple play. Something was failing inside the factory head unit.