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well passive crossovers are just a PCboard with electrolytic or mylar capacitors and air core chokes. its not too hard to pop the casing open and check those out using a meter or a scope. if the XO went though, it wouldn't be alt whine you'd get.
the whine would be high pitched, really loud, constant and annoying, usually from a shot capacitor.

thank you for your replies.

i isolated the problem using my cd walkman in place of the HU, connecting directly to the amp, to rule out my ground point and then reconnected the rca's to the amps front channel and using the cdplayer as my HU connected to the front side of the rca's, inorder to rule out the rca wire and connections to the amp.
kiki, you are right on. although my crossovers are passive. so maybe the wires touching the inside of the door caused a short....unlikely, but anythings possible.

tomorrow i'll do a little more digging and see if it's the HU,(which it very well may be) and check the crossover itself...which i should have done earlier, but sometimes you can think yourself out of your own way.

it actually sounds more like your short burned up a portion of the amplifier's internals, which is what's causing the noise.
it's repairable by any authorized repair shop though.

if the components/crossovers weren't amped and were connected through the head unit, the head unit's internal amp may have been damaged as a result of the direct short at the crossover.
you could try connecting a single speaker directly to the amp/head unit and bypassing the crossovers to ensure they aren't the cause, but one fried crossover cap or coil wouldn't cause both channels to have problems. the crossovers are beyond the amplification stage, so that shouldn't feed back into the whole system or whole front stage.
the amp being damaged however, could.

Thats weird.

Have you tried disconnecting the driver side speaks at the amp to see if the noise goes away? If you haven't fried something in your mid/high amp maybe there's still a problem with the left channel. You could try disconnecting the left RCA as well and see if that helps.

Noise problems can be a pain to diagnose, but this sounds like some sort of catastrophic failure to me.

-Fishy

hi everyone, long time listener first time caller
i'v been going through the site and havent found this issue so i igure i'd ask.

ok here's my story. it's a little long but here's where i'm at.
I just finished an install in my 93 subaru wagon. i am running JL Audio vr650-csi comp set for my front stage. i have my crossovers mounted in my glove box.
everything was fine until lastnight. apparently i over looked how i wired the woofer for the driver side and when i rolled my window down it disconnected the +/- from the woofer itself. i smelled a nasty electrical burning smell and then felt the crossover and it was hot (the wires had touched the metal in the door) i immeditially turned it all off and left it until this morning which was when i found the disconnected terminals.

after reconnecting the speakers, i turned my car on and had AWFUL alternator noise blasting out of both sides of my front stage(tweets/woofers). I checked my grounds ( i have my 8ga grounds running from my amps to a dist block and a 4 ga to a very solid bare contact on the body). did all the typical trouble shooting ( i'll list my steps if necessary) and found that the noise is only coming out of my front stage.


so basically my question is would a bad or blown crossover potentally cause alternator noise issue?