Car: 2000 Civic Si
Head unit: Alpine CDE-102
Amp: MTX thunder 4122
Sub: 10" Kenwood

Problem: Everything seems to be hooked up correctly as far as I know. I've never really done this before but it seems pretty straight forward and I can only think that it has something to do with the headunit. Anyway, I have a 0 gauge wire from the battery to a fuse then to the amp. Right now I have it grounded with a 0 gauge as well only cause thats what I had in front of me at the moment. Then the sub is hooked to a (+) on the right channel and (-) on the left channel. The RCA cables run from the sub-out on the headunit to the input on the amp. I went through the menu on the HU and turned the subwoofer option on as well. This all seems correct to me but I can only think that maybe I dont know my HU that well and I'm missing something else that has to be changed in the menu. I read the manual and it told me what I already know so I'm pretty stumped

 

does the amp have a good ground? also check the rca, make sure their not cut. make sure all the connections inside the box are good.

 

I pulled the sub out to check the connection and it was all good and the RCA cable is only 2 days old

 

Disconnect the subs speaker wire from the amp, touch the pos.(+) and neg.(-) speaker leads to the pos.(+) and neg.(-) of a batt., [9V works best but any batt. will work, AAA, AA, C, D and so on] the sub should "pop", if not, recheck the wiring, do the same test at the subs speaker terminal.
If sub "pops" sub and wiring is good, [you have continuity] problem is either amp, HU or wiring.
Reconnect the sub to amp, unplug the RCAs at the HU, lick a finger and touch one of the RCA center pin, [signal] and outside barrel, [signal return] at the same time, sub should "hum" if not, check RCAs and/or amp, if it does hum, try plugging RCAs into a front or rear output instead of the sub output and see what happens. 94

 

You have the remote wire hooked up, right?

 

I was looking at that and didn't know what that was for. I read somewhere else it has to be hooked up to the HU? Again I'm not familiar with this stuff

 

So now that I know, it should be hooked up to a power source. Would the cigarette lighter be good since its only powered when the key is to the ON position?

 

I ran a wire to the blue/white wire on the HU which is indicated as the remote wire and got nothing.

fcm, I haven't tried what you told me yet since I was missing an important wire and figured it was an easy fix. I'll try and narrow it down with what you told me and report back. I have a feeling that its the amp. The red light comes on but for some reason I think a connection isn't being made inside of it.

I also tried another amp but the light on the amp doesn't even come on and the fuse is fine, so that's another issue to deal with

 

hook it up to the power antenna wire.

 

Tried that. No dice

 

Tested the connections and all were good. I tried opening the amp but I dont have the right size torx bit

 

your amp might not be working..or the sub.. one of the two

 

or both.

 

You can try hooking up 12v to the remote terminal on your amp just to test your amp, just jump it to the 12v terminal with a short piece of wire. If that works than there is a problem somewhere between there and your head unit with the remote power.

Also to test the RCA's you can get a 3.5mm phono to rca adapter cable and use that to play an ipod or whatever through the amp. That way you can narrow down the possible problems.