continuity between amp power and speaker leads
 

I noticed when I was hooking up my ground cable from 1 of my amps, it sparked a little on the battery post. Some times a strong spark, sometimesa faint one. And then sometimes none. So doing some checking at the amp, I get some continuity using my meter. All the power, speaker and RCA wires are unhooked. Sometimes continuity between + and - jacks, sometimes not. Then sometimes between the + jack and the speaker outs, sometimes not. Also sometimes from just 1 set of speaker leads from each the rear and the front. (the unbridged leads)

So basically, any combo at any time. And then sometimes nothing. I hate trouble shooting electrical stuff!

I checked 3 other amps and they show nothing, as I would expect.

Sound like a warranty issue or are the electronics inside some how tied togeher? Almost acts like there are capacitors that are charging up and discharging giving the speratic readings.

JL amp.

Sometimes :D

You do not say but I assume that the amp works?

The spark can be normal ass the capacitors in the amp charge. If you put it on and get a big spark that means that the caps were empty, no spark means that you likely had the amp off, pulled the power and reinstalled it quickly.

Jon

Yes, it worked fine. I was just chasing down a power draw on my batteries and stumbled across this.

Audiofn hit it right on the money, some of the bigger JL audio amps have some big cap's also

Not sure, but I guess it's ok. Tonight after doing more double checking before I send it in, I now get the same results on the other amp. As it turned out, the reasoning (or at least my findings) is that the inconsisitancy of it either showing continuity or not was all to which probe I was using at the power lugs. If using + probe at power, then it would sound touching the - probe to the speaker connections. But if I used the - probe, then no sounds. Or the reverse of the probes, don't remember. To many test to keep straight. I thought a continuity checker just checked for an open not polarity.
Anyways, hooked all back up and jammed away. Still got to find the power draw. Can't imagine the radio memory taking this much. I'm unhooking the neg cables and connecting a test light in line between the battery post and the neg cable, getting a faint flashing light.

Thanks

Your best off sticking with a meter to test for continuity or resistance, the beep doesn't tell you what kind of connection you have, just that you have one. Also the reason you get continuity one way and not the other is there is probably a diode in there, they are like a one way check valve for electricity. On any American meter it sends the signal through the red(+) lead and then looks for the signal stength on the black(-) lead to determine how much resistance is in the circuit that you are testing. This is called common flow theory meaning that the electrons are flowing from positive to negative, although everything is built around this theory, it's actually incorrect. Reverse flow theory states that electrons flow from negative to positive and is correct but it was kind of like the marketing thing between VHS and Beta, even though Beta was a better product it was not marketed as well as VHS and disappeared. That's probably way more then you wanted to know.

hb24, thanks. Your explanation sounds exactly right on as what I've been seeing. I was using a Fluke DMM (way to complicated peice of test equipement for the simple guy) for the testing, but had no idea what the numbers are, so I just changed over to the beeper.

You need to use your multimeter properly to actualy measure the amount of static current drain. There will always be some but it is normaly not enough to be a problem from week to week. With everything connected normally and turned off, place your meter in series with your battery cable, set the meter to AMPS on the proper scale and measure the current draw. Dependiing on the exact type of meter you have you may need to put the leads in the seperate jacks for measuring current. If you have an analog meter and the needle pegs in wrong direction reverse the leads. The current drain should be less than 50 mA or so after a few seconds. An average deep cycle battery can easily provide 50 mA for over a month without becoming too discharged.