Hey guys,

So i bought my s2k used, and it came with two amps in the trunk, one for the speakers and one for the sub. The previous owner sold the sub before I bought the car.
About a week ago, i finally broke and bought a sub and enclosure from online. The wires for the sub amp were unplugged, so I plugged them in, though I made the mistake of putting the ground in the power port, and the power cable in ground port... I'm not sure if this could short circuit an amp or not.. Could it? So i tried to see maybe the amp was still good by unplugging my speaker amp and hooking the cables to my sub amp to see if it still worked. The cables did not fit, so i was plugging the speaker amp back up, and I did it again... I crossed the wires and now my headunit doesn't work, and my speaker amp's power light doesn't light up..
I checked the fuses for the headunit, the two amps, and the power cable fuses, they are all good. I even installed new fuses for the power cables, and amps, but still no luck.
Any advice?
I am driving around without any music right now... I really hope I didn't do too much damage....

I'm not sure if it matters, but I have a MY00 with alpine HU, alpine v12 speaker amp, rockford p2002 sub amp, and JL Audio 10W1v2-8 sub.

 

it takes a brave man (or woman, if that's you in the picture ) to admit
making the same mistake twice! always good to disconnect the battery
before working, and verify everything before hooking it up again!
Can't speak for the health of the amps, but I'd check carefully the two
fuses needed for the headunit - #9 & #22 IIRC. If the headunit isn't on, it
won't send a turn-on signal to the amp, so you can't know the amp's status
until you get the headunit working again.

 

a little update..

I did check all the fuses per Oth advice, and I had a burnt AAC or ACC fuse and once I changed it, my radio and speaker amp was back up and running! thanks a lot!

I took my sub amp into a local stero place called Magic Auto or something and had one of the guys inspect my sub amp. I told him I crossed the power and ground cable and i told him that the protect light is on. He basically through his hands up and backed away from my amp saying "its done..." He said once the protect light comes on, your amp will not work anymore. I was curious, is this true?? My amp is permanently fried?? Is there maybe a way I could repaire it?

 

Thats not true, sometimes it will come on if there is a bad ground connection

 

the protect light on the rockford amp doesn't necessarily mean it's fried.

I would double check the status of all the fuses on that amp, and try to hook it up again, this time correctly.

 

Check the fuses on the back of the headunit. You might have fried those. Use a multimeter to make sure everything is getting enough juice.

 

Pull the amp from the car. Hook it up to a battery (run the remote to the positive battery terminal) with no RCAs or speaker wires attached to the amp (so just power, ground, and remote). If the amp protect light is solid on, then the amp needs to be returned to the manufacturer for repair.

Amps are very sensitive to having power run backwards through them. It's very probable that you have fried some internal components - hence the constant protect light.

 

This sounds like a great way to test it out, I will try this out asap. Thanks!