Orion Xtr500 Popping Fuses... Any Help?

Curious if anyone has any ideas I might have overlooked...

My friend had an amp installed at some local shop around here...

The amp was purchased as a refurb a long time ago, and hasn't ever been used. It was delivered, and sat in it's box.

Anyway, these guys hook up the amp, and claimed it simply didn't work.
Popped both the fuses on the amp.

I looked at the wiring job, and wasn't exactly impressed...
the plug holding the speaker wires, they had stripped about 1" of casing off the wiring, and the wiring was too large to fit into the speaker plug, leaving some squished copper strands on the outside.
(I'm wondering if they ever came in contact, causing a short, and some inherent damage at that point)

At any rate, I tidied up the wiring, made sure the capacitor was charged with a resistor (and monitored its charge), removed the underhood fuse, installed the two fuses into the Orion amp, and noted a spark as I installed them (bear in mind, no fuse underhood - power coming from the charged capacitor).

I then installed the fuse underhood, and got a big spark, I assumed from the capacitor charging back up what it had lost when I plugged in the amp fuses (and I assumed the amp's capacitors charging).

But I walked to the trunk, and both amp fuses had popped.

I'm suspecting damage to the amp, but I don't know whether it is because the yahoos that hooked it up let the speaker wire strands touch (like I said - 1" stripped and shoved in the plug ), or whether the amp was actually damaged.

Anyone have any guesses as to what might be damaged - and if it would make any sense to contact Orion for repair (I'm doubting any warranty on refurbished gear), or if anyone here might have repair facilities?

Any help is appreciated!

PS. I'm not opening the amp up at this point, as it's got it's little sticker on it that says "warranty void", and it's not my amp.

 

I didn't install the amp, but when I got the car, the power and ground were in the correct locations.

The fuses were the ones that came with the amp... which the shop that installed it just threw out (not to mention, failed to give my friend even the under-hood fuse ), so I had to look the fuse rating up in the manual, and install two new ones.. so I do know they were correct.
Fuse underhood never blew, just the amp fuses.

Like I mentioned, really the only suspicious thing that I found was the extremely sloppy job fitting the speaker wire into the speaker wire plug (the Orion amps have this plastic plug, almost like a Molex plug, the wires fit into machined holes like a distribution block).
The speaker wire was stripped nearly an inch long, and was too large to fit into each speaker wire hole, meaning strands were askew outside each hole. I cut the stripped portion of the wires down to about half, and trimmed the stray strands... something a shop should have done by instinct, IMO.

But anyway... I agree, it seems like something is dead inside.

This amp was a refurb, and it sat in my friend's closet for over a year, before having it installed.
I don't believe there's any warranty at this point.

I'll get the amp back from him and open it up, the warranty sticker I'm sure has no validity at this point at any rate.

Does anyone know any competent repair shops, or any members on here, that could diagnose and repair at a reasonable cost?

 

Well...
As "electrical knowledge" goes -
I certainly believe I've got the wherewithall that if I had been the one installing the amp - there wouldn't have been any issues.

However... cracking open an amp, and diagnosing a complicated circuit requires much more specialized Electrical Engineering expertise that I unfortunately don't have...
...simply eyeballing for blackened components I don't think is the best strategy. :lol:

 

You likely may be correct...

Again, I didn't do this install, so all I see is the end product, and the positive and negative wires were correct when I got it - but that might not have been the case, they might have realized they made a mistake - or maybe never made one. I don't know.

But TO-3 on CAF is someone whose EE expertise I trust, having audio amplifier experience, and his guess also was that the power supply was shot.

If that's the case, a few components may need to be replaced, and we'll be back in business... but I need to find somewhere/someone that I can trust to perform the repair. My friend paid quite a bit for this amp (compared to what a class D amp of 500w could be had for today), so I feel really bad that he's going to have to shell out more to get it working.

 

My suspicion is, the damage is not to any componentry that is proprietary to Orion... it's likely something very fundamental to the SMPS, although I'm only guessing that's where the damage is, based on the symptoms.

I'd love someone that could check it out for a small fee, and then let me (or rather, him) know if the repair would be another small fee, or a large fee, in which case it wouldn't be worth it.

 

Sounds perfect... I'd love to chat with him. I obviously won't be driving the Civic, and the Pathfinder doesn't have anything really in it at this point...

Buffalo is just frustrating to me.
The people around here are great.. loyal to the area and proud.
But our city government needs to be flushed down the toilet.
It grew to massive size when Bethlehem steel dominated the economy around here... and what mechanism is there to scale it back, or allow it to change as the economy changes? None... flush it.

I'm not exactly a suit-wearing, benz-driving (I wish!) jewelery-blingin' kind of guy... I'm sure I'll be fine. :lol:

 

Oh no...
I remember driving across the Father Baker bridge when it actually was a high-rise bridge, over the supply canal...
Smoke so thick from the plant you couldn't hardly see.

Now, it's just empty. It's shocking when you see aerial shots of the area... it's massive.

 

It could have been around 79 or 80...
I would have been just 6 or 7 years old back then.. little guy riding in the back of Mom's red Pinto. :lol

Speaking of the Father Baker Bridge...
It should have been taken as a big red warning flag, when they built the Father Baker Bridge out of imported Swedish steel, as it was less expensive to do that, than to build the bridge from Bethlehem Steel, despite the bridge being located virtually in the middle of the steel plant.

I found this timeline, actually:
http://ah.bfn.org/h/beth/

Says 1983 was the year Bethlehem Steel closed most of the facility, save for the very few operations that I believe are still in operation today.