First, I ran the speaker wires from my amp to the stock wiring behind the HU. But that wire is only 20AWG. I want to rewire to the speakers but now I am short on full length wire. Can I splice by soldering and heat shrink speaker wire without any loss of quality? Second, on the amp, fuse dist, etc there are set screws. Do I clamp these set screws down onto the conductor or on the insulation allowing the conductor to be held in place against the back plate? Third and last, how do I measure the voltage on an RCA cable? I was using a volt meter set to 20vdc and got .5vdc when I was expecting closer to 5 to 9vdc from the LOC. Thanks
Soldering speaker wires should not reduce quality. Clamp set screws onto the wire itself, or a spade or pin that you have crimped onto the wires. Don't screw onto the insulation because you won't have a good connection. The most straightforward way to measure voltage on an RCA output is to use a 1 khz 0 dbFS test tone (meaning zero db under the Full Scale, maximum CD recording level). The autosound 2000 CD101 has that tone. You can also use a -20dbFS tone as found on the Stereophile test discs, and then multiply the number you measure by 10. Then just set your meter to measure volts AC and touch the leads to the center and outer conductors. Be aware that the Navone loc doesn't give quite a strong signal as it's specs might indicate. See my Navone LOC tests results: http://tom-morrow-land.com/tests/navoneloc/
A lot of voltage ratings for the outs are just peak readings so that might be why you're reading .5volts. For example, I know a lot of decks out there are rated at 4 or 5 volts, but for normal playing, they tend to regsiter much lower, like 1 volt or 2.
Right.... a deck that has 4 volt outputs will only put out 4 volts with a full scale signal. Since most audio is less than full scale you will normally measure much less.
