[tango]

Well, guys, it finally happened. The Bose 9M81 18T806 BB amplifier in my 2013 2G has finally started to act up. About a week ago I was driving and talking with my wife on the Bluetooth when suddenly all the sound shifted to the left speakers. I started turning knobs, pushing buttons, throwing switches, trying to figure out what went wrong. The door-mounted tweeter works fine, but both front and rear door-mounted mid-range units are silent. Me, being me, I started digging around and found out that these amps are a known problem. So further research led me to the shop manual instructions on how to remove the amp. I did the deed and in no time flat I had it out:

It turned out to be a pretty easy process. It was so easy that I'm surprised that nobody has ever done a tutorial on this. Wait. No. I'm not surprised. There is hardly any information on 2G M6s anywhere. Man. It's seriously a disappointment to see just how uninvolved owners of these wonderful cars actually are. It's a crying shame that owners of these cars were supposed to be a set who were not Camry-types. You know, people who actually care about driving pleasure and know more than a little bit about how cars work. If I didn't know better I would have said that these cars are so reliable that they don't need shade-tree fixing. Anyway, I digress. So after a moment, I went ahead and did a video and uploaded it to YouTube. The link is below:

I'm going to be making an effort from this point onwards to make tutorials whenever I do work on my car. I'm not so sure the HOA around my neighbourhood will appreciate much of this, but such is life. I hope this can be of some benefit to some of you out there.

 

[tango]

I've gone ahead and sent the amp off to be repaired. As soon as I hear back from them I'll let you know.

 

[tango]

Okay, guys, I got the amplifier back, installed it...but no change. So I spent $135 to get the thing repaired, but it didn't need repairing. The good thing is that hopefully I now have a more robust amplifier with more reliable internals. That's a good thing, right? I think so. The experience was not all that great, to be honest, because the guy who did the work ignored my questions and the receptacle where the cables plug into it has a crack that was not there before. He obviously saw it because it has a silver Sharpie mark over it for some reason. In any event, that has not affected it from what I can tell. Anyway, so back to my problem. After being totally disappointed I decided to throw the shop manual "diagnostic" shit out the window and just removed the door cards and swapped the speakers from the left (working) sides to the right (non-working) sides. Voila! The speakers from the left side worked perfectly! So I misdiagnosed my problem as an amplifier problem. So where do we go from here, is the big question. Clearly, the first thing is to get the money together to replace the speakers with new ones. I've seen them going for as little as $77.50 at Tasca Parts and as high as $107.66 at Jimellis Mazda Parts. All the door speakers have the same part number (GS1G-66-960B) so that makes things easier.

I did some videos so you guys can check them out below. I'll keep you guys in the loop.