Hello All- Im new to this forum but am enjoying it greatly! I am in the process of installing an Alpine Iva-W205 touchscreen Dvd player in my'03 H2. Alongwith the indashI am putting in a Pac video bypass and a Pac steering wheel control interface so my factory buttons work. I am trying to accomplish this by using a Metra GMOS-04 converter (Crutchfields). I have also installed a Jl 500/1 amp powering aJL H2 Stealth box alongwith a JVC backup camera and headrest monitors. I know, alot going on! After going through 2 Metra converters and checking a rechecking my wiring, I am still losing channels of sound when playing the stereo. It does not matter if its on radio, cd, or Ipod. When i turn up the volume to anything past half way, I lose sometimes the front speakers, then the back, then sometimes the front right and so on. There is no pattern to it. The funny thing is I never lose the sub though. You would think if it is a voltage problem, the sub would be the first to lose power. My door chimes are also going offnow and telling me my driver door is ajar when im going down the road. (thedoor is not ajar)Crutchfield has just sent me my third Metra and Im trying it tomorrow but i dont think thats the problem. The second Metra I plugged in caught on fire immediately and started smoking. Has anyone got any ideas? FYI, I had a former Alpine Tech guycheck my wiring and everything is wired as it should. Am i just trying to add to much fancy stuff? Anyone else heard bad thing about these Metra Converters?

 

20% of all metra moduals don't work right. The manufacturer told me that directly. They are rigged together and untested when they ship out. Pretty sad way to run a company, after 3 attempts to install mine I called Metra directly to trouble shoot the problem. He had me test a couple things and told me mine was defective. Figuring the shop where I bought it would try to say I hooked it up wrong and burnt it up and not replace it I clipped the ends and put it back in the box like new. I didn't want to get another defective one so I decided to give up and had them install it (that way if it does go out it's on them to fix) the audio shop called me two hours into install and told me it was defective, which I knew but now it's on them. Problem was they didn't have another one to use, but metra located another dealer in town that had one for them to go pick up. It's the more expensive one with a lot of unused wires and I refused to pay the extra money blaming them for selling me a piece of junk to start with. So After 4 hours to do basically a 30 minute job I got my car and everything works great. And if , and when, it stops working I can take it back to them. I hate spending money on something I can do myself, but it wasn't worth the headache.