I have a client who has a Russound CA4 installed by another (now bankrupt) company. They had some Polk Atruim (1 pair) speakers installed on the side of the house and the outside zone died. I pulled all the speakers from the four zones and determined the Zone 1 amp took a dump. I looked at the specs and saw the amp was 15 watts per channel--no wonder it crapped out! So I installed a 50 watt per channel (the family is not into loud music) Audio Source amp and moved the outdoor speakers to Zone 4 to allow me to use the variable output on the Russound to drive the Audio Source and Polk speakers.

Client called me about a week later saying the outdoor zone plays for 10 minutes and shuts off. I went out and tested the zone and it did exactly what the client said. I turned the zone back on after it shut down and the sound was playing but distorted. My thought was input stage or output stage somewhere was overdriven and something got overheated.

Again, I have the Zone 4 going via variable preout to the Audio Source amp and then to the outdoor speakers. I thought maybe the speakers could be shorting out (voice coil going bad) so I took them home and jammed out with my tempermental receiver and no shut down. I called Russound who really didn't help me but said I needed more power than 50 watts per channel and that was the problem. I asked him why the 15 watts per channel at least lasted 2 1/2 years with no problems and he didn't know what to tell me.

I called Audio Source and the tech support guy was more helpful and said the amp was pretty robust and overdriving the input stage was probably not the issue and if the outputs were shorted by something down the line--speaker wires and speakers-- the amp would shut down completely rather than play with distorted sound. One thing I did mention was that I had the volume control on the front of the amp turned to 8 and was surprised that I had to do this when usually 5 out of 10 was pretty loud (yeah, yeah, I know I had the amp turned up pretty high) but I wasn't getting much sound out of that zone until I turned it up to the 8 out of 10 setting.

One thing I did notice is the Russound keypads don't get really loud until I turn it up to the second to last green LED on all the keypads (the keypads have 6 or so LED's in an arc that light up one at a time as you raise the volume on the keypad).

The Audio Source guy mentioned something about this (I was thinking the same thing) that the output voltage on the preout of the Russound may be too low and I could be overheating the Russound CA 4 and forcing it to shut down. This makes sense but what I am also wondering is maybe the internal amp on Zone 4 which is not connected to speakers could be overheating the zone and shutting down the amp. I asked Russound about this but their tech support could not give me a definitive answer as to whether internal amp with no load would still get overheated at a high volume setting on the keypad.

One thought I had to to connect an ipod directly to the Audio Source 100 and bypass the russound and see what happens. Audio Source thought maybe the Ipod output was too low in the dock but I get the same volume from the cable box when I switch sources on the Russound keypad.

I need to use the variable out on the Russound and not the fixed as the client doesn't want to have to come inside the house to change volume using the knob on the Amp 100.

I thought one thing I could do is use a PAC SNI35 (high power floating ground speaker level adapter to RCA) and use the Russound amp output on Zone 4 and run that to the RCA inputs of the Audio Source to raise the voltage going into the amp which would allow me to not turn the Russound keypad volume too high and would allow me to drop the volume control down from 8 to 5 which is where Audio Source recommended I set it to on the amp.

One other thought was maybe the Russound was going bad and losing Zone 1 output from the internal amp was a warning sign...

I have stepped into the middle of this and now own the problem so any advice would greatly be appreciated.

TIA.

I'd bet that you're correct on this count. In my experience the CA4 isn't nearly as robust as the old CA4.4/4.6 line was.



Sounds like it's time for a new unit....