Help please - potential amp disaster

[Rikster]

A few days ago I posted a thread asking where I could get a cable with right-angled RCA plugs. The reason for this is that I have fitted an amp to the back of the rear seat in my 325Ci however as the amp is quite long there is barely enough room to fit the cables to the amp when the seat is in it's upright position.

The amp is fitted vertically up the seat back, with all of the RCA connections at the top end. The amp RCA input cables already have right angled RCA plugs (which came with another amp), however I also needed to hook the amp RCA output up to another active sub. For this I used a standard RCA cable, unknown to me at this point that I had a clearance problem.

Now to my disaster. I was fitting the amp and cables with the seat back down, everything looked ok so I lifted the seat back up and gave it a good push into place. The RCA cables with the right-angled plugs were fine however the plugs on the other RCA cable got smashed as they hit the rear seat frame. Upon realising this I removed the smashed plugs however the ceter pin from one of the plugs was broke and it is now lodged in the connection point on the amp!
(I don't think I am explaining this very well, so hopefully you are with me!)

I have tried everything I can think of to get it out, however it is well lodged in there.

Now to my question which I'm finding hard to explain. Is the center pin on a RCA plug actually used in making the audio connection, or is it just there for stability purposes? This may sound a stupid question, however the inside of the RCA connector on the amp appears to be plastic so it doesn't look as though the center pin is involved in making a metal-metal contact .

I'm hoping to be able to get away with a new RCA cable (with right-angled plugs) but one of the plugs will have the center pin trimmed down so that it will fit into the amp. If this won't work that it looks as though I have wrecked the output port on my amp, in which case I think I am screwed getting my second amp hooked up ...

Any help and advice very welcome.
Rik

[StK]

Yeah Mate your centre pin is the + "positive" for your RCA cable so it needs to plug in all the way to make a connection with the female connector on your amp-you won't get any sound if this is improperly connected

[Rikster]

Bollocks. That's exactly what I didn't want to hear.

Looking like I am going to need to take the amp apart

[StK]

Originally Posted by Rikster

Bollocks. That's exactly what I didn't want to hear.

Looking like I am going to need to take the amp apart

You should be able to take just the cover off and from there you should get easy access to the connectors and hopefully you may be able to push the centre pin out that way but if you have absolutely no luck getting it out you can get new ones and just solder them in fairly easily

[Rikster]

Thanks STK.
Took it apart and got the pin out. Hopefully I haven't screwed anything up with the amp internals.