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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/NigelNungaNungastein on 2025-06-02 10:18:03+00:00.

I drove around for the past 4 years with the car stereo turned off because it sounded terrible and I thought I had blown up my amp or speakers but was too lazy to fix it.

Over the years I had tried rewiring it, replacing the RCA cables, etc but managed to convince myself that either the kids had poked out the speakers, or the amp had some hardware defect.

I’m a software developer with 20 years experience and I am usually very good at troubleshooting complex problems.

Toward the of a 7 hour roadtrip on the weekend while trying to dim the display on the Pioneer head unit, I discovered it was just in karaoke mode and actually works quite well.

TL;DR I put up with no car stereo for years, only to discover that Menu > Microphone > Vocals was set to off (Karaoke Mode).