[Rich Wales]

What do I need to do in order to feed the outputs from a typical
aftermarket receiver into a Monsoon sound system?

Specifically, I've been told that some sort of adapter circuitry
is (or once was) required in order to convert the normal output
level from a typical receiver into the different (lower?) level
expected by a Monsoon amplifier. Exactly what sort of adapter
would this be? Can it be had as a prepackaged module, or would
it need to be a custom-built circuit?

I've also been told that "newer" Monsoon amplifiers have extra
circuitry to sense the incoming level and adjust automatically to
accommodate a standard receiver without external compensation.
And, indeed, the aftermarket (Kenwood) receiver installed in my
2004 VW Golf appears to have been put in without any adapters
of any kind in the custom wiring harness (the installer simply
spliced wires without using any extra modules or components),
and it works OK for the most part.

However, I'm having intermittent problems with distortion that
comes and goes on one channel only (front left), and one of the
many possibilities I'm considering is that there might be a
problem with the level-sensing logic allegedly in my Monsoon amp.

I probably have no hope of getting VW to acknowledge this problem
-- they would surely observe that the amp worked just fine with
the factory-original radio, thus "proving" that the problem must
be in my aftermarket receiver -- but one possible workaround I'm
considering is to install whatever sort of level adapters have
traditionally been used to interface a typical aftermarket radio
to a Monsoon amp, and see if the issue is resolved by changing the
signal levels to what the Monsoon unit was originally designed to
accept. So, if I were to decide to do this, what sort of adapter
devices should I be looking for?

Rich Wales === Palo Alto, CA, USA ===
http://www.richw.org === http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Richwales