kickass audio

Whats your electrical on your vehicle like? Do you have a h/o alt? Did you do the big-3? What/how many batteries do you have? Also one big thing i noticed even with the electrical i have now is the voltage drop was bad until i had grounded right directly to the frame of my truck. Im going to make that ground better and run a direct ground wire from front to back but until then my chassis serves pretty well. If you have a car that is uni-body construction they dont really have a great ability to ground as cars with solid frames do because there are so many points on the body which are painted and have bad grounds on them. I had this problem with my old car which was a uni-body.

Thats correct to use for your wire. dont be the guy who gets a bigger fuse for wire that cant handle that power load at all. Fuses serve two purposes, one is that if the wire were to get cut and start grounding out on the frame of your vehicle, it would pop the fuse to stop the flow of current through the wire. The other purpose is if you exceed the current capabilities of the wire it will pop the fuse so you dont start heating the wire up, melt the jacket, and then make it short out. Trust me i was stupid and put a 100 amp fuse on shitty 4 gauge wire and the fuse never blew and i exceeded the power handling capabilities of my 4ga wire and it had melted my 4ga wire back about 1.5 feet. Id keep it at 8 0 amps and then leave it at 4ga wire. If you really want to run the amp at the 1 ohm load (i really highly/strongly recommend you do not do this) but you can get larger power wire, like 2ga or 1/0 and then have it with a bigger fuse according to the power wires current limit and then you will be alright. But for now your 4ga will be perfect if you can get it to run at a load from 1 ohm to anything higher. Just because your amp doesnt get hot doesnt mean its not working correctly. I had my old amp i had strapped in my truck and one of the damn things burnt up. I had it strapped at .5 ohms instead of 1 ohm and because of that my amp would work and not have any problems but the damn amp blew some mosfets out on it. The amp didnt get hot at all until i ran it off just one amp instead of 2 amps strapped together, my voltage drop was little to none, and my sub played great. Anyways i digress, just keep the 80 amp fuse because that is perfect for the fosgate 4 gauge since fosgate wire is a little under rated for their awg standard. They have a good amount of wire exceeding the limit of the AWG standard plus your wire is OFC so it can handle a tad bit more power than cca cable. If you can id say that maybe get a bigger power wire for it, if you can afford it, 1/0 would be best. I would get it as OFC because that wire is the best there is for power transfer and resistance but it does cost a little more. Id recommend some Rockford Fosgate 1/0 or KnuKonceptz 1/0 OFC wire for your power/ground wires. There should be a 250-300 amp fuse at the most for 1/0 wire.

For the fusing you only go as big as your amps power wire can handle a load without burning out or melting. What gauge wire are you using for your amps power? What amp fuse are you using?

If its a monoblock then forget what i mentioned about the left channel positive and right channel negative that wont make any difference. Monoblocks with 4 speaker terminals (2 positive and 2 negative) are internally connected to eachother. They just have 4 outputs to make it a lot easier to the installer for changing impedances without taking the sub in and out of the box a million times. It also wont matter which side you put it on as long as the positive and negatives dont touch one another you will be just fine. For running the amp at 1 ohm, if it doesnt say it can do it chances are its not made to do it at that load at all. Most amp manufacturers like to blow up the biggest specs they can about their amps. If they can do low impedances, they will put that in huge yellow font to grab the buyers attention, if its got a lot of max output power that you will never actually see, they will make that big. Point being unless its a high end amp it will not do 1 ohm at all. If your amp gets hot, sounds like crap, or your sub is bottoming out then your amp 100% cannot handle the 1 ohm load. I had a amp that was made for 2 ohms and when i was screwing around with it, i put it to .25 ohms (hahahaha, thank god i learned what i was doing) and that amp would get so damn hot that it would feel like your hand was in the middle of a camp fire. I then put the impedance back up to 2 ohms and it ran just fine.

That does not make any sense your voltage drop is worse at a higher imp load. Your amp should be really at 2 ohms strapped. Heres the thing with strapping amps up.. If the amps minimum nominal impedance is 1 ohm, the minimal nominal impedance strapped is double that, which would be 2 ohms. If the amps minimum nominal impedance is .5 ohms, its strapped nom impedance would be 1 ohm. Sometimes you can do what i got lucky with in my system and use impedance rise to get your imp up high enough to try and trick your amps protection circuit to not kick in and shut the amp off but other times its smarter than that and knows what you are doing to it and shuts off. I have my dc 5.0k wired at a nominal impedance load of .5 ohms. The amp is only made to drop down to 1 ohm nominal but my impedance rise gets up to .96-1.1 ohms so im fine for that. Ive tested my voltage drop and heat from the amp and sub and it does not have any when im slamming on it so im perfectly fine with mine. What impedance are your subwoofer(s)? Do you have a clamp meter you can use to see what your impedance rise is? Also, did your problem with the music cutting out still occur once you swapped the impedance of your sub?

It may be the amp. Do you happen to have another one to try it with just for kicks? Also if you push on the middle of your subwoofers cone, do you hear any scratching noises or does the sub bounce like a ball when you let go of it? If you havent already tried it, try to wire it so that your amp is only using one channel. i.e. connect the positive wire of your woofer to the positive of the left channel, and connect the negative wire of your subwoofer to the negative wire of your left channel.

It should be wired to the amp so that the left channel positive goes to the positive wire of your sub, and the right channel negative goes to the negative of your sub.

can you tell me how the sub is hooked up to your amp? it sounds like you wired it wrong. Also can you double check the resistance of your sub to make sure its at 4 ohms? The power output will suck but id bridge it at 4 ohms. DO NOT run the amp at 1 ohm, there is a reason why your fuse keeps blowing. You are putting extreme stress on your amp at 1 ohm and it is not made to run that low. Dont do it or fear the problem of melting your power wire or burning the amp up. and edit: you cant bump your thread no more than once every 24 hours, thats one full day.

I agree with you on this one superjay. I would have ran a relay if i had problems turning on any of my equipment but luckily i didnt. It would be of best interest for a relay if you have problems turning on the amps or only a select few if any turn on. Most of the times headunits only put out around 850 milli-amps of current through the remote wire so that isnt crap for some amps to kick on with. The relay trick will give it the power it needs to kick on and keep it running and not have you worrying about stressing out the headunit to supply all that power to the amps since the relay is doing the hard part for you.

If anything update your video card driver to the latest revision and it may have that setting when you go to the control panel or maybe desktop since its Ubuntu and show the brand of your graphics card with the settings within it. What graphics card is in the laptop? Model/brand. Also when you reboot, is your BIOS the entire size of your screen or is the border existing with the BIOS on the screen too? If there is no border in the BIOS then the problem is your os not supporting the higher resolutions of the monitor and a new driver (if they even have one for Ubuntu) would be necessary

It should be in one of those two spots. Most of the time if its not then you just need to use the right resolution and make sure the aspect ratio is correct too. I'm 99% sure you wont have any problems with it. If you can tell me about how old is your Toshiba? Usually older laptops like 4+ years have the border setting I was talking about in the BIOS. They did this because ppl were dumbasses and put their resolution to 800x600 and their screen was huge and blurry to all hell. So the manufacturers came up with this so of gramps decided to play with his resolution, he would still be able to see what he is doing, not exceed the limits and shut the monitor off or make it so its insanely huge on your screen. Nobody needs to click on an icon the size of your thumb. Lol.

Depending on the laptop in the BIOS there is an option to stretch your screen or preserve the aspect ratio. I've never really messed with Toshiba's too much but dell was big on that setting in the BIOS. Id sift through the BIOS and see if you can fond anything about preserving the aspect ratio, if not then you just need to run the 10" at the optimum resolution it is made for. Your laptop will distinguish the different resolution capabilities so don't worry. As long as you wire everything up right and pair the cables you will not have a problem with it showing a border. Also if it does show a border, there are ways to turn it off within your graphics card's programs. Ati, nvidia, and Intel all have those features.

Have you tested your impedance rise at all before you think to wire at .45 per amp? Id hate to see good amps get burnt from dangerous impedance loads. I'm not trying to bash on you but knowing your impedance rise opens all kinds of doors to what you can do with your system and be safe doing so. Do you happen to have an amp for your mids and highs or do they run off your headunit? If you have a mids and high amp see if that goes in protect too. Sometimes different amps and other equipment can cause really different results. Also did you redo your amp gains when you swapped headunits?

Do you happen to hear anything like a sudden pop when your radio stops playing the music and comes back? I had this the other day with my system and i have a dc audio 5.0k and a 175.4 amp. My amps and i believe yours does too have a protection circuit to stop playing dc power over 4v on the speaker wires. This will prevent you from "popping" the speaker from a sudden surge of power going through the system. I had mine go into protect on accident when i connected the power to my 3sixty.2 and the amps were still powered on (stupid me forgot to shut the radio off). Well i plugged my 3sixty.2 into the power and all i heard was a very loud pop from the sub and door speakers kicking on from that surge of power and my amps all went into protect. I thought for sure i fried all my speakers but i turned the radio off and back on and i was back up and running and none of my speakers died. Anyways, id see if you happen to have any dc output on your rca's at all because there is a protection called dc offset in which if you output a dc signal, your amp will cut the power and go into protect. Now this protection will not work with clipping because there is still a sine wave its just lopped off severely. With dc offset, the sine wave is a pure line which is DC, not AC like sound works at and is very bad for your amp to run in a mode like this. Id also check your ground wire on your radio just to make sure its getting a decent connection, you can never be too sure about grounding things. Also try to look at your voltage on your remote wires with your new kenwood deck. See if when the amps start to cut out if the voltage drops below around 12v, if it does then you need to get a relay because your amps are drawing more power than the headunit can put out for the remote turn on lead. Also to check into more detail about your speakers cutting out at a certain volume on your radio, take a DMM and set it to ACV and test the rca's to see if it shows voltage when you turn the radio up past a certain level. If there is always voltage the headunit is in good shape.

Sometimes if you have multiple amps it can draw a ton of current but a normal remote output will be fine for about 4-5 amps dependent on their current draw it takes to kick the amps internal relays on. I didnt clamp my remote wire because i really dont care what power it draws to turn on my amps and sound processor but it is running off 18 gauge wire with no problem. It is pure copper wire too. I had at one point 5 devices which needed to kick on when i powered my radio up. My 2 sub amps, my mids+high amp, my sound processor, and my radio bypass. It would handle all those turning on at once with just one remote wire off my radio. Sometimes like superjay said you do have to run a relay but luckily i have not run into that problem yet but if it does come up, they are super easy to fix and you can get a pre-wired mini spdt relay for like $10 and just wire it up and be done with it. Either way the gauge wire doesnt make a huge difference, i personally wouldnt go any smaller than 18 gauge to help in case you happen to get an amp like superjay where it draws a lot of current to turn it on. You can always use speaker wire for the turn on. Im using 12ga speaker wire for my 3sixty.2's power and ground wires (overkill i know it but hey i had a crap ton of it sitting around). Also you can go to home depot or if you know a buddy or shop around online and get 14-12 gauge speaker wire in 100 foot rolls for like $15. As long as the wire is ofc (personal preference really, theres not a whole hell of a lot of current draw for just a remote wire in most cases) and has a decently thick jacket to protect the wire from shorting out im more than happy.

For your wiring that could work but this is what id do. I would get a spare wire just incase something goes horribly wrong but get a very low heat soldering gun (either a cordless or a very small handheld soldering gun from radioshack will do. id get it like 15-20 watts max) and then i would get some lead free solder for a pure connection. Then i would cut the wires off the 2 some odd foot long cable that goes between your motherboard and monitor. I would cut the cable in the middle if you can BUT do not cut all the wires at once or you will instantly screw yourself. I would cut off the outer shrink wrap if it has any for the wires and then i would cut each wire one at a time, decide how long your cable needs to be extended and then solder the wire one at a time. I would keep a pattern when you do this, for example do the entire top row from one side to the other or do one wire at the top and the other wire at the bottom to keep them in a consecutive pair to help minimize the problem of running the wrong wires together or crossing something. If you lived near me and i didnt have so much crap to do with college id be more than willing to help you out with this task because i have all the tools you can imagine and a few times i had to solder the wires together because the morons at hp have such thin wires that the damn things kept snapping. The hardest part is to not and fracture the wires that are stock on the lcd harness and to get the wire so hot you melt half the sheeting on the wire.

Thank you everyone for your replies on this. The more that are related to this the better it will help me. For the electrical draw im in no means concerned for it. My electrical is absolutely overkill in my truck. I have 4 xs power d3100's and a s3400 along with a 270 amp mechman alt. The only time i get voltage drop is if i go full tilt at idle and dont rev up my engine to about 1300-1500 to keep it up to the demand from my 5.0kw. Im really just thinking mac mini because it seems a hell of a lot easier to mod since the newer ones im looking at getting have 9 wires you need to cut, 4 of them are +12v, 4 of them are -12v, and another one is just useless. So getting the mac to run off the power from my truck would be easy but i want a power regulator to help keep the power constant and not have any peaks and valleys are what im watching out for because i do have some moments where that happens. Plus the mac mini is a hell of a lot smaller than most mini pc's ive seen. Even the one meade has on his cart in the shop is fairly big compared to the mac mini. Im just wondering how the mac mini works in the truck for daily use and not overheat because ive been told by several mac owners that the mac mini sucks at cooling. Ive thought about getting an external sound card but either way i dont think it will help get my voltage up high enough. I DO NOT, i repeat DO NOT want or need to use any voltage boost/line drivers for raising the power from the mac mini to a signal my 3sixty.2 can interpret. The big reason i am not doing that is because i have never found one that actually works well and plus my 3sixty.2 is already a line driver to begin with. I just have to see if it will accept an input as low as the heaphone port will put out for voltage levels. I wouldnt really have much desire for a external card since my 3sixty.2 has a ton of control to my entire system. I am still going to try and mess with my laptop in my truck to see how the output is on my 3sixty and everything and if its practical to do and what not.

Yea that wouldnt be too bad. Im kinda doing a knock off of what meade did to his tahoe with the mac mini but im gonna try to find a way to cut out the headunit from the entire system and use just the mac mini and the 3sixty.2 so that should be fun if its even at all possible with how low the output voltage is on headphones. Im not sure where i found it but a co-worker showed me a link a few months ago where you could get a normal display to become touch screen by applying an adhesive surface to the monitor. You plug it into the usb of your computer in which you want to make it touch screen, calibrate the screens touch points, and then you will have a fully functional touch screen. If i can find that link or get him to send it to me ill let you know for sure because you could just use a normal screen for your laptop and put the touchscreen part on top of the lcd panel and go from there. You would still have the p.i.t.a. job of extending the wires but just be slow and make sure you shrink wrap the wires to prevent from a short or broken wire.

Alright, so before i get started im sure someone will start saying im copying steve and all that but i really am not for how im approaching this. What i am going to do for myself this fall is going to be purchasing a mac mini (either a new one or older one, im getting it as a refurb from apple for a hell of a lot cheaper and still under warranty and all that good stuff). Im going to be running the mac mini in my room under the mac os so i can play around with it and know as much as i know about windows with a mac os too. Anyways heres my little dilemma. I really REALLY want to get rid of my headunit (Alpine IVA-W205) and just use the mac mini for ALL the controls in my truck. I never use the radio, maybe once a year will i play a cd and the last time i played one was when i had my truck metered. I dont watch dvd's in my truck either. The big thing i can instantly take advantage of with the mac mini would be first of all a bigger screen in my dash (not too sure on the size just yet, ill get some help and ideas from you all on this), be able to play the movies i download and all my music on the mac, have everything controlled through the mac mini, basically everything through that as if it was a headunit. Now some things i have been thinking in depth about is how i can connect this to my system if i wanted to rip out the headunit. I was thinking to just install the mac mini either under my center console or behind the dash since theres a ton of room behind there for me to put the mac mini. Then i was thinking about how to connect it to my amps and since i have a 3sixty.2, i thought about using a headphone to rca cable that would connect to the 3sixty.2's AUX input. Now the problem... Im not sure if the mac mini is any exception but with both my dell laptops i have, when i try to scope out the outputs to see where it clips at and everything, i cannot get the sine wave to show enough, it is basically two lines with a small overlap on them with my TPI-440 scope. I tried to press the t.base and then go fast/slow with no success of expanding or zooming into the sine wave any better. Does anyone know any other method to try and scope the output from my mac mini to know how high i can set the volume on it before it starts to clip? Im pretty sure steves dd-1 wont work on this since the voltage isnt that high off a headphone output so i dont think the dd-1 will show the signal at all when i put the leads on the rca end. Also, i was thinking about easy ways to get the touch screen on my dash. I dont want to do anything insane like steve has done with his 'hoe and chickens hoopty because im not that complex of a guy and am not really showing it off but i do want a pretty clean look to it. What i was thinking to do was to get another center piece of my dashboard that pops off for me to remove the radio, a/c controls, cigarette lighters, rear wiper switch, and my 4x4 switch so i can modify that to make the touch screen fit and be able to swap back to stock when i sell the truck. Can someone tell me how big or small of a touch screen would be good for controlling a mac mini like steve can do? I do plan to use a keyboard/mouse with it but having the ability to skip that and just use the screen would be boss for me. If anyone can help me with this please reply to this topic and let me know, i appreciate everyones help on all the stupid things i get myself into.

sorry i just got the chance to try and find stuff on your laptop. I didnt find any pin out diagrams online about your monitor to know if the monitors will be plug and play. It may work, it may not work. Only way to tell would be to take the new monitor and plug it into your laptop and fire it up to see if it shows images normally. If it doesnt then the pinout is different. Usually the monitors dont have too many color pins, most are grounds but like i said before the wires are super thin so you will need a lot of patience, a steady hand, and some tiny wire to solder onto the connections when you extend the monitor.

Ill have to look that up for you. I have never seen a Toshiba display port before so ill check if it has the same pinout. For extending the monitor of the laptop to the dash that's gonna be a pain in the butt just to tell you because with most laptops I rip apart to fix, the display cables share a lot of the same color and they are super tiny so u can fracture and burn the cable. It is not by any means a simple splice, extend, connect job to do what u want.

Im sure you will, mine has got to be a problem with the enclosure but idgaf. It still slams to all hell and i keep ripping those tack welds off the bracing for my roof and snap random pieces in my doors, dash, and console.

It is all the way down and my lowpass is all the way up. For my crossover settings on my 3sixty (since all my xover settings are through that), it is set to 28-80Hz with a 24db crossover slope. I tried to turn the infrasonic filter off completely and it doesnt change a single thing. Im honestly not worried. Like i said before and ill keep saying, im not too worried about the low power output for the lower freqs because it still rips my truck apart and shakes the hell out of you in the process. lol. If i could get the power up it would rock but its not a real urgency for me. My urgent need is to get the roof deadened but that wont happen till next summer. Im getting myself a mac mini to get a feel for apple and figure out how to use it all for 3 years before i mod my truck to put it all in there and then ill get some more mids and highs.

Ray, It still sounds like he has everything good. The amp is rated at 2100w per channel at 2 ohms, and 3400 at 1 ohm. The amps ratings off the site are for 14.4v too, and according to his post, he dropped to 12v.

The reason they call it a 12k is because if you were to bridge both channels, it would be over 12000 watts of power This amp is a 2 channel amplifier, not a full blown monoblock. The speaker outputs have a left and right channel. Cody clamped them one channel at a time and came up with the same results. So he came up with a lot more power than the amp is rated for with his voltage and imp rise.