kickass audio

Yea the OP could do that but i tbh dont think he is too inept with computers to do that. You can always get a damn good length for wifi by using a satellite to grab signals for a longer distance but that wont be any bit obvious with a satellite dish on the roof of your car aiming at someones house to steal their internet at one bit.

For the droid bionic it is really new so your wifi tether may not really work too well. I had gingerbread on my droidx and it worked great except for wifi tether. That damn thing would be a total pain in my ass to the point i gave up on the new OS and wiped it back to the stock firmware of froyo and blocked the over the air updates of it so it would get stuck with froyo until i decided to update it. There are newer versions of the wifi tether out there that are supposed to work with gingerbread but they are really making it hard to tether because you are really supposed to pay for that crap. With my phone when i had gingerbread (the same os as the bionic comes with) when i wanted to tether sometimes it wouldnt work (like 10% it would) if it didnt work i had to stop tethering, put it on airplane mode, put tethering on, take it out of airplane mode and it may work but mostly didnt. I got so fed up that i just reverted back to the stock rom my phone came with and used the tether on it because it worked 100% of the time. There are ways to get it working but i am not taking anymore chances with it not working when i need it so im sticking with what i have and knowing it works all the time. If you want just google "droid bionic wifi tether" there are plenty of guides out there on how to root your phone, how to get free wifi tether and all that.

I know a lot about those usb adapters you are talking about (i support them for the company i work for). Anyway i never have used their 4g service since it is so scarse to find and access but on 3g verizon maxs out at 5mb down and 1mb up. For sprint it is usually 4mb down and 1.2mb up. They do have unlimited plans for them but mostly business accounts, a ton of carriers are trying to get around the whole unlimited data since there are ppl like me who steal it from tethering. What i do is i unlocked my phone (i have a Motorola DroidX first gen from Verizon Wireless) and i have it running off Droid Froyo (the name of the firmware) since it runs wifi-tether like a champ and verizon cant shut me down on that like they can in gingerbread. Then i installed wireless tether and when i set it all up i just turn it on, connect my laptop to it, and i have free internet for up to 5 devices. I still only get 5-6mb down and 1mb up but for not paying their b.s. $19.99 a month fee for a capped limit on tethering i am using the unlimited part of my phones data plan. I on average suck over 1.5-2 gigs of data a week because i tether my phone up at work so im not on my work internet and i do all my homework and streaming/downloading. I have not been busted for stealing all that data yet but if i do ill still do it. lmfao. Honestly id just do what im doing with getting a phone with unlimited data (act fast because companies are stopping the unlimited data things now) and get a cell phone that supports wireless tether and runs off android, root the phone, install wireless tether, enjoy free wifi access from your phone hassle free. I personally hate those damn aircards as their signal strength isnt worth shit and they break so easily from daily use. The other thing i noticed with the aircards is that out of nowhere the damn drivers for them delete off your system and you have to reinstall and reactivate the units.

youre welcome man. i actually learned how to use them not too long ago with my hid's and all that good stuff i wired up. You can also go to the12volt.com as they have a ton of diagrams and great guides for wiring. I use that site a lot when i get stumped on things. The switch would be the best and you could get away without using a relay to power the switch and kick on all your amps and the power inverter but if it wont cut it on then it means you exceeded the limit of your radio's output current for the remote turn on wire. If this is the case you would do the wiring like here: http://www.the12volt.com/relays/relaydiagram25.html and then connect everything, your amps, power inverter, anything else you want to add on as an accessory that turns on and off with your radio to pin 30. Here is the pinout if you cannot get the switch to kick over when you tap into the switch yourself and need to use a relay to boost the power of the remote turn on wire. Pin 30: connect this to the remote turn on inputs for your amplifiers and to the switch wire off your inverter which goes from 0v (inverter off) to +12v (inverter on) Pin 86: remote wire coming directly off your radio (solid blue wire) Pin 87: positive wire (connect to positive terminal of your battery with a fuse close to the battery no more than 5-10 amps is needed since its going to be a small relay) Pin 85: ground, connect to the negative or chassis of your vehicle. For the relay, it is still a SPDT type relay but you wont need near as much power to get it to work. A relay about 5-10 amps would be way more than enough power to turn on a crap load of accessories with a remote turn on wire. Honestly what i would do first if this was my vehicle would be to take the wire you find out in your inverter is the switchable wire and connect that to the remote wire off your headunit. Try turning it on and see if it kicks on the inverter and your amps. If it doesnt kick on the inverter check to see if your amps turned on. If your amps didnt turn on then you exceeded the current limit of your remote wire off your radio and need to use the connection mentioned in this post with the relay to make it all work. If the amps turn on but your inverter does not, then you connect the remote wire to the wrong wire on your inverters switch and this needs to be reversed. I really dont think it needs a lot of power to kick that on but who knows. I have never had any high powered inverters, only a cheap 60w inverter i got for a gift. If im right it should work because i had at one point 4 items turning on and off through the remote lead off my headunit. I had 3 amplifiers, and a sound processor turning on and off with it. Typically there is a limit of 2-3 amplifiers you can connect to the remote lead before it ceases to function but i didnt reach that limit.

Hmm well since it has a switch you could re-wire the switch. What you could do is get a dmm and see what wire is the positive wire for that switch on the inverter is the switchable one (it has power when you flick the switch to "on" and has no power when the switch is set to "off". Once you figure out which wire is switchable, you will take that and wire it up to the remote of your radio for example or the accessory wire for your radio. I dont know how much current it draws to engage the power inverter but it cant be more than 1 amp. If you cant do that you can do an alternative of taking a SPDT relay that can handle a continuous load of 30-40 amps (the bigger the better) and wire it up like this.... Pin 87: Connect to positive terminal of your battery with a 30 amp fuse close to the battery Pin 85: Connect this to the ground or negative terminal of your battery. Pin 86: Connect this to the remote turn on wire for your radio, accessory wire for your radio, or any other wire you can tap into that goes from 0v when your engine is off and the key is set to off to a wire that is energized with +12v when the key is in accessory or on. Pin 30: Connect this to the wire you previously figured out is the trigger wire on your power inverter to switch the power inverter on when the relay is energized.

Yes you will kill the battery if you have the inverter on at all times. You would need to run a relay that can handle about 30-40 amps of current to turn on the power to the inverter when the key is on or the engine is running. You can run a switch for it BUT switches cannot handle loads as much as you will place on it by the power inverter. You will either burn the switch out or shock yourself from the overload of current through the switch. I would get a relay for it and wire it up. 8ga seems too overkill for me, id just get 12ga or at most 10ga and wire it with a 30 amp fuse and call it a day. You will use the relay to interrupt the power when the engine is not running.

It may be a 90w adapter brick for your laptops charger. That will definitely work with your power inverter without making it sweat. I would really think that a 200w power inverter could be too much for your cigarette lighter. What size fuse do you have in you cigarette lighter fusebox?

The reason you blew the cig lighters fuse is that your inverter had a surge of power greater than the fuse. DO NOT i repeat do NOT upgrade the fuse to a higher amperage fuse, doing so will cause wire overload and can burn the wire. I would just do like i said and get some 12-10 gauge wire (speaker wire would work, i did that for my 3sixty.2) and put something like a 30-40 amp fuse depending on how long the run is and wire it directly to the inverter. To check the wattage of your laptops power adapter, look on the back of it. There will be a sticker with the serial number, manufacture date, etc. There will be one that says output power (it will read a number and then have a w after it. Usually they are 65w, 90w, 120w) see if you can find out the wattage of your laptops charger and then find the wattage of your power inverter for me as well.

for your wireless keyboard with a mouse built into it, look here: http://www.gadgetytech.com/2009/01/14/a-wireless-keyboard-for-my-media-server/ its made by logitech but costs about $200 so dont expect anything cheap. They have ones that are hard wired for cheaper. For your power inverter it would be a little cheaper but i wouldnt get one you just plug into your cigarette plug and call it a day. I would at least get a 150w power inverter (just to have some overhead, usually a 95-100w is good enough but can get hot on a near dead battery or a laptop with a high display brightness) and hard wire it to your battery. The power wires going to your cigarette lighter were not made for anything more than 15 amps of current if your lucky, most are only 10 amps. I would get something like 12-10 gauge and wire it to the power inverter directly with a fuse into the line for protection and then plug your laptop into it. Now if you were just going to occasionally use the laptop in the vehicle the cigarette lighter will get you buy but id monitor the power wires to make sure they dont overheat and melt.

the steady voltage part is somewhat along the lines of why steve used the power adapter for his mac mini. It regulates the power and keeps it pretty steady for his computer. He hasnt had any problems with it so im not really thinking it hurts his mac mini running off car power with the adapter. Running it just straight off the battery is completely impossible to do and as stephen stated is not going to be steady at all, it fluctuates a lot.

actually you cannot just splice the wires and put it directly into the 12v of your cars electrical system. Laptops charge at 14-18.8v so the 12v would not even get the laptop any power to run any components. Some computer charge at even more than 18.6v of power. You need something to boost the voltage up higher or use a 16v system where it will charge around 18v. Steve did this to make his mac mini work in his tahoe: Either way you need a step up voltage for it so it takes your voltage and raises it up enough to run the computer off it.

It very well could be clipping to all hell but i know for a 100% fact that mine wasnt clipping or distorting. The tweeter just couldnt handle the power it was being tossed at full tilt. Plus when they were like that, the highs were extremely harsh so i had to back the volume off on the tweeters channels within my 3sixty to make it better. The mids can take a ton of power but the highs from what ive noticed dont like taking that much power, plus they get loud at low power as it is.

I myself have blown one rockford tweeter. I blew one my tweeters off the t1652-s component kit. I am running the tweeters at 4 ohms per channel (only running two tweeters) on a DC Audio 175.4 amp. For the 6.5's i have them running at 2 ohms per channel (im just using two channels for the mids and the other two for the highs) off the same 175.4 amp. I have only blown one tweeter because i had given it too much power. Im not trying to say you did it wrong at all im just trying to offer my help with this so please dont take it the wrong way... Did you hear any bit of crackling with the tweeters whenever you played music? If you heard even the slightest bit of crackle (similar to listening to rice krispies in a bowl of milk or opening up a piece of candy in a plastic wrapper or that your artists voices sound like they have a lisp when you know they dont sing/talk like this) then you are overpowering the tweeters just a little too much. I had a small amount of this crackling on my tweeters and i froze the diaphragm of the one tweeter the other one is still working like a champ. I tried to run just the tweeters on passive and active crossovers with the crackling so i went to my 3sixty.2 and turned down the output on my tweeter channels a little till the crackling stopped. Then i ran it like that for awhile with great success and i decided to take the passive crossovers out completely so i was running it all active. I am to this day still running a full active crossover network and an very happy with the results of it. What i would say is listen to your tweeters closely and see if you hear any bit of that crackling or hissing noise i mentioned previously in the post when you play the music because it means you have too much power going to the tweeter. For the mids, i am blasting on them with full unclipped power and am not holding back on any of it. If you could, please tell me what your crossover network is? Do you have passive or active crossovers? What slope are they set to as well as the frequency?

wow i just asked, way to get your panties in a bunch.

have you checked out lowes? they had my 5 layer birch but were a little more expensive.

i got 5 layer 3/4 mdf at home depot. it can take the air from my smd so you should be fine. it was iirc $45 a sheet and i bought two sheets.

I have a dc 5.0k and there are two massive relays inside it next to the capacitors that are on the pcb. When i took off the cover to drool over the guts i saw them and they are pretty big, in fact they are bigger than the relay for your vehicles starter. There is no problem with them clicking as it is normal operation so dont worry about it. In fact i like that it has a relay so it wont consume as much power to try and kick the amp on to start it.

I was in 5th grade at the time and didnt know what was going on. I never knew what a terrorist attack was or who the people who were attacking the nation were. When i heard about the attack i was breaking down because my Aunt and Uncle worked at the twin towers so i was frantic to see if they made it out alive or not. When we got let out of class early i went home and watched the news all day long and couldnt take in what was happening to this great nation. After 3 days from the attacks i got a call at home from my Aunt and Uncle informing me and my family that they all made it out just fine but were having breathing problems because as my aunt was leaving the towers and fled down the street she was covered in the dust and ash that fell down. To this very day i still cannot imagine what would provoke somebody or a group of people to do something like what had taken place just because it is your duty or belief. RIP to all those who served this nation, the workers who took their own lives to save everyone elses, those who volunteered their own time to help out everyone else, and to the men and women whose lives were innocently taken on that day. We will never forget any of you.

For running all the yellow and black wires together it isnt needed. The thing you need to do is find which wire is the main rail and has the most power cabability or amp rating. Finding that wire is a pain in the ass and sometimes cant be found because like my old power supply it had a protection circuit in it where if i drew enough current id shut it off so i would draw 15 amps and it would die on me until i reset it. For his setup i think a psu will get him by pretty well.

bigaltexas - you will laugh your ass off but i used a pc power supply that is made to run a desktop computer. I bought a 500w ATX case power supply at circuit city when they were going under for $90 and modded a few small things on it (mainly cutting and connecting wires together). heres a crappy vid on how to do it (idr the one i looked up when i was 13 to see how to do it). Basically heres how you do it. 1.) Get a power supply that is able to support your amp you wish to run (id get anything from 500-1000w for your system which will give you about 300-750w rms around 2 ohms depending on your amps current draw) 2.) Take the power supplys motherboard connector and look for the small all green colored wire. You need to cut this and the black wire DIRECTLY next to it on the same plug (the plug is the biggest one and has about 24 wires going into it) Take that black and green wire, strip it and twist them together and if you want solder them together. Tape the wires off so they wont short on anything. 3.) Take one of the connectors that goes into an IDE drive (it is about the size of an VGA cable and it has a red, 2 black, and a yellow wire on it. Also note, it is NOT the one that looks to have a cavity in it, this is for a floppy drive and wont supply crap for power. Look for one that is the thickest wire and use that since it is the main power wire and will give you the most amperage) 4.) Cut just the yellow and black wire that is right next to the yellow wire. The yellow wire will be your +12v wire for your amp and the black will be your ground wire for your amp. 5.) Connect the black and yellow wire to the amps power wire, then you need to take a small piece of wire (speaker wire will do) and connect it from the positive of the amplifiers power input to the remote turn-on connector of the amp. 6.) Plug the power supply into the wall and test it out, you should have a working amp/radio in your house now. Of course if you want to do it an easier way you could get a good car battery charger and do it that way with a small car battery (ONLY get a sealed battery as a normal battery will release O2 gasses which are toxic and un noticable and will kill you)

Ill help ya out since i doubt other ppl will touch this one. First of all are you talking about putting a car audio system in your house/room? If so i dont recommend you use a capacitor for the power at all. Also for your amp something like a simple 2 channel that puts out the 200w rms at the subs imp load will be fine. What impedance sub do you have if you even have one? I have two 10" subs next to my bed in my room that ran off a computer power supply (i fried the power supply from overloading it ) but it worked great for my amps. The only downfall to doing a setup like this is that you cant make it really big because pc power supplys ONLY put out 12v power, nothing more so for amps that put out more power at higher voltages you wont get this. Also another downfall is that if you want to keep upgrading your system you will quickly reach the limits of the power supply since they only run off small 14ga wire and can only handle at most a 30 amp load from what i tested. For the power of your sub, how big of a room are you planning to put it in? If its not a big room you wouldnt have much of a need for a big sub stage to "fill" the room with bass, if it is a big room you would need a decent amount of power to really fill the room with bass. I have a room that is about 14x22 feet and for my two 10's they worked well when i gave them 500w rms and they are in a sealed enclosure btw. If you could, please let me know if you are talking about putting a car audio system in your house or a normal home theater type of setup and i will be able to help you from there.

Im not a big guy on knowledge about this kind of stuff but ill suggest this to you OP. Keep the new alt with the smaller pulley it comes with when you purchase it, and if anything get a underdrive pulley for your power steering and maybe the water pump. I dont know how small you can go before you have the chance of ruining your steering or water pumps flow so id ask some good pros on here about that but thats where id start. I wouldnt make the pulley on a h/o alt bigger since you are pretty much wasting your money on getting something high powered and restricting its output. Think of it like buying a race car but putting a very low end limiter on the engine, whats the point? lol.

no problem bro. ive been doing this awhile to learn all the small little things like this (im ocd when it comes to details) lol. You can try to re-cut them but it will still happen. The only way you can try to get around it would be to take the the wire and brace it down to something close to the amp itself. For example since my amps are mounted on my sub box (i dont want to hear it from anyone, they are on rubber stoppers so they dont shake one bit from the bass) the wires that go to my sub amp are held in place on the side of my box with little metal/rubber tie down straps. I got the idea for the straps after my dad suggested i use them to hold my ground wires up from my old sub box in my old car and it worked great. I have one for each wire for the power and it works great. A 3/4" connector for 0ga is what will work just fine and fit it tightly. This is what i used: http://www.google.co...=1t:429,r:6,s:0 edit: since you really cant get around the wire exposing itself a small bit another thing you could do if you didnt feel like spending $5 for those rubber clamps, you could use those rubber connectors they use that go over your crimp terminal and your wire when you connect the wires to the terminal. Like if you look at this pic, http://www.google.co...ved=0CE8Q8wIwAA the red thing is what im talking about. you can take that red jacket and slip it over your wire before it goes into your amp, secure the wire in your amp as far as you can, push that rubber cover up and put some electrical tape over it to keep the wires from being exposed. edit2: and so you are aware theres no way in hell you can solder that wire correctly and thoroughly with a simple soldering gun. My dad has a 150w soldering gun and that thing puts out insane heat but it wouldnt even get halfway through the 4ga cable i had for my mids and highs before i purchased rockford 4ga since it was thicker. I also saturated the hell out of the wire with flux so it would suck the solder in well. The only good way you can solder wire this thick is with a blow torch similar to what you use to solder metal pipes together in your house. Thats exactally what i used for my wires and it worked great. Just if you can regulate the flame down low as to not burn the hell out of the wires jacket when it gets that hot and when its soldered i like to submerge the tip i just soldered in cold water to prevent the jacket from melting anymore or any solder from running. When i soldered my 4ga wire with a solder gun it just put a small amount of it on the top of the wire and the inside was still untouched.

This is normal for what you have happening. Whats going on is the wire is staying stationary BUT the jacket itself is moving. So if you were for example to take that wire and pull on it very hard as long as you secured it tightly it wont come loose from the amps terminals. What would then happen is you would see some more of the wire inside that terminal being exposed. This is because when you pull on it or move it, you are bunching up the outer sheeting and when this happens it will move away from the tip of the wire. Think of it like when you originally stripped the jacket off the wire when you first wired up your amp, remember how you cut the wires jacket and then pulled it off? well this is the same thing thats happening here. the wire is locked in place by the amps clamps that rockford uses (very great btw, they are so damn tight you have to be a strong guy to rip the wire off them when properly secured) but the outer jacket/sheeting is not and thus when you move the wire that sheeting moves with the wire. Another way you can see this would be to take a freshly cut piece of wire in which you did not cut any of the jacket off of and bend that wire around your finger toward the end of the piece of wire. What you will notice is the wire strands will be exposed more and more you wrap that wire around your finger. This is because the wires are staying the same but the outer jacket is changing its lengths. One way i kinda got around it was to take the jacket and if i can sneak a small amount of it into the opening of the terminal BUT do not have it touch the plates where the wire clamps in place. When i have this set it push in on the wire as i tighten the hell out of that terminal and im done. I also have another method of where i stick the screw driver into the opening of the wires hole and mark off the outer edge where the screw driver is no longer inserted into the hole (the very tip of the connector) and i take about 1/8 of a inch less than that when i cut the sheeting/jacket off the tip of the wire and i install it. I have done this and have a tiny amount of wire that is exposed if i pull on the wire very hard.

yea that battery sounds to be dead to me. I used to run a 1400w rms amp at 4 ohms bridged and that puppy was a power hog but i ran that off a stock 150? amp alternator with an xs power s3400 under the hood and no big-3 and it would only drop to 13.3v at full tilt with the engine on. I would slam that system in my parking lot at college full tilt for 4 hours and i could still crank the engine over without any issues. If you want to do something good you can get a battery better than optimas and get an xs power (dont bother with kinetik, they arent as good as they are hyped up to be) and do the big-3. I got away without doing the big-3 but it prob would have helped me if i actually did this on my old car first.