The more time you spend with automobile audio, the more opportunities you’ll have to set up the equipment independently. In this elementary tutorial, I’ll go through the essentials for setting up an amplifier for your car stereo.
Installing an amplifier requires some technical know-how. They involve taking out panels and routing wiring from the dashboard to the trunk or wherever the amplifier will be installed.
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A car audio amplifier is excellent, but you’ll also need an amp wiring kit. These sets typically consist of the following:
Power cord (large red wire) Inline fuse holder RCA cables Remote control (length, thin wire, typically blue) Speaker wire RCA connections and looms Other wires and connectors
For these kits, the most popular sizes, or gauges, are eight gauges and four gauges. Smaller numbers indicate larger wires. Amplifiers in the 600-1,200 watt range should be fine with a four gauge system.
Now that you have your amp wiring kit and car audio amplifier, you must find the battery. Once the battery’s location has been determined, it should be disconnected before installation begins to prevent accidental shorting. Investigate the section of the vehicle’s firewall opposite the battery to see if there is a port you may use to bring the power cable inside. If you can’t locate a suitable hole, you might have to create one yourself. If you must drill one, be careful not to nick any wires by starting with a tiny hole. Make the hole bigger and bigger with a step bit. After you’ve drilled the hole, protect your power cord from sharp metal edges by inserting rubber grommets.
Now that the power cable has been fed through the firewall, you can open the car’s interior to install the wiring. Three cables will need to be routed to the amplifier in the automobile. The amplifier is typically located in the trunk or hatchback. The first wire is red, and it’s the one you ran from the car’s battery. The RCA cables follow, and then the small blue wire that controls the TV is attached. Some kits have the remote wire already attached to the RCA plugs. Sound is transmitted to the amplifier via the RCAs and then amplified by the speakers. Running the power line down one side and the RCAs down the other is a good rule of thumb for me while I run the cables. You can create engine noise within your speakers if you don’t do it properly. Connecting the RCAs to the radio’s output lets you modify the sound quality, and some CD players even have a dedicated subwoofer out’ pair of RCA connectors. When you turn on your radio, a signal is sent down the slim line (often a thin blue wire) to the amplifier, which causes it to turn on. You can connect the CD player’s remote using this wire. If the wires seem excessively lengthy now, don’t fret; they may be shortened later when you decide where to put the amplifier.
After the cables are laid, you can temporarily position the amplifier and the box in their final resting places to determine how much excess wire must be cut. This is also the moment to decide where to attach your ground wire; typically, a body ground within a foot of your amplifier will do the trick. Once you’ve found a good spot, remove any paint there with some sandpaper to make a good connection to the car’s body. To make your installation look more polished, connect all the wires to the amplifier and subwoofer and conceal any surplus wire.
Connect the battery terminals and set up the inline fuse protector to complete the process. Now that you’ve finished setting up your system, you may turn it on and adjust the volume and other settings to your liking.
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