Car Audio Central - Ultimate Car Audio Forum and Community

Found this site that will convert volts to watts, or vise versa.
http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-ohm.htm

well, if u have ever heard of a tool place called harbor freight, they have a digital one for like 5 bucks that is effective and accurate for the purpose needed

When you refer to the bass boost, I assume you are talking about the remote gain control and not the actual bass boost (if your amp has it). Because if you are talking about the actual bass boost and not the lil remote and you plan on using it you will want to have that turned on when setting or you may be clipping after you set it and turn it on.
If you are talking about the little remote gain control that goes up front, just unplug it before you set your amp and then plug in after, it will not allow you to adjust any higher than your gains are set to.

yeah you pretty much got it. I set mine with a DMM using a sine wave rather than music.

Hi guys, just for some clarification. I'm trying to set my amp for my subwoofer. When I do all of these adjustments to my amp, do I have all my settings (bass, mid, treble) all set to 0? My stock headunit allows these settings to be set at -6 to +6. Also, I should have my bass boost turned down to 0 as well correct?

From my understanding, this is what I should do (I don't have a voltmeter).

1. set my amp to low pass (as opposed to high pass or full)
2. set my lowpassfilter to 80 hz
3. turn bass boost down to 0
4. turn down gain to 0
5. Put in a high quality music CD, and turn volume up to 75 percent
6. slowly increase my gain until I start to hear distortion, then move gain down a bit til distortion disappears.


Is this basically it? I don't know too much about car audio and just want the simplest way to set my amp. Also, since my amp is going to be set for only my subs, I only set the amp on low-pass right? Does this mean that my setting on highpass filter won't matter? I believe that the amp can be set on low-pass, high pass, or full (meaning both together?). Thanks guys!

http://www.mmxpress.com/technical/ampinstall.htm
http://www.caraudio.com/forum/showthread.php?t=164826
http://www.termpro.com/articles/levelset.html

I had a '77 Blazer with 33" MTRs on it and I was running a pair of stock speakers from out of my dad's old truck (no sub) and I didn't need it at full volume :)

Edit: Excellent tutorial TechSys

Adam's Gain Setting Tutorial

This covers using an O'scope, or a DMM, or your ears. Haven't heard anybody say it's wrong, yet.

I'm going to do the O'scope this weekend. Was given a very old (ancient) tektronix 310A scope, last weekend. Want to see what happens with it. :)

Any hardware store carries a decent dmm, but yeah I LOVE harbor freight.

And if your going full volume there is definately something wrong, I had a Blazer with 33inch BFG Mud terrains (some loud tires) and drove with the windows down and never had to go past half to hit real hard with only 1- 12" Audiopipe 600w rms

As a general rule of thumb, at full or near full volume, a HU is going to send a clipped signal to your amps, so you set your gains at 3/4 volume so that you don't get to full volume on your HU.
If you're turning up your system to full volume all the time, you either need new equipment that can handle the output levels that you want, or you should get your ears checked because you're goign deaf lol.
I measured volume on my computer speakers with the RTA on my computer and I thought 105db or so was pretty damn loud. Obviously that's not in a car with road noise, but still.