Car Audio Central - Ultimate Car Audio Forum and Community

check out http://www.motorcityreman.com and see if they have an alt. for your application.

they seem to have very fair prices.

TEDD

Up to twice your birthday spending limit depending on what you want.

a high output alternator can run anywhere from $150-$800+ +installation
then if you want a dedicated deepcycle battery, that's $150-180 for the yellow top battery, $3/foot for 1/0ga cable, a battery isolator which is anywhere from $20-500
a lot depends on the car, and how good the alternator is. very cheaply made alternators can actually be worse than the OEM one you have now. Good ones will be a massive improvement.

this sux i just want a freakin huge system but watever ill just look smaller

this hobby isn't cheap.
a lot of people want a system with thousands of watts, until they find out what it costs to power that system, too.
On the other hand, while I did have a HO alternator in my old Festiva, I also ran 14 speakers using two amplifiers that delivered a total combined power of 820 watts RMS and that system could easily get louder than you'd want to be inside the car with, and sound very clean and tight while doing it. More power isn't always the answer. You need to choose wisely and get good equipment once, and you can build a very respectable system with moderately low power and without loading the entire car with speakers.
My current setup uses 8 speakers total and 3 amps (3 speakers in each door, two subs)

this was what I ran with 820 watts total;

•Pioneer Premier DEX-M88 CD Player (replaced Alpine 7905)
•Pioneer Premier CDX-M33 CD Changer
•Alpine 3401 Parametric Equalizer (replaced Audiocontrol EQL)
•Alpine 3339 Graphic Equalizer
•Orion 300-PRQ pre-amp
•Orion 200-CRX electronic crossover
•Orion 2125SX Digital Reference amplifier (mids/highs) @ 2-16 ohms stereo
•Orion 280GX amplifier (subs) @ 2 ohms stereo
•(4) Orion hard-dome tweeters 15KHz+
•(4) Orion soft-dome tweeters 5KHz-15KHz
•(4) Orion 5" midrange 100Hz-5KHz
•(2) Cerwin-Vega LE-12D 12" DVC subs <60Hz
•Interconnects - Phoenix Gold
•Lestek 150-amp alternator with external Lestek regulator set to 14.4VDC
•Sears DieHard Gold 1200CCA battery

http://www.wickedcases.com/festiva/

I thought power wasnt exactly what made bass, it was just the movement of the woofer, so with a bigger box you need less power, if ur low on cash why not make a 3 cube box and use like 200 watts for somthing instead of 600 or 800. I plan on makin around 3 cube, if thats what chad suggests for my 15 inch atlas subs when i get em

a lot of things end up factoring in to "making bass."
cabin efficiency and sympathetic frequency, power, enclosure type and construction, cabin gain and enclosure gain, speaker displacement (cone area and excursion) and more.

a larger box will extend low frequency response, but it's not going to add much to SPL. At most you're looking at a difference or 1 to 2dB. Also keep in mind "larger and smaller" enclosures are within limits. this is why there are recommended volume ranges for enclosures. Going beyond those recommendations will yield poor results.

if you have a 15" sub, stick to 2.5cu ft sealed, 3cu ft ported. that's a really good starting point. I wouldn't go more than half a cubic foot beyond those volumes either direction at most for best results.

is power used in anything besides moving the cone faster? Theres alot i dont understand

A speaker needs a certain amount of power to be efficient and do the most work for you. It pretty much allows the sub to exurt more, easier. The cone only moves as fast as the frequency played. Hertz is cycles per second, 20 Hz is the cone moving 20 times in one second; Power doesn't matter here.

short answer, yes.
only about 5% of the power put out by the amplifier is returned as "sound" from the speaker.
a lot of power initially drawn from the alternator is lost to wire resistance, amplifier inefficiency, and losses through the transducers. Also you lose energy due to enclosure flex, wave cancellation, resonance in the vehicle, etc..
lots of ways energy is lost in a car.