Thread: Help me understand something

What are you using as an amp? sound cards dont put out enough watts to power car speakers. they put out enough watts to power headphones....but not speakers....even desktop speakers, they have to be plugged in to an outlet (the majority of them).

Wow, now I feel retarted. I should have guessed that, but I really wasn't sure. How do you wire up the speakers to the amp? RCA out from CarPC to the amp and than bare wire up to the harness adapter?

The amp will have RCA in, use that to connect the carpc to the amp. The amp will also have terminals for the speakers themselves. Personally I would bypass the wiring harness by putting my own wire to the speakers, depends what type of amp you get though...the small wires the factory installed can only take so much... however, you can buy a wire harness from an audio store that plugs into your existing harness but the wires are free so that you can solder/splice into the wires you need. Then if you need to go back to stock form its much easier, just unplug the harness you installed and plug the radio back into the harness. (this is assuming you are ditching the radio...) If your keeping the radio, you need to splice into the wires.

Ok, thanks for the help, Squadfer. I am ditching the radio and the CarPC is going to be my new means of music I just need to find out how many speakers I have (I honestly don't know ) and find a cheap-o but decent amp.

The cheaper option is to see if you can wire an auxiliary connection into your stock headunit, so the headunit is acting as the amplifier. You may or may not be able to do this based on the headunit. If it allows you to control a CD changer, there should be an adapter. A Maxima specific forum would be a good place to look for help.

Another option is an aftermarket headunit with an aux connection.

There's a bunch of way to go about doing this.

Originally Posted by Machinehead

The cheaper option is to see if you can wire an auxiliary connection into your stock headunit, so the headunit is acting as the amplifier. You may or may not be able to do this based on the headunit. If it allows you to control a CD changer, there should be an adapter. A Maxima specific forum would be a good place to look for help.

Another option is an aftermarket headunit with an aux connection.

There's a bunch of way to go about doing this.

Well, I'm taking out the stock headunit and replacing it with the Lilliput 701 and the CarPC. I used to work at Best Buy, and just for laughs, I went over there to ask about amplifying the CarPC and the guy didn't know what that was, so I talked to the installers and they both said that amplifying stock speakers with a standard amp will blow them up. So, since all I want to do is get sound from the CarPC to the speakers and I don't need amazing sound, just sound like I have now, they recommended I get a 4 channel 30 watt amp and that should do it. That true?

You mentioned you didnt have the bose setup. With that info i'm going to assume you have 4 speakers, 2 in the front doors 2 in the behind the rear passenger headrests. I would take machinehead's advice on going to an altima forum to find the answer to how many speakers you have in your car though. An amp that I'm am currently eying for my specific build is the Alpine MRP-F250, 120 bucks at crutchfeild. I cant find a better deal then that anywhere else as far as price + name brand.

I made a post before you, Squadfer, but because I'm new, it didn't show up yet.

Anyway, I am under the impression that you can't use an amp like that with stock speakers. And I checked the Maxima forums, and I have 4 speakers. But I thought an amp like that will produce too much power and blow up the speakers, or so I've been told.

Get a low power amplifier and use it to power the stock speakers. The easy way to do it is to get an aftermarket wiring harness and run the speaker wire from the amplifier to the aftermarket harness. This way its useable with the stock speakers. If you want to do a full upgrade with speakers all then I would run speaker wire into each door therefore bypassing the stock harness all together.

Easiesy way for you since you didn't mention upgrading speakers is probably going to be a 200x4, or even lower if you can find such an amp, and running the speaker wire into the aftermarket harness.

Aftermarket harness = 18.99
Amplifier for 200x4 ~ should run you about 100-150. (If you can find it)