Thread: amp and sub question

Well yeah, exactly. If you've used audio equipment enough, you'll kind of get an idea of where to set the gains in order to achieve the max power you are looking to get. If you have a head unit that has 4v preouts, you won't want to set the gain too high... 8v preouts and you should be all the way down on the gain. But if you're using a carPC and you have onboard sound, your gains will be much higher up to get to 7,8,or 900w...

There's a more technical way to do this, using a multimeter and test tones to read the voltages, that will allow you to get exactly how much power the amp is pushing.

Also note that some subs can take a fair bit of abuse. I remember walking into a Circuit City and talking to a guy there who I told I was running 600w to a cheap Pioneer sub rated at 200w. He was like "oh well you're gonna blow your sub" and I said, it's been in the car, banging for two years now. When I bought the sub, I had read plenty of reviews of people putting a lot more power on the sub than mfr. ratings and they were fine. My experience was the same.

Each sub is different and music tastes are different. If you play a lot of deep bass all day long, be conservative. If you listen to music that will never hit 50hz on a consistent basis or you simply don't listen to your music very loudly, don't worry so much about the amount of power your amp is giving your subs since chances are they will rarely see full power during music playback.