Speaker Replacement

A lot of people are skeptical of changing their own speakers, and instead go and play hundreds of dollars to have a car audio shop do it. Well i'm here to tell you that it's not as hard as it seems! The only background information you need would be how to remove your door panels. You don't know how? LOOK IT UP! After that it's a matter of matching the size of your stock speakers with your new ones. The last relatively difficult part is connecting the speakers. To do that, you have to cut your stock speaker wires, strip them about half an inch and splice on your connectors.

Crutchfield.com does a wonderful job of supplying you with everything you need (tools and information) to replace speakers and other stereo components in your car!

http://www.crutchfield.com/S-lOWWwHv8uMD/

Choosing a Box for your Subwoofer

When choosing a box for your sub/subs, there's a couple of things your going to want to consider. The first obvious thing is buying for your right size of subwoofer. Subwoofers usually come in either 8, 10, 12, or even 15 inches. So you'll want to choose a box with the correct cutout diameter. Subs also require a certain amount of volume in the box. Given the right amount of volume will ensue that the sub will sound it's best. For example, if you were to put a high performance subwoofer in a box with less volume than it requires, chances are you'll destroy the box as well as the sub.

If your looking at purchasing a box for your subwoofer, look towards A-Trend enclosures. They have a wide variety of boxes to fit the needs of your system!

http://www.atrendusa.com/

Looking to buy a subwoofer?

For anyone considering buying a subwoofer, DD Audio delivers! These subs are unbelievable! I just recently installed one of their 1500 series woofers, and i'm everything but disappointed. When put into comparison with my previous JL Audio High Output sub and enclosure, it's not even fair. I would recommend these subs to anyone who likes bass, cause there's a lot of it!

The Digital Designs Subwoofer:

http://www.ddaudio.com/products/mobile-audio/woofers/1500-series.aspx

My old JL setup:

http://www.jlaudio.com/ho112rg-w3v3-car-audio-h-o-wedge-subwoofer-systems-93136

DD Subwoofer Wiring

This will be a brief post showing how I wired my new Digital Designs subwoofer. The sub is a dual voice coil 4 ohm. As you can see in the photo above, I wired it in parallel dropping the impedance to 2 ohms. DD subs also come with direct connections, meaning that instead of having terminals, it has wires that come directly out from the sub (the red and brown wires). I used the wire nuts (included with the sub) to connect my wires. From there I used some of my own speaker wire to connect the wires to my box.

Subwoofer Wiring

Subwoofer wiring is a VERY VERY important part of subwoofer installation. First of all, subwoofers either come in a single or dual voice coil (meaning it has one set of connectors or two). There two ways to wire a sub. Either in parrallel or in series. Parallel is connecting positive to positive and series would be going positve to negative.

Wiring your sub/subs in parralell will lower the ohm impedance while wiring in series will raise the impedance. In the picture above (referring to the JL W3v2, dual voice coil sub), you can see how wiring differently effects the final impedance. D6, D4, and D2 means 6, 4, or 2, dual voice coil subs. It's very important to know exactly how many ohms your subs are running at to ensure you give them the correct amount of power.

A Buyer's Guild for Subwoofer Amplifiers

When buying a Amplifier for your subwoofer there's a couple things you might want to take into consideration. The first being how many subs are you running? If your running one, or even two you subs, a mono block amplifier is always a good choice. However 2 channel amps could be more convenient with 2 subs. Next thing is to match the independence level (Ohms) and watts that the sub is rated for with your amp. To avoid any possible damage to your amp, you should give your subs more power than they need. For example, if you have a sub that is rated for 500W RMS @ 2 Ohms, then it would be a good idea to have an amp that can run AT LEAST 500W RMS if not more @ 2 Ohms. However, I have friends that under power their subs and the amps have done just fine, but as soon as you turn up your gain to far trying to make up for less power is when you'll start running into problems.

Car Stereo Issues

Throughout my days of working with car stereos i've been faced with many "Technical Difficulties". This post will consist of a lot of those issues we came across, as well as how we overcame them. Over time I will continue to update this page, considering I will be checking with the friends that were faced with difficulties to clarify stories.

To start this off I would like to bring up my most recent issue. My sub would cut out only when I accelerated, and play when I was stopped. After fair amount of research I came across a lot of talk about bad RCA cables, and bad grounds. So the first thing I did was replace this sketchy ground wire on my capacitor. I was upset when this didn't solve the problem.. The only thing left was to check my RCA cables. Turns out the cables were slowly getting pulled away as I accelerated, eventually disconnecting them... Easy fix I guess :)