New member, and novice at car audio, I've done all my installs thus far but head units and sub amps are pretty straight forward. So I bought a kicker KX300.4 to power my kicker R6C comps; along with the fact that the Eclipse HU I just bought (cd8053) is unpowered is leading me into uncharted territory. So... 1. How should the wiring setup be for best performance given the material (ie straight front/back), and is anything special required to run at 2ohms (Need at least 75w)? 2. Does the speaker wire run directly from amp to speakers, or from amp to harness where you splice into the existing Speaker connection. 3. If direct anyone ever run on a 03 Civic SI could use some helpful tips on getting to everything 4. Unrelated but my sub amp is currently bridged but I'd like to try running it at half ohm its a Soundstream Reference 700s, supposedly half ohm stable, how would I accomplish this.
Thanks for all your help I tried to make the questions specific as possible...
1. How are you planning to use the amp? Are you bridging it to the components? Or do you have 2 pairs of them?? To get an amp to operate at 2 ohms you either have to have 2 ohm speakers - which you don't, or have a pair of 4 ohm speakers wired to each channel of the amp, but then the speakers split the power so each one recieves the same amount of power as they would running individually w/the amp seeing 4 ohms. Not sure, but at this point it sounds like you may be stuck with 4 ohm power unless you plan to bridge the amp which would give you 150w per side.
2. since factory wiring is generally on the cheap side most everyone will run new wire for their upgrades. Plus if you go from amp into existing wiring you're probably going to be adding a few un-needed feet of wire which should be avoided if possible.
3. No experience in a civic.
4. Couldn't find any info on the 700s, but 1/2 ohm is not something routinely done. It requires either multiple speakers or a DVC 1 speaker which would be quite rare. With 2 speakers you'd need dvc 2's, and with 4 speakers you could do it with dvc 4's.
I wasnt planning to bridge the amp only have one, and for the components I'd really perfer stereo sound heh... Running new components up front and factory in the rear, hmm sounds bad for me as I was hoping to get more than 35w per channel in fact I'm not even sure if thats enough. Looks like I bought the wrong amp. I could bridge it and just run the front speakers I suppose being the HU is unpowered I wouldnt have anything going to the rear.
You can bridge an amp and still have stereo sound.
Instead of running the front left and right pre-amps to channel 1 and 2 with the rear left and right to channel 3 and 4 -- you run the f and r left to 1/2 and f/r right to 3/4 - or just use y cables on the fronts to input into all 4.
Actually, bridging a 4ch amp for components is a cost effective way to get plenty of power to them. It's unfortunate you'd lose your rear fill by doing it.