Hey all I just bought a 4-channel pioneer premere amp. Question is, how do I hook it up to the headunit. I have all the power and ground and stuff hooked up. I want an easy solution. Do I just plug in the RCAs and call it that, or do I run wires through the amplifier to the back of the head unit and splice them into the speaker wire? Also, what is this speaker level input stuff? It looks like a little plug with a bunch of wires coming off of it? Do I need that? Thanks all....so confused!!
you have to run rcas from the rear of the deck to the amp, you need eith 2 sets of rcas or 1 setr and 2 sets of y adapters(depends on rca outputs on radio), then you need to run speaker wire from all channels on amp to the speaker leads behind the radio(unhook from radio harness and attach the wire you ran to the wires you unhooked from the radio, you should have 4 wires from amp to behind the radio. That is the simplest and quickest way to run them. ****this is providing your car has no factory amp, if so you have to disconnect/or cut speaker leads going into the amp in the car.
do u have an after market HU or a stock one? if u have an after market HU then it probably has rca jacks comin out of the back of it. in that case u just run rca's from amp to HU. did u run your remote turn on wire also?
if you use stock, you need a line out converter, and then tun the remote to switched power at fuse block, if aftermarket use rcas to rear and radio has a blue or blue white. for remote turn on.
u have to get y adaptors like ty said, 4 ch amps have to rca inputs. its up to u how u want to run ur speaker wire. u could go from amp to speakers, through doors and stuff, but if they are running off of the stock wires right now, then wut ty said about running wire from amp to the back of the HU where the original speaker wires are will work.
personally i got rid of the stock wire cuz i put in new speakers in my dash (94 chevy silverado) and i just ran new 14 guage wire from my amp to the speakers under the carpet, up the dash, and straight to the speakers.
I was told by a couple installers to simply run the wires from the back of the amp and splice them into the back of the head unit. So say, for left front I would have one wire extra going for positve connection and one for the negative. So in essence all the speakers had 3 wires spliced together from behind the headunit.
I hooked up my 1 set of RCA's to the back of the head unit then to the amp. When I turned it on the rear speakers worked and were amplified and sounded awesome. The fronts did not work at all. I put it in 2 channel mode and now they all worked fine for some reason. I turned down all gain and everything to just about bare minimum, when I hit 20 for volume on the cd player you heard 4 loud pops and it just stopped working. Returned the amp and everything. Turns out that I must of somehow fried the interal amp of the cd player or something, cuz I put the factory one back in and it works perfectly fine. Hmmm.....maybe next time I wont attempt to do it myself.
Anywho, whats the best brand of cd players (most rms watts per channel?) Pioneer with 22?
Or, was it just supposed to go from the amp to the speaker wire behind the head unit (unconnect the speaker wire from the cd player to the speakesr, so in essence that is just kind of lying there) and use the rca's for the signal?
the wires from amp should never have been hooked up to radio. the wires from amp are hooked up to the wires that you should have disconnected from radio(speaker leads) on the cars harness....
im in the motion of installing my 4 channel amp, ive got it all done in the bak of the HU, ive got one set of RCA leads comming for that into 2 sets of y leads in the amp, i keep getting a buzzing noise over the sound.... HELP!!!