Quote:
Originally Posted by punked44212
first of all i really dont know much about this stuff. I need to know what olms are, the settings for them, how to bridge, what channels are( if i had a amp that was 200watts by 4 channel does that mean i could hook 4 speakers up to it and get 800 watts total) i dont understand what it means. what is a crossover? could somebody please explain this to me.
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Ohms is the measurment of resistance. Most amplifiers are capbable of running at different resistances, or impedences (another name for resistance). Depending on the subwoofer, the voice coil can be wired at different impedences. This resistance is called a "load". Placing different loads on an amplifier determines how much power the amplifier will put out. For exapmle, there are amps that produce 1000 watts at 1 ohm. What this means is that if you wire a sub to 1 ohm (whether or not you can do this depends on the voice coil configuration of the sub you have) you can expect to get 1000 watts out of the amp. If you wire a sub to 2 ohm on that same amp then the amp sees more resistance, or impedence, and will not pass as much power to the sub. The same 1000 watt @ 1 ohm amp might only pass 500 watts at 2 ohm. And 250 if you place a 4 ohm sub to it. Depending on the amp, you may be able to run it below rated impedence. Meaning that just because an amp says it 1 or 2 ohm stable doesn't mean that it will hurt if you run it at .5 or 1 ohm (don't try this with just any amp, always research before you run below rated impedence). If you do this, expect more watts than what is printed. But also expect the amp to draw more current from the cars electrical system.
Briding an amp means wiring two channels together. Basically if you have a 2 channel amp, it means wiring channel 1 positive and channel 2 negative to the same sub. Different amps are bridged differently and could be Channel 1 neg and Channel 2 pos. Remember though that a bridged channel is usually stable at twice the impedence of a single channel. Meaning that if a 2 channel amp puts out 500 watts from each channel at 2 ohms then bridged, it will be 1000 watts @ 4 ohms.
The amount of power from each channel depends on the amp and what "load" is hooked up to it. First and foremost, forget about "MAX POWER". Max power is and imaginary number that companies place on amps to sell them. RMS or Continuous power is what you should look for. If an amp says 200 RMS x 4 then yes, it's 200 watts from each of 4 channels for a total of 800 watts.
A crossover is basically a series of components that allows a certain frequency range to play in a certain speaker. A crossover is typically used on a 2+ way speaker setup to prevent certain freqs from playing in the wrong speaker and keep others where they belong. If you were to hook a CD player up to a single speaker then all frequencies of a particular song would play through that speaker. But if you use two speakers with a crossover, you could have one playing from 150 Hz to 500 Hz and another playing from 500 Hz to 5000 Hz (hertz = measurement of frequency). This esentially makes each individual speaker concentrate on less freqs and by doing this, if creates a better sound.
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