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First a question though - are you actually getting whine? I didn't see it in your post other than the header. If you are getting whine, and you have run your power and ground like I have, down opposite sides of the car, keeping them as far apart as possible, then next I'd check your grounds. You want all your amps to ground at the same location, and ideally your head unit too, but I have found that to not have an effect, in my car. Also make sure you have scraped all the paint off your grounding point. Or, what you can do is use the rear seat belt anchor bolt as a ground, you'll just need a fairly large ring terminal - I recommend something that won't corrode, like gold or nickel plating. That's where my amps are grounded.
When you say you ran the power wire under the console, are you talking center console? I'd avoid that at all costs, especially since your amps are in the trunk. Run it all the way down the left side door sill, starting at the very front of the driver footwell. Don't come out of there until you get to the middle of the rear seat. Run your RCA cables behind the deck, and then along the front edge of the front right footwell before going into the door sill, but don't run them down the center.
There are a few reasons why your amp could be cutting out. Any halfway decent amp (I think the Legacy's qualify) has at least two kinds of protection circuitry, which are short circuit and thermal. If your woofer shorts or you accidentally connect the output terminals together, you shouldn't hurt it. Also, if you are running it with too low an impedance or with not enough ventilation, it should shut down before any damage is done as a result of the overheating. However, it typically takes longer than 10-15 seconds to overheat, and a shorting problem is generally realized immediately. One possibility is that you simply have a defective amplifier for your sub amp. Try running your subwoofer off either of the other two amplifiers and see if they do the same thing.
It sounds like you have the voice coils connected properly to let your amp behave fine, so I am even more suspicious of that amp. An amp can also sometime have problems due to undervoltage or overvoltage (at the input terminal), but both are highly improbable, especially since your other two amps are working fine. Your woofer will be more efficient when wired in parallel, no doubt about it, by a significant amount. It may just be that wired in series it doesn't compete with the average sub out there. Have you considered running your sub amp in stereo, with one channel to each voice coil?
Also, the 8 gauge wire is a bit small in your case, but I don't think it's the source of your problems. The wire is really only too small depending on your average listening level. I have 8 gauge wire in my car, all the way to the trunk (about 15'), with 275w RMS available from my amp. Sounds like you could have as much as 500w RMS, so ideally I would think 4 gauge is more appropriate. But, if you and I both listen at the same average level, the current draw will be pretty close. What size fuse do you have at your battery?
I'm also curious how you split the wire. If you didn't use a good distribution block, it's possible that is a source of your issues.
Aaron Gilbert
posted by 205.215.216...
, Thu, 27 Feb 2003 18:04:31, Sat, 1 Mar 2003 01:15:37
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