My bro gave me his DB drive 600watt 4 channel which I bridged, anyway I have two 10" CVR's and when I turn up the vol with a killer bass line the amp shuts off. I had a small MTX 200 watt amp that pushed these speakers with no prob then switched out to the DB unit and now Im stumped. We literally disconnected the amp from his Z28 and like less than 5min later we had it installed in my truck. He had 2 12" Memphis Audio subs and they worked fine with same amp just minutes before we swapped it out. any ideas what it might be? The 12v wire from the amp is ran to the Acc. block on the driver side of the truck, and I have a pretty hefty fuse between them so I dont know if that might help. Thanks in advance!!!

 

What size power cable are you running? Any charging issues with the truck? How old is the battery?

 

Is the amp getting to hot and then comeing back on when it cools down?

 

poor ground?? list goes on and on

 

How do you have your sub wired? What's the minimum impedence on the amp and what is the impedence on those CVR's?

If the CVR's are dual 4 ohm voice coils, you can wire each sub to give a final impedence of 2 ohms per sub. Will that db drive push 2 ohms bridged? It may only support 4 ohms bridged. If that's the case, you're pushing beyond the limits of your woofer. I'd suggest selling it and upgrading to a better mono or 2 channel amp.

 

Let me see, first the amp isnt getting hot and cutting off because it will shut off and all I have to do is turn the radio off and back on so the amp will power the subs.

The ground is perfect so no problem there, I am running though a small power wire to the amp. That might be something to check out or upgrade since its relatively cheap to replace. The battery and all the charging system is in perfect working condition, truck has about 32k miles. I had a small MTX 200-300 watt 1 channel amp that I bought for like $120 bucks new, it really sucks that's why I switched.

ramd- you have a pretty good amount of knowledge on stereos so i might say that maybe the amp/subs arent compatible with the ohm stuff you mentioned. The amp is capable of pushing 2 ohms bridged cuz that's how my bro had his Memphis Audio 12'' subs running. He never had any problems with it, and the amp was working fine before we pulled it off his car. The amp was bumping hard like 5 min before we installed it in the truck, so I know its not the amp. Im going to double check the way I bridged the amp and double check the speakers to verify the specs.

Any other ideas before I start taking everything apart?

 

1st: make sure you have your subs wired properly. Maybe your subs are wired down to 1-ohm, instead of 2 ohms (If your 10's are 4ohm dual voice coil, you may have wired them down to 1 ohm, which would cause the amp to be put into safety)

2nd: Check and re-check ALL power connections. Maybe one of your crimps is loose. Maybe the fuse isn't tight enough. Maybe the power wire's insulation is breached somewhere along the line.

3rd: If you have cheap power wire, replace it, completely. You can get a nice wire kit from Wal-mart, or my favorite, www.knukonceptz.com for decent money.

4th: Make sure you properly set your gains: if you didn't reset your gains when pulling the amp from your brother's car, you need to do it. Every car is different.


Check everything and get back to us...

 

Alright, I got the damn thing working the way it should. I messed around with the wiring and the guy that had the speakers before me wired them weird, and a connecter came loose during the process of removing everything. My bro helped me re-wire everything, but we couldnt get the damn thing working with the amp bridged. We tried different configurations but no go, so we ended up using only 2 channels from the amp. Let me tell you the damn thing thumps really hard even though we're using half the amp. Im not a stereo genius or anything so it took us about 2.5hrs trying to work around the damn speaker box and front seats(RCSB). Thanks for the help guys, this was really getting me frustrated.

 

All your amp is doing when it cuts off is going into protection mode. Since you are bridging your amp, wire the subs parallel. The thing that is going to trigger your amp to go off like that is too large of an OHM load on the amp. 4 channel IMO amps are horrible to bridge to 2 subs, unless you are just looking for a small cheap system. If you really want some bang, go with a Memphis Audio 1000x1 mono block Class D amp or something similar. My personal opinion is to keep it simple when you wire up these things. I see a lot of people put out diagrams of OHM loads and they are confusing to people who haven't ever seen it before. Keep the 4-channels for your speakers and wire up a new amp to the subs.

 

I really dont want too much thump, not planning on going into competition so its o.k. for what I need it for. If i ever want to get some major bass I'll keep in mind what you mentioned about the mono block D amp. In the mean time im pretty happy with it.

Oh BTW I used the ohm diagrams to try and wire up the speakers, boy did I have a hell of a time figuring out what went where...LOL!!!