right now I have them running off of my Cobalt 200.4 amp. People have been telling me I'm underpowering the subs and the last thing I want to do is blow them. They're DVC subs rated at 4ohms. Right now I have my rear channels bridged and the subs are wired in paralell. Wred like this, how many ohms should they be? I guess what I'm trying to ask is how many watts at how many ohms do I need to sufficiently power these subs. I was looking at a JL 500/1 and keep the box wired the way it is, and an MTX 300/2 and wire the subs seperately but the ohms thing is confusing me since I'm new to this stuff. Any help is appreciated. Thanx.

 

oops, sorry. the box is wired in series, but each sub inside the box is wired in an 8 ohm load. So what is the total resistance of the setup? I'd like to get at least 250-300 watts RMS to the speakers. What do you recommend?

 

if you have two 4 ohm dvc subs you're probably running a 4 ohm load with a parallel/series wiring configuration. You could run parallel/parallel and have a 1 ohm load but i think your 4 channel amp would have blown up by now if you had that.

the fact that your subs arent getting enough power isnt what will hurt them. Its when you jack up the gains on your amp way too high and clip the signal.

the subs are rated at 250 wrms each...most orions can take quite a bit more than they are rated at but just to be safe i think you'll want about 600 watts going to the pair. You'll probably have better luck wiring them to a 1 ohm load as it will be easier finding an amp that pushes 600 watts at 1 ohm. The JL amp is only stable down to 1.5 ohms (it could probably run at 1 ohm just fine but why take the chance). There are many good deals on amps with the specs you need.
JBL 600.1 $180 from ebay
autotek 550.2 $195 from ebay
many many others

 

thanks for the help man, youalways come to the rescue. can you walk me through what I need to do to get down to a 1 ohm load?

I was looking at the MTX Thunder940.

235w x 2 at 4 ohms
470w x 2 at 2 ohms
940w x 1 bridged output at 4 ohms.

what do you think?

 

ya that one would do the job, just be careful setting your gains.


http://www.lalena.com/audio/faq/wiring/ diagrams are much easier than explaining the whole wiring sequence. Go about half way down the page on the right side and it says "4 coils in parallel 1 ohm"

 

Thanks for all your help. Just need a couple more things clarified and I'll leave you alone

Right now I have the speakers wired up in the 2 paralell, 2 series fashion, which yields a 4 ohm load. If I had an amp (say 300w x 1 @ 4 ohms), how much power would each sub be getting?

would it be better to run a 300w rms x 2 @ 4 ohms ( 1 channel for each sub) or a 600w rms x 2 x 1 @ 2 ohms (one channel for each sub?)

The cobalt amp I'm running now is rated at 1x250@4 ohms, and if the total impedance of my setup is 4 ohms, are the subs each getting 250w? what would happen if I wired the subs into a 2 ohm load?

 

250w bridged into 4 ohms is 125w per sub.

theoretically you would have roughly 500 watts if you could run the amp at 2 ohm mono, but that isnt happening.


adam

 

when you bridge your subs into one channel it is the same as running one big sub so you would divide the wattage going to it by the number of subs you are using.

getting an amp that puts out 300X2 at 4 ohms wont be too good because you will be running your subs in stereo (they wont both boom at the same time) which doesnt create the desired sound for most people