Hello ALL: I have always wondered about what actually drops the ohms down on an amp and to what extent. I understand how the wiring of your subs has a bearing on inpedence but what about at the bridge? Example...If I wire two 4-ohm speakers in parallel I get a 2-ohm load. When I hook up the speakers to using the bridge of my amp (rated at 400x1@4ohms) does the "bridging factor" actually drop the inpedence down more (I thought that a bridge sees half of the speaker load, regardless of how wired) because then you would have a 1ohm load. That is how I had my last pair of subs hooked up, and even though the amp never blew, if this is the case, I really dont want to run a 1-ohm load to my amp. I know this might be a silly question, but it has always confused me, and since I am in the market for some new subs, I need to know if I need two, four ohm speakers or two eight ohm speakers, because I dont want to go below two ohms, and I certainly dont want to commit the sin of wiring the subs in stereo..ohhhhh....Any feedback would be great!
yes.. if you bridged to a 2ohm load the amp would see a 1ohm load. is it a 2 channel amp or a single channel? you say its 400x1 so that leads me to believe its a monoblock.. therefore you can just run 2 4ohm subs to a 2ohm load on the amp directly. if its a 2 channel amp and you want to bridge it. Wire them to an 8 ohm load and bridge it so the amp would see a 4ohm load bridged.
Thanks Dave. No its a two channel amp. The specs are 150x2 @ 4ohms and bridged it is 400x1@4ohms. Looks like I was running a 1ohm load before. Suprised it didnt melt. I will look for some 8ohm speakers or some DVC4ohm. Thanks again
well running at at 1 ohm you were prolly clipping the amp But I am surprised that it never fried....what amp is this??
could you please explain how this works? If this is true then how is it possible to run it at 1 ohm? I really wanna know what you mean by this because this is how I think I fried my old amp and I don't want to fry another one. [edit] OK I reread it and I think i understand it. If you bridge the amp to 2 ohm it will see it at 1 ohm, but if you just ran it non-bridged at 2 ohm it would then see it at 2 ohms?[/edit]
i believe each channel see's half the load. 2ohm mono would be the same power output as 1 ohm stereo.
The amp is an AutotekSS400.2. Nothing Special. I dont even think they make them anymore. I purchased it in 2001 for 250bucks. I was looking for a cheap bass amp that was comparable to (at the time) the big dogs such as Rockford(are they as good as they used to be??) Kicker, JBL, JL Audio, and MTX. All were very popular for sub amps, but very expensive back then. I went with the Autotek since it was half the price and from the reviews it delivered 400watts (bridged) that was clean, unlike some cheapo amps that promised you 1000watts (which is way to much unless you doing shows) and only delivered a fraction of that clean such as Pyramid and flea market amps. I am suprised it didnt clip or melt either, yet I never turned it up more then halfway since I had two JL Audio 15's, and it really was to much my ears and my chest.
I own an older Autotek Stealth Series Amp. It will handle a 2-ohn load mono. The Autoteks were extremely durable and super tough amps. Almost impossible to destroy. The SS series were also strong, but no more 1-ohm loads. They went down hill a couple of years later.
