StrikerNo9

My passenger door speaker sounds blown. Ok, no problem. I thought it would be easy to just replace the front speakers powered by the HU and add a sub for some bottom fill. I have an Alpine mono amp and a Kicker S8L7 sitting in the basement. But since I didn't have the time to devote to doing it myself like back in the old days, I though I'd seek professional help.

Next thing I know, the sales guy (and an installer)wants to tear out all the speakers and thrown in this expensive amp, run it off of the high level speaker leads because , according the the pros, our HUs don't have preouts and it'll all be a hair over $2500 thankyouverymuch. Sticker shock I guess, but I also felt that they were feeding me a line. I did understand the need to go with an amp for the new speakers, but they gave me a bad feeling. There are so few shops near me, but I'll try another before giving in.

Research on the forum has got me to almost want to attempt it myself. I realize it is a lot of work rewiring all the speakers and mounting amps etc. I have found some Alpine 4 ch. amps that I could use with the famous Blau Adapter (and maybe that neat Zapco Symbilink if I can find it). Daisy chain the mono amp to it and throw in the speakers. If I can only convince the wife now...

DJ_JonnyV

As quoted from Adam Sandler's movie The Waterboy. I was in the exact same situation as you at the beginning of the year. Had a few blown speakers in my A6, and even though I got them replaced under ext. warranty, it still sounded like crap. Dug into it, and figured I'd give it the old college try. You do need a lot of patience and the right tools to do it. Yes, and I'll state this again, a lot of custom shops (in my area) want to sell you the farm and wouldn't even use the pre-outs on the H/U. I'm not taking a shot at Avincar by no means, as it sounds like he is definitely an exception to what's around St. Louis. If you haven't already, check out the link in my sig for my install.

Pelican Pete

All electronics have a "sweet spot" where they operate most effeciently and sound best. And if you run them outside that sweet spot, the quality will vary.

THe PG had a very limited range of input voltages. If I ran the HU too hot, it would overload the PG input stage, even when I turned down the input gain on the amp. If I ran the HU down, but cranked up the gain on the amp, it would just amplify the system noise. I could never get that amplifier to sound quite right, even with months of tweaking the gains.

By contrast, the Alpine has a much more forgiving input stage, and works quite nicely with the factory HU. It has a larger "sweet spot" so to speak, and the factory HU falls within that range.

The PG amp would probably work very well with an aftermarket HU which outputs a higher voltage -- which the amp wants to see. Then both units would be operating in their sweet spots.

--P.

Pelican Pete

To me, "bad" means it was broken. It worked just fine. It was just a crappy design. Rather, a limited design, which in my installation yielded crappy results. ;-)

-- P.


By the way, I still have that PG amp. I will not sell it to anyone on AW. I figure I'll reinstall it into the car when I eventually sell it, and hold on to the Alpine. (The installation is too far gone to restore the factory system to its original state.)

StrikerNo9

It is probably one of the most in-depth posts I have ever read and should be permanantly archived in the tech articles. I have it bookmarked now and plan to read it over ten times. I just acquired a Blau adapter from ebay and almost won an Alpine amp. I may just give it the old college try!

avincar

Where are you geographically - maybe I know someone.

StrikerNo9

I pulled the radio yesterday to look behind it. Is there room for any of the symbilink stuff back there? I checked out the slb-tp4 on the zapco website, but it seems kind of large to fit behind the radio. There is also a cable transmitter sldin.t-f? would two of those work instead of a tp4? then i would need the slbr4 to receive the signal and output to my alpines, correct?

thanks for your help

DJ_JonnyV

Just send me an e-mail with any questions...more than happy to help out

avincar

There is usually room for the Zapco SLB F unit that comes in the CDC amp box (smaller than the metal-cased unit on the Symbilink page).

StrikerNo9

<center><img src="http://www.zapco.com/images/Cables_Small/SLDIN-T.F.jpg"></center><p>There is no mention of a SLB F unit. Only the TPs the Rs and the U pieces. Do you mean the SLDIN- TF shown here?