Will "sub level" affect amp gain

Sounds like it's damaged. If it's under warranty take it back to the shop you got it at or send it in for repair.

 

I will be sending it back today. I am more or less just trying to get an idea as to what happened to make sure I didn't do anything incorrectly. But given all of the details I mentioned I have pretty much concluded that it is just faulty.

 

Only thing that I could think of that you could have done would be if you wired the sub to present the wrong load, i.e., wired to a 2 ohm load as opposed to a 4 ohm minimum load that the amp supports in bridged mode.

 

Yeah but that amp is two ohm stable or so they say. It's just odd because the amp never heated up to the touch. I will say at one time when it shut off I smelled that burning amp smell and just new I had fried it but sure enough after some waiting and a little tap to the amp it started working again.

 

Well, gotta tell you, I was running a 4 channel amp, RF, at one time with the front channels going to door speakers and the back channels bridged to a sub. According to the docs it was 2 ohm stable and I wired it that way and the sub would go into a "death-beat". Turn out the amp was not 2 ohm stable in bridged mono mode. Wiring to 4 ohms worked fine with this amp.

Just fyi....

 

Yeah thanks. I measured it and it was like 1.92 ohms or something. I tried running it at 8 ohms (DVC) but didn't like the sound so I put it back. If the new one has trouble I will just sell it and get a different model. This is the first time I have had trouble out of kicker products. I will say I bought this amp from an online company selling kicker refurbished amps so there may be a higher failure rate in this stuff. I guess I got what I paid for.

 

Two ohms bridged is the equivalent of one ohm in stereo. The amp can not do that.

Also, the sound of a sub wired at 8 Ohms is exactly the same as 2 Ohms. You'll have less power available (in theory) but more headroom. In the real world, you just turn the gain up a tad and you'll never know the difference.

 

It is not a one ohm load. It is a DVC 4ohm woofer wired in parallel. That would be a two ohm load. I agree with you about the "sound" being the same; bass is bass. I just meant that it did not have as much power driving the woofer so it wasn't as powerful a sound. I would prefer to keep the gains lower anyways and would rather use the full amount of power the amp is capable of. Although if the new amp I get does the same that may mean getting another amp.

 

Yes, it is a two ohm load but when bridged drives half of the output. That's why you get more power when you bridge an amp. So while technically it is a two ohm load each channel sees half of that.

The point of the gain control is to make sure everything clips at the same time. Keeping it low doesn't or turning it up doesn't hurt anything. You're simply matching levels. Using an 8-ohm load with the gain up a bit is exactly the same as running a 4-ohm load with the gain down except the 8-ohm load will have more headroom. It also won't keep you from making full power. Again, the point of the gain control.

Your new amp, unless it's a very high end model, will not run a 2-ohm bridged load either. If you want to make sure, download and read the manual for the amp you're considering. Notice, ALL amps will not be able to drive the same load bridged as in stereo.

 

This is a class D one channel mono amp. It can take the ohm load it is seeing. If the gain is set higher on an amp that will introduce more noise or hiss into the system.

 

My apologies. I originally read is as a 400.2. The amp should have been fine with the load it was presented.

Raising the gain, however, would not have caused any noise because it's driving a sub. Even an amp powering your main speakers, unless is damaged or poorly designed, should not introduce noise when the gain is turned up.

 

So I received the new amp and set the gains and everything works correctly. This being the first ported box I have ever used though it definitely sounds a little different than a sealed enclosure. The internal volume is 1.6 which falls right in the middle of kickers specs. This may be a dumb question but is there any way to tell what frequency the port is tuned at? I am still running all the eq's flat and boosts off but there seems to be an "off" spot in the bass to mid transition. Any thoughts?

 

If it is a pre-fab box, its probably upper 40s to low 50s. You can figure it out by measuring and using a box calculator.

 

Yes it is pre-fab. I had heard talk of lining the walls with the poly batting material to dampen the sound a little. It almost sounds kind of "resonant" for lack of a better term.

 

It probably IS resonance. Could be from wall flex but more likely, being pre-fab, is that is a high-gain tune which will do this. Makes it more efficient but Alamo makes it peaky. Try reversing the polarity just for grins. Where do you have it and the mids crossed at (freq. and slope)?

 

Well until this morning I had the HU HPF set to 125 to try to keep the lows out of the 3.5" speakers I had in the rear pillar but decided I didn't like the rear fill sound so I pulled them out. I am just going to run some components up front off the HU until I can get another amp and get it installed. The Alpines I have in the door now are very soft sounding so I am switching to some kicker components as I have always like them.

I will say that by lowering the LPF on the HU for the sub to 80hz as well as lowering the filter on the amp it does sound better. I should be able to really get it dialed in when the new components arrive though.

 

Does your new amp have a subsonic filter? If so I would highly recommend using it. Also, if you want to know what the enclosure is tuned to I need the interior volume in internal dimensions as well as the port size and length.

 

OK. I will see if I can get those measurements and let you figure it up for me. It does have a subsonic filter as well. It is not adjustable though; just always on.