Ok this is stupid but i was curious if its possible to hook front and rear speakers to a 2 channel amp i know i wont get a stereo effect, im just curious if they will run ok, like not blow up if ran together?
yes it will be ok but it will sound like crap as you are already figuring. but hey who cares its always fun working on anything related to your car!
can anyone else answer this too?
Well i had all my speakers running off two channels of a 4 ch amp and it sounded good to me. My front speakers have always drounded out the rears so you never heard them.
it'll work u just gotta hook em up in parallel or series...make sure ur amp can handle the load, all automotive speakers i have seen are 4 ohm...so make sure its either 2 or 8 ohm stable...
wysiwyg wrote:i would say they bang, they don't really pound so much. but if
you want to bump, then they will bump and hit real hard and a lot good. 
LOL
If your 2 channel amp is 2 ohm stereo stable, then you'll be fine. Make sure the speakers are 4 ohms each.
julian rodriguez wrote:yes it will be ok but it will sound like crap as you are already figuring.
It'll sound the same quality-wise as if you used a four channel amp,no worse, no better. You just won't have the fade ability anymore.
-Chris
I have a set of Infinity Kappa components and a set of Infinity Kappa coaxials, wired in parallel, running off a Rockford Fosgate Punch 60. No problems.
As people said, make sure your amp can handle it.
Dude watch how you wire it because you don't want to change impedence (ohmage).
2 Channel and 4 Channel amps will not handle ohmage changes well. I honstly wouldn't recommend doing that anyways. Your going to get better sound if you stage your speakers properly in the front and only run two of em off an amp. If your have subs to be honest rear speakers aren't going to do much for you anyways.
Just ot clear up a slight misconception, you WILL get stereo sound with four speakers hooked into one amp. Stereo is in two channels ONLY! All music is recorded in two channels NO MORE. The only and I mean ONLY way to have more than two channel sound is to hvae a Dolby Digital Pro Logic processor either built into your amp or as a seperate unit.
If you take your basic home theatre system for example. Unless it is using prologic you are NOT getting surround sound. Your getting a "Simulated Surround sound". All your processor is doing at that point is recreating the left and right front channels in the rear so you have sound coming from all directions. The only way to have each speaker play something unique is to use DTS. This system is actually recorded in 5 channels (yes with five different microphones) and the only place to find this is on DVD's. No other format will play True Surround Sound.
With that in mind I would suggest scrapping the two rear speakers (or front if you have four in front) and only using 2. Your going to get a better signal to your speakers which means better sound quality and clarity. It'll go a bit louder too and it will put less strain on the amp trying to pump our more power to your speakers.
Hope some of this gives you a litle more insight into car stereos.
So to recap, in my opinion I would only go with two speakers for the better sound, just make sure you stage them properly in your car and you won't even notice there's only two!
if your amp is 2ohm stable in stereo wire the speakers together no problem if its not still know problem just take the + from the amp hook it to the + on your first speaker than take the - from that speaker and hook it to the + on the next speaker than hook the - from that speaker back to the - on the amp and your good to go just repeat the steps on the other channel this way your amp is still drawing a 4ohm load so the amp will be fine u can wire as many speakers as u want this way because your dividing the amps power instead of multiplying its load and making it produce more power. it will sound just fine and it will be in stereo just no fade if u have the speaker why not use them.
Rowdi wrote:Dude watch how you wire it because you don't want to change impedence (ohmage).
2 Channel and 4 Channel amps will not handle ohmage changes well. I honstly wouldn't recommend doing that anyways. Your going to get better sound if you stage your speakers properly in the front and only run two of em off an amp. If your have subs to be honest rear speakers aren't going to do much for you anyways.
Just ot clear up a slight misconception, you WILL get stereo sound with four speakers hooked into one amp. Stereo is in two channels ONLY! All music is recorded in two channels NO MORE. The only and I mean ONLY way to have more than two channel sound is to hvae a Dolby Digital Pro Logic processor either built into your amp or as a seperate unit.
Something about that doesnt sound quite right...i was drivin around with my front speakers unhooked (hookin up an amp to the front ones, finally
) and the back was missing the sound that the front ones would be putting out...like certain guitar noises and @!#$ and when i was playin kottonmouth kings, the little sounds that are in the background and @!#$ wernt comin through at all...but when i got my amp all installed and everything, it god the missing sounds back ..
wysiwyg wrote:i would say they bang, they don't really pound so much. but if
you want to bump, then they will bump and hit real hard and a lot good.
LOL
Chris H:
That's partly right.... Sounds to me like you may have had your head unit staged for your front speakers OR your crossover (EQ) on the deck may have just been recreating certain frequencies in the back. Hard to say without seeing your system but if I could show you in my car what would happen with mine is when you fade the sound from the front to the back you will hear the same sound in the back but of course because the speakers are different sizes some of the audio will sound different, BUT you will not lose anything if you fade to the front. The front speakers play all your sound unless you have a crossover, or eq wired up to cut our certain frequencies on those speakers.
So basically when you listening to music in your car and you have what you described happen, your still only listening to the same two channels but some frequencies inteh rear may be different.
A good way to demonstrate this (if you have a dvd player that can support this) is to listen to a movie in Dolby Digital Surround. you'll notice that if a helicopter flew over you from your rear right to your front left, you would only notice the sound move from back to front. Both speakers in the rear would play the same sound and it would just fade from front to back. When you switch to DTS, you'll notice the helicopters sound will move from the rear right speaker to your rear left speaker to your front left speaker creating the illusion that the helicopter is flying over top of you. Yes the only way to achieve this kind of sound is with DTS. Lots of people thing Surround sound does that but it does NOT. Not even Pro Logic 5.0 will do it without DTS.
What I was getting at though is that You only really need two speakers in your car unless you want to cater to people in the back seat or listen to surround sound movies.. Unless you mount speakers either high up in the back seat pointing towards you or have speakers mounted in the seats themselves pointing towards you, your really not missing anything when you have a properly staged sound system. Hmm it's really hard to demonstrate unless you know someone who has a system like this or if you can get to my little town in northwester ontario haha.
Basically what I had set up in the sound room of the car audio store was a car chassis with all the speakers wired and staged properly to perform at thier best. I did this to demonstrate the simple fact that when your front are staged correctly, whenever the rear speakers are faded out (With subs! This does't hold true to people without subwoofers) you don't notice teh loss of the rear speakers. And I have yet to have a customer or person listen to my system or the one in the sound room and tell me they noticed a loss of sound.
Everyone does hear things different though and every vehicle is different.
ohmage
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