Battery Drainage! (Car Audio Gurus I Need You!)

[Dale]

That is a bit high, would certainly indicate the regulator to be on it's way out.. though I highly doubt it would be high enough to blow an amp (or anything designed to run in a car, they generally have a reasonable amount of tolerance).

As for the alternator, AFAIK, they have internal regulators. The cheapest thing to do will be to take the alternator off yourself and take it to an auto elecy, they will be able to test it for you (probably for free), which will test the regulator too. Then get them to reco it for you, it should be much cheaper than a new alternator! But of course call somewhere and check for a price on a new item just to be sure, bosch should have something.

[BradW]

What does the voltage do when you rev the engine.
I don't know much about stereo's and amps, but I would think that an amp that is designed for an automotive application wouldn't mind 15v too much.
If the voltage goes up higher (say 18 to 20v) when you rev the engine, then more than likely it is a faulty reg. If it stays around 15v then it could be a feature, not a flaw.

[love ke70]

15V isnt too bad, and its gonna give you better audio. most amps will give you power figures for 12V and 14.1 or sometimes 13.8. which is basically car off and car on.
definitely check it, but expect it to be running around 14 anyway.

on the matter of gains:
your headunit will be sending the signal down the rca's at a certain voltage.
the gain on your amp is how you tell the amp what voltage its recieving.
the higher the voltage its recieving the less the amp will work.
if you set the gain to max (usually 0.3V) then the amp will work hard and amplify the signal quite strongly. the problem with this however is because its amplifying for the wrong signal so the sine curve that is bass note will be too big and the top and bottom doesnt get sent to the speaker, meaning you get a powerful signal that gets chopped mid beat, rather than sweeping around (think of a sine curve and imagine it without the top and bottom curve, this is what happens when you have the gain too high) this causes distortion aka clipping depending on the fequency and extremity of the situation.
to have the gain to a higher voltage than what the HU provides simply means you arnt getting the most from your system.

to tune this the HU manual should tell you RCA voltage it puts out, and the gain on an amp will either have the two extremes number and you just estimate where it should be, or if it just says max and min then the book should tell what range it covers.

or something like that, lol

do not ever ever ever set your gain to maximum just to get more volume, if you do you will be banished to silly person-dom for all of eternity

[EldarO]

Why would running the gains on the amplifier at full make it sound any better? The quieter you have the sound source, the lower signal to noise ratio in everything leading up to the amp.

EldarO if you agree that running signal and power wires together is a nono because of worse interference, all that turning up the gain is doing is making that interference (thats getting into the signal leads) louder! Think of this, you have no music playing, but the amplifier is on and the gain is set to 0 (assuming it can be turned to 0). How much interference can you hear? None. Set it to 3, you can hear some buzzing but it's not very loud. Now turn it to 10, it sounds twice as loud. Lets say with your head units volume at max, the speakers running off the amplifier are pushing distortion with the gain set to 5... why would you run the amp at 10? you would have louder interference, run the risk of someone with no ability to perceive distortion ruin your system, and have bigger steps between levels of attenuation (assuming your cd player has a digital volume control... which is does).

theres no intererance i can hear, you have to remember, the idea of doing this was to get big bass, and by big bass i mean BIGGGG BASS, my mate can set his dads car alarm off.

you also need to rtealise that the interferance, or "Buzzing" is only present in the subs, the rest of the speakers are fine, also, the car is a silvia, and due to the boot being such a small area, the buzzing really cant be heard unless you strain, and its non existant at anything above 5 or so on the volume dial, which is equivalant to about 8% volume.

ill say it again, this is how we got big bass from my mates system.

i dont want to argue or have to justify why this is the way we did it, next time ill just shut the f%$k up.

Eldar.O.