Auto Fixit Dude - Keep Your Car Alive

Planning to upgrade your car music setup? Looking for something to improve on that tinny little AM/FM radio sleeping in the dash, with the pathetic little “woofers” in the dash and door panels? Installing a new sound system doesn’t have to be the electrical equivalent of brain surgery. The process can actually be pretty easy, if you follow a few basic steps. In order, these are Input, Amperage, Output, and Wiring. If you get I.A.O.W firmly in mind, car sound system success can be yours.

Input: This is where the sound comes from. Input can be a radio, a CD player, or, if you’re feeling retro, an old school tape player.

Amperage: Amperage is power—the power to make big speakers excel. Amplifiers are designed to take input and boost its power so that it can really be heard.

Output: Output means speakers; in most cases, big subwoofers speakers that deliver max bass response that rumble the sidewalk. We’ll get back to this all important area in few sentences, but right now, let’s hit the last part of the I.A.O.W. equation—wiring.

Wiring: Wiring is the glue that holds the whole set-up together. You need wires to get the input to the amplifier. You need wires to get the amplified input out to the speakers.

Back to Output: Speaker output is measured in terms of a magical value called RMS. In its original, physics-based meaning, RMS stands for Root Mean Square, which is a way of describing how much electrical energy can be delivered through a system. While physics geeks are constantly complaining that we audiophiles misuse the term RMS, you don’t need to be Steven Hawking to understand that in audio terms, RMS is the rating of how much raw power your amplifier can pump through a given speaker. Too much power (too high an RMS output) and your nice subwoofers speakers might well blow out like a cheap piñata in a windstorm.

RMS is rated in one of two ways. Continuous RMS is a rating of the average level of power that will be delivered through the speakers. Continuous RMS is good if you plan to not max the speakers or turn them up all the way. The second rating method is peak RMS. This is a rating of how much the speaker can take in only very short bursts of power. Peak RMS is usually twice that of continuous RMS—but this means that if you plan to push your speakers at high levels (and if you’re like most of us, you do), or employ capacitors to boost those subwoofers speakers to the max, you’ll blow them out in the blink of an eye. So remember when matching speakers to the power of your amp to use the continuous RMS rating just to be safe. Amplifiers are usually rated in peak RMS, so as long as you match them with a lower or equal continuous RMS speaker, you’ll avoid distortion, blowout, or clipping. And that’s the best way to go.

Remember: as long as you keep I.A.O.W in mind, boosting your sound system with new subwoofers speakers can be as simple as installing new rims or tires. Go for it!

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