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Is it possible to use a car amplifier for home use?

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unclesam93

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I have a sony xplod 1100 watt sub that I want to use in my house and the amp for it is a sony xplod 600 watt amp made for use in cars. Can I convert this amp for home use?
 
Sure, why not? You are just going to need a real big as in very high current 12 volt power supply.

Ron
 
So say a power supply for a pc? The thing is though, where is the audio input on the amp, it is normally remote because it goes to the head unit.
 
I doubt a old computer power supply is going to carry it very far the 12 volt outputs are not for highly variable loads and only represent a part of the power supplys actual wattage rating.

Your better choice would be to use a 50+ amp battery charger and a smaller car or deep cycle battery or a big set of capacitors rated to around 1 farad total or so.

As far as turning the amp on a simple switch to supply power to the remote turn on is all thats required.
 
OK, while not a guru at this stuff I can tell you the following. My wife had a 300 watt Alpine system in her last Jeep. The amp was a 300 watt remote amp but clearly had jacks for the audio inputs from the head end. The amp was fused at 50 amps. Running AWG4 copper from the battery to the amp. The amplifier obviously did not draw 50 amps. However, 300 watts / 12 volts = 25 amps. That only means that under full power the amp could draw upwards of 25 amps. You have a 600 watt amp meaning under full power (as in volume maxed) it might draw about 50 amps. If you were to use a PC PSU I would look towards a single 12 volt rail model capable of about 60 amps as in really big! The next problem is a PSU like that delivers the current through a collection of small AWG 16 yellow wires. All of the 12 volt rail wires would need to be paralleled together.

Again, the wife's amp is clearly marked with RCA jacks for the inputs. The Sony manual for your amp should show a connector pinout. The amplifier is just that, it is a stand alone power amplifier. The power it draws will be a direct function of how hard it is driven, it will not draw full power unless it is driven to full power. Will a PC PSU work? Yes, as long as it can support the load.

Maybe someone else will wander along with more thoughts and more familiar with that amp.

Ron
 
I can't say for that particular amp, but it's typical of most of these car amps to be rated in fake watts (some type of "peak music power" watts). The "600W amp" is likely a 12v 100W RMS amp at best. A 12v 10A or 15A PSU would probably be plenty. Anyway in home audio use an actual 20W RMS in music will be unpleasantly loud. Only silly teenagers at parties need more than that... Darn, am I sounding like AudioGuru?? Please shoot me now.
 
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Good point. I assumed true RMS music power or true RMS power not peak power or any of the ******** ways they advertise power. Also I have noticed said same in that 20 watts in an average room is more than I need.... unless the tunes are chasing several good beers. :)

Ron
 
I can't say for that particular amp, but it's typical of most of these car amps to be rated in fake watts (some type of "peak music power" watts). The "600W amp" is likely a 12v 100W RMS amp at best. A 12v 10A or 15A PSU would probably be plenty. Anyway in home audio use an actual 20W RMS in music will be unpleasantly loud. Only silly teenagers at parties need more than that... Darn, am I sounding like AudioGuru?? Please shoot me now.
+1 it's unlikely a person in a home would ever run at more than 10W continuous power as that would blow your ears out. You could use a 12V supply good for maybe 10 - 15A and provide large capacitors near the power amp to supply transients and it should work fine.
 
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Thanks guys, all great input. One more question though, say I have a psu that would go well with this, where is the audio input jack? I'll upload a pic to help .https://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/26/003fmn.jpg/

The 4 RCA jacks labeled front and rear are your inputs.

Anyway in home audio use an actual 20W RMS in music will be unpleasantly loud. Only silly teenagers at parties need more than that... Darn, am I sounding like AudioGuru?? Please shoot me now.

Hey now some of us like the full on movie theater experience of surround sound and having the whole house shake when they blow something up! If I am recalling it right my home theater system pushes around 135 watts @ .1 THD on each of the 4 front speakers and 35 watts @.1 THD on the mid and rear sets.
I have dual 16" sub woofers and dual 12" woofers on the front two channels and yes my living room lights flicker a bit on explosions so there is a lot of watts going some place in my system! :p

If its too loud and the screen is too big you are too old! :D
 
Those amps are often quoted in PMPO

Peak Music Power Output, which is measured between positive and negative peak. That 600 Wat amp output can be divided by 2.8 which is about 214 Watts RMS if you are lucky.

Most often if running at those power levels continuously the thermal overload will kick in.

A 12 V 15 - 20 Amps PSU with some caps or SLA battery should work fine.
 
Good point. I assumed true RMS music power or true RMS power not peak power or any of the ******** ways they advertise power. Also I have noticed said same in that 20 watts in an average room is more than I need.... unless the tunes are chasing several good beers. :)

A 20W amp is FAR too small - it leaves you no headroom, and you're going to be hitting distortion on peaks. Modern speakers tend to sacrifice volume for higher quality (particularly with small speakers), so you tend to require quite large amps, so you have decent headroom.

CD with it's much larger dynamic range has made it even more so.
 
I audio use an actual 20W RMS in music will be unpleasantly loud. Only silly teenagers at parties need more than that... Darn, am I sounding like AudioGuru?? Please shoot me now.

very true.. No one needs 100 watts at home! I still use tda2030a amp with a bridged 2030a for subwoofer and it is plenty for me.. But i can't understand that how to get 1100 watts output using a 12V supply? I mean what kinds of Ic's or powertransistor do they use to get 1100W For a car amp? Or is the 1100w label one of those old business tricks?
 
Home speakers usually produce about 90dB at 1m distance with 1W input. So two speakers for stereo (you can multiply in more speakers for surround sound if you want) produce 93dB. But they are farther away than 1m and might be 4m which reduces the sound level to only 81dB at your ears which is not loud.
If each speaker has 20W then you hear 94dB which is fairly loud. Suddenly the beat of the music tries to produce 104dB which is loud and needs 200W. Sometimes the beat of the music tries to produce 114dB which is very loud and needs 2000W.

High power car amplifiers use a voltage stepup power supply circuit to provide plus and minus 50V (or more) at 5A (or more) to a high power amplifier circuit.
Unless the amplifier is a very efficient class-D switching circuit then it is linear and uses a lot of power supply power to produce heat. A 500W amplifier might produce 300W of heat so needs 800W from its power supply.

Here is an amplifier that produces 1500 real Watts into 4 ohms. It has 18 output transistors. Its power supply is plus and minus 135VDC at very high current: **broken link removed**
 

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very true.. No one needs 100 watts at home! I still use tda2030a amp with a bridged 2030a for subwoofer and it is plenty for me.. But i can't understand that how to get 1100 watts output using a 12V supply? I mean what kinds of Ic's or powertransistor do they use to get 1100W For a car amp? Or is the 1100w label one of those old business tricks?

Most car amps use wildly exaggerated figures - so assuming your 1100W.

First off, that's probably five channels (four + sub) - so we'll assume 4x200W + 1x300W.

Those values will be peak imaginary power, and fed from a supply higher than a normal car suppy (not just 12V).

If you're 'lucky' you will get 4x50W RMS, + 1x75W RMS - but it might be even less than that.

So a 50W amplifier sounds a lot lower than an 1100W one :D

Some amps do specify real RMS outputs (though not many), but in all cases (anything over 16W per channel) they use an inverter to increase the supply to a suitable value for the amp.
 
those answers were helpful, so i think if i have 6 tda2030a chips, and each 1 of them produces (except one as it is bridged and used for sub exactly) 18W so 5X18W=90W And only 1 of them produce 35W(2 tda2030a's bridged) so 90W+35W=125Watts!, then can i say that my amp's total power output is 125W True RMS!?..
 
those answers were helpful, so i think if i have 6 tda2030a chips, and each 1 of them produces (except one as it is bridged and used for sub exactly) 18W so 5X18W=90W And only 1 of them produce 35W(2 tda2030a's bridged) so 90W+35W=125Watts!, then can i say that my amp's total power output is 125W True RMS!?..


Well sort of. Another thing to look for is what impedance they are rating their power at. I have a set of A2300HTX audiobahn amplifiers but to get the peak 2300 watts out of them they have to be bridged and pushing something like 1 or 2 ohms otherwise I dont think they get much past 400 watts per channel.

If you are wondering what a 2300 watt car audio amp looks like they are absolutely huge and heavy! Half their internal structure is just the power supply and its capacitors and their output stages look more like a power supply for an inverter welder than an audio amplifier. :D
 
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Dynamic range is the point: if you check a typical vinyl LP, yhe dynamic range almost never exceeds 45 dB. But CD's can have a big dynamic range, and movie DVD's have an ANNOYINGLY high range so that when you adjust volume to hear the dialog the train going by shakes the pictures off the wall.

But in the case of music, you can have amps rated for high peak power with large storage caps to provide transient peaks. That's why many car systems have the monster 1 Farad caps (or more) near the amps. The average power rating can be a lot lower.
 
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A 20W amp is FAR too small - it leaves you no headroom, and you're going to be hitting distortion on peaks. Modern speakers tend to sacrifice volume for higher quality (particularly with small speakers), so you tend to require quite large amps, so you have decent headroom.

CD with it's much larger dynamic range has made it even more so.

I agree Nigel, I was speaking about the situation where the HiFi amp is supplying an actual 20W RMS of music into the speakers. My logic was that if it is "loud in a room" at 20W RMS the amp would be drawing maybe 40W to 50W from the supply and a 12v 10A supply would be quite sufficient for most "room" use.

My home built "gainclone" style amp is a 40W per channel stereo amp and it really loud on about 1/3 volume. And has plenty of headroom. :)
 
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