Car Amp

[dat boi]

Can anyone with experience in hooking up a car amplifier to their computer's audio system tell me how they went about setting everything up.

 

[towert7]

Audio output from the computer to the input on the amp.................................

Am I missing something? That seemed too easy

 

[schapman]

The only thing I could assume is the 12V DC that it probably runs off. He's gonna have to get an AC->DC transformer that's the right spec for the car amp.

 

[BBA]

The only thing I could assume is the 12V DC that it probably runs off. He's gonna have to get an AC->DC transformer that's the right spec for the car amp.

Done it. A PC power supply wont do the job. Your going to have to get a deep cycle marine battery for the power source and a trickle charger to charge it when it's not being used.

 

[Fryguy8]

This isn't going to work how you want. The output from the soundcard isn't nearly clean enough to be ampilfied to this extent in most cases. It's also exceedingly difficult to get any sort of real amount of 12V power without spending a lot of money, money that should be spent on just getting a better and safer setup designed for the home. When you can get 1400 watts for $250 with the likes of behringer ep1500, there's no reason to screw around with car amps in a house environment.

Can it be done? Sure, but there are other, much better avenues to take.

 

[Audiochris]

I agree with Fryguy8. The with the amount of money you would have to spend to power a car amp properly, you could go out and buy a real amp. Although I usually try to steer people away from Behringer products, it will be more than adequate to fit your needs.

 

[agent420]

This isn't going to work how you want. The output from the soundcard isn't nearly clean enough to be ampilfied to this extent in most cases. It's also exceedingly difficult to get any sort of real amount of 12V power without spending a lot of money, money that should be spent on just getting a better and safer setup designed for the home. When you can get 1400 watts for $250 with the likes of behringer ep1500, there's no reason to screw around with car amps in a house environment.

Can it be done? Sure, but there are other, much better avenues to take.

I also agree with the power problem. I'll also point out that car audio is usually designed for 4 ohm (or less) drivers, and most home equipment is 8 ohm - that will make a big difference. No matter how tempting it may seem this is not a worthwhile venture.

However, I do take issue with the soundcard output quality. Unless you've got a really cheap card, the analog quality should be fine, and feeding a car amp would be no different that feeding a home reciever. There are millions of people running pc analog audio through external amps just fine.

 

[Fryguy8]

I tend to prefer digital output from soundcards much more than analog output, and soundcards really aren't meant to act as full pre-amps, more as a signal source.

 

[agent420]

I tend to prefer digital output from soundcards much more than analog output, and soundcards really aren't meant to act as full pre-amps, more as a signal source.

Not to get too off topic here, but ultimately the audio has to be converted to analog at some point, so the quality is determined by DAC components and circuitry; by using digital output you are simply offloading that responsibilty to another device. It is a sad fact that many lower end recievers and speakers have a lower converter quality than many good souncards, so in many cases you could actually degrade the audio quality by going digital; it depends on the equipment. You cannot make any assumptions that just because you are connected digitally there will be an improvement in quality. There is quite a bit of information on the net regarding the specs of soundcard chipsets and the dac's used, but there is much lees data available for those critical components in recievers and speakers. Without that information for comparison, vague statements like 'preferring digital connections' have no weight. Granted digital transfer is immune to audio frequency interference, but with decent cables that is usually not much of an issue, and digital can suffer from it's own maladies like jitter. There's always a ying and a yang.

Furthermore, I'm not certain what you mean by 'full pre-amps'. There is a set electrical standard that defines line level audio signals for consumer devices, and I'm fairly sure most soundcards adhere to that (there'd be no reason not to). In the above examples, all that is needed is a signal source, technically the term pre-amp infers boosting a low level signal such as a tape head or stylus cartridge to drive the following power amp... in pc audio there is typically no need for that. The power amp is looking for a line level signal, which is exactly what the soundcard provides.

 

[Fryguy8]

In my experience, soundcards have had an awfully high noisefloor, a problem that is only magnified by using high levels of amplification.

And I prefer to use digital output from my soundcard to get to a DAC that has a much higher noise floor and overall higher quality in the conversion. It's been my experience that even low-mid end receivers (a $300 denon, for example), far outperform the abilities of typical sound cards. Typical soundcards excludes the likes of x-fi, juli@, emu, and other cards known for quality that a minority of users have.

And in my case, I'm using an actual dedicated DAC unit (A Zhaolu v2), so the improvement is very noticable.

You do however bring up valid points, and I apologize for not being more pedantic in a discussion that certainly warrants it.

 

[agent420]

It's all good. Didn't mean to imply your setup was in any way inferior. I was just trying to point out how the 'digital' thing works, and how marketing depts could take advantage of that.