rizzo30

You should Contact DC Power Enjineering for a bigger alternator. There is no way your stock alternator can handle a t1500 bd. That thing could probably use up250 amps but your alternator can only put out 120. DC Makes them that range from 275 to 320 amps. If you get a HO alternator you will notice that your voltages will increase and they will be much more stable.

I have to agree. Contact DC Power Enjineering. They made a 320 amp alt for my 2004 Stratus which will do 160 amps at idle. Most companies out there other then DC also tend to over rate them selves. Meaning that most of them cant even put out what they are rated at. With DC power, if their alt is rated at 160 amps, then its actual output power would test at around 200 amps. DC is known to put out more than what its rated for. Their only bad thing is that it takes soo long to get your alt. They are a very small company so I can give them some slack for that reason. Otherwise they have made the best alternators that I have ever seen.

Agreed. I have two Q15s which I reconed as 12s. I just ordered two more Q12s so I can have a system with four Q12s. These are an amazing sub and are worth the wait. I'm just hoping that this delay can get resolved soon so I can get my order in at least a month from now.

Check out the DC Power Engineering forums here on SSA. They made me a 320 amp alternator for my 2004 Stratus. They make the best alternators that I have ever seen.

What settings should I play with? I have tried to adjust the crossover on the amp, I have played with the bass settings. I don't really want to adjust the gain any further up than what it is right now. I am running this sub in a sealed box so I have the subsonic filter as far down as it can go.

I have two FI Q 15 inch subs that are each a dual 1 ohm coil. I had them running on two Rockford T10001bd amps and then switched to a Sundown Audio SAZ-3500D amp. It seems now that for some reason I may have lost some sound quality when going from the rockford amp to the sundown amp. It just seems like the subs may not be hitting all notes or sounding as good as before which is when I ran them on rockford amps. Does anyone know if this is possible or even who makes a better amp whether if its Rockford or Sundown Audio? These subs are fully loaded with each being in its own 2.5 cubit foot sealed box. I guess I am just looking for the best amp here which could match these subs perfectly at a 1 ohm mono load.

I am running a 320 amp alternator made by DC Power Engineering which does around 160 amps at idle and 320 at 1500 engine rpms. I have zero gauge ran back to the amps and also have 4 1.5 farad caps also. Then of course I upgraded the hot and ground wires coming off of the alternator to zero gauge along with the rest of the big 3. Sell and get some batteries...you may have a massive voltage drop even if you have an alty. I think my voltage drops to 12 volts from time to time on a very short peak. If its a longer peak, my alternator just catches right back up and goes back to about 15 volts. I will check the crossover on the amp and also try to set it to 80.

SSF I assume is subsonic filter. That was set to off on the bd amps and is set to 10 hertz on the sundown amp or as low as it can go on the sundown amp. I assume that lpf is low pass. That is set to 80 hertz from the head unit and left wide open on both amps since I set it on the head unit.

Maybe I should just go with two 12 inch btls instead and port them. That should get pretty loud. I just like the sound quality of sealed subs so I figured I would stick with sealed and figured that FI made a really good 15 with their Q model. I could have got some 05 RE XXX 15 models about a year ago, but I didn't know anything about FI back then and my friend just sold them. They were blown and everyone wanted them for obvious reasons that we figured out later.

With the bds I wired the subs at 4 ohms with bd sync which did not match those bds the best since that made them capable of 1500 watts rms at 4 ohms. The gains on the bds were a bit over half which was clipping. Now I have the sundown amp wired at 1 ohm and its gains are at under half or maybe 1/3 of the way up. the bass on the sundown amp is maybe 1/4 of the way up. Rockford used a 4 volt gain for those power amps while this sundown amp has a 6 gain setting.

I am running a 320 amp alternator made by DC Power Engineering which does around 160 amps at idle and 320 at 1500 engine rpms. I have zero gauge ran back to the amps and also have 4 1.5 farad caps also. Then of course I upgraded the hot and ground wires coming off of the alternator to zero gauge along with the rest of the big 3.

I second that one. Contact DC Power Engineering like phi said. They make the best alternators on the planet. I got one from them and it will laugh at any amps that I throw at it now.

I went on a trip today and one of my subs stopped working. I noticed that one of the coils was no longer working. The coils were series so I just ran the one sub and eventually one of its coils stopped working also. I tested the coils with an ohm meter and each sub has a coil that reads open. Am I right that something like this is not covered under warranty? I am not really sure why the coil opened up since I was probably giving the subs no more than 1500 watts between the two. I also have a voltage meter in my car and noticed that my voltages stayed around 14 volts when the first one blew while on the highway. These subs are dual 1 ohm coils and I am powering them with two Rockford Fosgate T1000-1bd amps. The two amps are synced or bridged together with a bd sync cable so the two amps can combine to make one large amp. The subs were series ed to create a 4 ohm load which should have the amps together rated at 1500 watts rms bridged between the two together. When bridging two amps like this, can issues be caused with each amp trying to sync together while each is trying to produce half of the sign wave? I am just trying to figure out what could have possibly happened. I have a 200 amp alternator in my car and was driving at highway speeds on the interstate. Of course all of my wire is zero gauge and did all of the big three to make sure that is good while my voltages were constantly fine since they were in the 14 volt range. Right now each sub still partially works on one coil. I am just trying to figure out what I need to do. I noticed that recone kits are a available. Do I need to buy one of those kits for each sub and recone them? If so is it possible to add the extra spider like I did when I originally bought these subs? These subs are the new 2010 model and I also assume that the other add on options that I selected when buying them such as cooling is all part of the basket/magnet structure part so I assume that I do not lose those features also.

If it is a tear in the surround, use black silicone. I punched a small hole through an RE sub once and that worked great. Silicone is soft so it will do a great job at flexing as the surround flexes during normal use. Silicone will also bond very good to that surround so that way you won't have to deal with it tearing off.

I decided to order an ocsilloscope. I did some reading and a lot of people around the forums recommend the Velleman HPS10-SE. I am going to use that to test the signals coming from the preouts and the speaker outputs to make sure that I will not have any clipping once I get the subs reconed. It costed about $160 shipped but that seems to be the only way to make sure that you do not have anything that will ever clip. That should also give me my answer to whether or not my head unit ever clips when I test it on test tones at 0db at 40 to 50 hz and also 1khz. One thing that I did notice on the voice coil since I tore the cone out was that the voice coil seemed to be rubbing on the side. Part of the metal windings has rubbed off. Can that actually happen from clipping or would that be a manufacture defect? I had a grill over the sub so I know that one side of the sub was not hitting anything.

Then why do people claim that the higher end head units with the higher voltage preouts do not clip? I have a 5 volt preout on my head unit. Other people on the net claim that the Kenwood Excelon head units can be cranked all the way to their max and their preouts will not clip. That is not to say that the amp won't but the head unit at least won't. From there the gains on the amp just need to be adjusted low enough so they do not clip.

Yes, I do crank the volume knob all the way up. I do have a higher end headunit which I believe does not distort. I turned the gains all the way down on my high amps to try to hear distortion and I can not hear any even with the volume on it cranked all the way up. I try to configure my system so you can crank it all the way up without having anything distort. I have a Kenwood Xcelon 901 or similar model which I believe does not distort its preouts at all even when cranked. I know that its built in amp will probably distort when cranked, but I don't use that. I guess someone can correct me if i'm wrong about some headunits not distorting the preouts but I sure do not notice any. I have had Focal components hooked up to a 4 channel amp thats connected to it for over a year and they have never given me any problems.

Gain was probably 1/4 below max (which is where it would meet the headunit voltage) bass boost is not used, loudness is turned off, the sub was crossed over at about 80 hz and lower from the headunit. The amp did not clip and the voltages were totally fine. There is you're problem. Search the thread how to set gains with dmm and set you're gains correctly. I'm confused. I already know that 2/3 of the way up is where the gain will meet my headunit preout voltage. I had the gains set lower than that even. Yes I have used a voltage meter before to set gains and thats how I know that 2/3 of the way up is about where the voltage is matched. I had them lower meaning that the amp would not have been clipping and it would not have even been working at its max.

I'm thinking about running each sub off of its own amp instead of bridging the two amps together. I just believe that when you deal with a lot of power and a small issue happens with getting the amps synced then those issues can be quite severe on the subs. Anyone think that will be better than abridging or bd syncing two amps?

Gain was probably 1/4 below max (which is where it would meet the headunit voltage) bass boost is not used, loudness is turned off, the sub was crossed over at about 80 hz and lower from the headunit. The amp did not clip and the voltages were totally fine.

Sorry but i'm running sealed so I do not have the issue of running below a tuning frequency. They are each in a 2.5 cubic foot sealed box. Thanks for your reply but playing below the tuning frequency has nothing to do with my issue.

Yeah, I will probablly do that. Its not too big of a hurry right now since I was actually thinking about throwing these subs away. Its kind of just a thought right now because I figured that maybe they would be worth something if I could get them reconed. oh sorry looked like from the pics of the SEx it was a 4 spoke Do they have pictures of what these recone kits look like? When I view them it just shows up as a white box so I was kind of wondering. I am running Firefox 3.5.2 while the same thing happens on Internet Explorer 8.

Yeah, I will probablly do that. Its not too big of a hurry right now since I was actually thinking about throwing these subs away. Its kind of just a thought right now because I figured that maybe they would be worth something if I could get them reconed.

Thanks for the reply. I have three RE Audio 12 inch SEX series subs and one RE Audio SE 12 inch sub. One of them completely blew (spider even smoked lol ) and the rest either have a dead coil or broken voice coil leads. I don't really mean to bash a company or anything but they just didn't seem to be the same as the older RE Audio. I was thinking of just throwing these things away but maybe they are worth something if I can recone them as FI subs.

I was going to post some pics but it wanted them to come from a website. They are on my SD card since I took them with my digital camera. The reason for two boxes instead of one huge box is weight. I can lift one single box but a dual box would be hard. I know that FI recommends anywhere from 2 to 2.6 cubic feet per chamber so I wanted to get as close to 2.6 cubic feet per chamber or per sub as possible while still being able to fit them in my car. So I came up with two single boxes that allow each 15 to have its own box that has 2.5 cubic feet per chamber.