PaulD

that was one of the hardest things for me to get thru my hard head ..... if you have a 100 W/ch amp and the passive skims off say 20% of the power (just using round numbers), each speaker could see up to 80 watts if a frequency is in that speakers range. The downside is that during loud, complex music, the amp will most certainly be taxed mightily. According to alpines site, the rear channels are also 25 w/ch from 1-4 ohms. Given your current amp channels and power for each, the way you have it connected wil probably best suit your needs.

yea, if I understand what you wanna do

I didn't realize the rear channels were so much uderpowered as the fronts. I was really thinking like a "normal" 75X4 amp, in which case my idea was to give the midbass the same power as the mid/tweets. Understand that if you use a passive xover 1) it saps a little of the power 2) each speaker receives the total power of the amp IN IT'S FREQ RANGE (minus what the passive saps off the system). The 100x2 is great for the mid/tweets, but 25x2 is gonna be a bit lacking for the midbass. maybe you can use the 2150 in there somewhere and use the rear of the 500/5 for the rear speakers ? Lots of options to consider. Also, don't worry about matching power of speakers to power of amps that closely. If you are into SQ and clip the squat out of your system all day - you could use a 100w/ch amp to power the tweets and not blow them. Power is headroom, not volume (unless you have a megawatt SPL machine)

it will tell you if the amp is noisy ..... if it is, we can troubleshoot that, if not - we can move to the next item up the chain. The shorting plugs just make sure there is no noise inductance because of the no load on the inputs

The reason is beacause you're mid (in phase) had a drop out with the next speaker (midbass or tweet) causing it to be very low in volume. When a song contained frequencies that were being attenuated, the stage will be pulled the other side. The other thing has to with phasing issues, flipping the mid helped the phase at the offending frequency - but be aware, it may adversely effect another group of freq's.

yea, I have to admit that high quality stuff is dwindling - look at the latest offerings from Alpine for a headunit. And most of the MP3 stuff sounds BAD, I had NO idea a poor recording could make a good sounding stereo sound so bad. There seems to be painfully little real music nowadays, it just synthesized, sampled stuff.

ok, time to use some logic - rather than just shooting in the dark. First you need to make a set of shorting plugs. Go to radio shack and get an el cheapo set of RCA plugs (male ends) that can be wired up. Take a small peice of wire and connect the two terminals inside the plug together, have it soldered if you can - you are doin a pair of these. Unplug the RCA's from the amp and pug these in, in their place. Turn on the stereo and see if the whine is there. Let us know what happens.

I have an 8" sub glassed in where the factory mid in each door used to be .... I gave up 0 trunk space. They can hit like 128 dB or so - more than enough for a daily driver. And my 75X4 amp doesn't suck the electrical system dry either.

if you look at the "tweeter" chart - the bottom curve that has a huge spike just over 1000 is saying the resonant frequency of the tweeter is just under 2 KHz, the top curve shows it has pretty flat response above 2 KHz. These are telling you not to crossover the tweeter any lower than 2 KHz. If I were you, I would hook the mid and tweet to the passive crossover (just like the rears speakers) and connect them to the front 2 channels. Then connect the midbasses to the 2 rear channels on the 500/5. Typical crossover point ranges: sub to midbass 50-75 Hz midbass to midrange 250-400 Hz midrange to tweeter 2-4 KHz

I've known Richard for quite a while, more than 15 years .... although he is VERY difficult to get a hold of these days. I knew this was a joke after like the first sentence.

I was replying to Eldorado

what kinda noise ? and what kinda "drastic" measures" ?

I see that some myths NEVER die .... I am assuming the next post will be about running the power wires down one side of the car and the signal cables down the other ........

I typically don't care for all the bells and whistles on todays headunits ...... if you wanna use all of that time correction, EQ, crossover etc ..., you are pretty much stuck with it. Once you connect an external EQ to it, you lose the xover and most of the time correction features. I always thought the function of a CD player was to ...... play CDs

$1200 is cheap for a true SQ head unit

well, I hope I can be of some assistance ....... my forte' is sound quality, so I don't know much about bass systems - just the basics, and troubleshooting problems - especially noise problems.

if I'm reading what you're saying right, you probably ..... a blown mid, a loose wire at the passive crossover or a mis-set knob. Are you using a crossover built-in to the CD player ? If so, the internal x-over might be damaged as well - or got mis-set.

first thing is to check you current draw .... get a cheap multimeter from walmart or whatever that has a 10 A (amp) slot for the red lead. Take the fuse out of the wire going to the amps to disconnect the stereo from the cars electrical system for now. Take the negative battery lead off, then put the black (-) lead from the multi meter on the neg (-) battery terminal, now put the red (+) lead (that's plugged into the 10A slot) onto the neg (-) battery wire that you just removed from the battery. The multimeter will complete the circuit ..... if it reads very low, like .2 or less, put the lead into the slot that says 200mA. It should read no more than 10-20 mA. If it reads more than that, or read to high to put into the 200 mA slot - then you have a current drain somewhere. Have someone watch/hold the multimeter while you pull the car fuses, one at a time. Once you find the circuit that is shorted, the current will drop. Then you know what circuit is bad. Look on the fuse box diagram and see what few components are connected in that circuit. If the reading is very low, put the fuse back into the stereo power wire and do the same thing over again ... remember to start in the 10A slot (that's to prevent you from damaging the multimeter. If everything looks ok, then you have a battery/alternator problem. You should be able to go to autozone and have it checked out.

why does this guy HAVE to buy from cartoys ?

dang, looks like all the kids from automotive forums came over here