alanMI88

someone gave me a 250 watt sub last weekend. i have a 96 civic, and was wondering how to hook this up to my car. he said he has an amp for it too, and will give it to me once he finds it. i have the stock radio in it, and plan to keep the stock one. can any one tell me how to hook this up. thanks

freecrx

yea you will need a line out convertor. PAC makes a nice one that gives you a remote turn on lead for the amp also. then you basically take the wires from your rear speakers, hook them up to the input side of the line out convertor and then you have rca outputs on the other side. you will need power to the amp in the form of heavy guage wire usually 8 or 4 depending on the amp directly from the battery and a good ground with the correct wire, usually the same guage as the power wire. then you connect the remote turn on lead to the correct spot on the amp, hook up the speakers, hopefully you have a built in crossover in the amp, and check everything out. dont forget to fuse the wire under the hood even if the amp has one built in, this is to prevent your batt. from exploding in the event of a short.

this is very short and basic and there is a little more to it but if you are going to attempt this and this doesnt make sense, either involve a friend who can help you or have it done proffesionaly. i dont mean to offend but for you to get maximum benefit from this you are going to have to have some understanding of polarity, some basic electrical knowledge and be somewhat mechanical to get it to look and sound its best. if i can help let me know.

alanMI88

where do i get this line out converter from, about how much do they cost?

freecrx

any audio shop should have one. they run about 20 bucks

alanMI88

Im ready to put this in. I got the amp, it says JLB Decade on it. I've never heard of the brand before, the sub is Pioneer.

The amp:
On the back it has speaker imput (L+, R+, L-, R-) and RCA line in. It also has a knob that says "imput level", its adjustable from 4V to 250 mV. Then there is a switch for "Bass Eq." Either off, or +6dB. Lastly is has a "Crossover" switch. The three positions are LPF, Flat, and HPF.

The front has speaker output (L+, L-, R+, R-). Then Batt(+), Gnd(-), and REM. I dont know what REM stands for.

So I've probably given more detail than necessary, but I didnt want to leave out any important detail. I have some basic electric knowledge, I wired in my under body neons my self. This is proibably a bit more complicated.

Can someone please give me a fairly detailed description of how to wire this up. Which wire to plug in where, etc. Do I still need the line out converter, or does that amp cover for that?

Also, I just got a new battery last weekend, a 51R. They said the 'R' stood for reverse, meaning its a reverse polarity battery, because Hondas run on reverse polarity or something. Does anyone know anything about this, will it affect the way I wire the amp to the battery?

Thanks for reading this long post, and thanks for the help!

Integral

Ok, you still need the line out convertor... in the back of your cd player you are going to hookup that convertor AND the remote(REM) wire (This is usually a blue wire that connects to a power source from your cd player, whether you want your amp to come on during full ignition, or accesory mode, is your choice.) When hooking up your convertor, you splice into the existing rear left and right speaker wiring, so the amp will run as "rear speakers". You then need to run the RCA wire from the convertor to the amp. As stated before, you also need a 4-8 gauge wire for power and for a ground, and the ground can be hooked up to any grounded location on the car (usually the most convenient bolt). And just run speaker wire for each sub to the speaker outputs, right neg to right neg, right pos to right pos, etc etc.

Don't forget to hook up the engine bay fuse through your power wire...
And don't run your rca wires right next to the others, try to keep some space in between them. Hide the wires, and wha-la. Feel free if you have anymore questions, and no, the battery thing shouldnt matter, as long as you ground the amp and hook the power wire up to the positive terminal. Just be sure not to short any fuses while hooking up the amp ;p (I believe most people disconnect the negative terminal from the battery before installing a system...)

2legit2quit

Sounds like that amp has speaker level imputs so a line out converter is not needed.

Integral

hmm, Would the quality be as good as if you were to use a convertor though? In either case, if you wanted to just run the wires to the amp to the inputs, I suppose those that would work. Just buy some extra wire to splice into the existing rear speaker wiring...

skip259

since the amp is only 250 watts, 8 gauge would be ok for the amp. Also, see if the amp has a bridged mode option. looks like it's a stereo amp, but if it can be run in bridged mode, you'll get some more power for the sub.

bass on!

alanMI88

I've got another question.
I realized I dont know which is positive and negitive! The rear speaker wires dont use standard black/red. The left speaker has one Blue/Yellow wire and one Gray/White wire. The right speaker has a Yellow/Red wire and a Brown/White wire.