I'm planning on doing an amp install in my S2000 soon. I've decided to mount the amp in the spare tire. I have a few questions for you guys who have done amp installs in the stook before.

1) Where is the best place to run the rca cables and power lines?
2) Where is the best place to go through the firewall for the power line to the battery?
3) Approximately how long of cables (rca and power) am I going to need?
4) Can any of you recommend some good line level convertors?

Thanks!

 

Let's go guys/gals. We need some help here. I am in the middle of an amp install myself.

SilverS2k, For what it is worth there are rubber grommets in your fire wall that you can push your power cable through with enough determination.

My question is with the stock head unit where is the best place to run my turn-on lead. I've heard there is a switched fuse somewhere???

 

I'm still trying to decide when I wish to do such an install, so these will be educated guesses based upon previous installations...

1) If at all possible, keep power and RCA cables away from each other. While the power cables only carry DC, they'll act as antennas for other signals and possible reradiate back to the RCAs. Personally, I would position the power cables along the transmission block (middle of car) and put the RCA cables along the door sill. It's a toss-up...this makes for slightly longer RCA cables, but keeps them away from the potentially noisy tranny block...hell, six of one, half dozen of the other, I suppose...

2) As Clovis said, there's a convenient grommet above the battery that flows nicely into the interior.

3) That all depends on your install...get a rough estimte using a piece of string, then add 20-30% for boo boos.

4) Not a clue here, but quite a few amps nowadays have both line-level and speaker-level inputs. Personally, I'm going with a Sony HX1002 (or something like that) if it will fit under the seat...that has speaker-level inputs which I'll use until I install a better head unit.

Hope this helps...

 

Answer #4 PAC has a good line level converter. Better yet is to just replace the head unit and bypass the problems that come along with line level converters such as noise and cutting of wires.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Pinky
[B]Answer #4 PAC has a good line level converter.

 

You should mount LL converters as close to the amp as possible. If you have a few millivolts of noise riding around in your interior, would you like that noise to be added to a long wire carrying a signal of a few hundred millivolts, or a signal of a few volts? Exactly...keep the signal at high levels as long as possible...

 

Thanks guys! I'm gonna start my amp install this weekend. I'll post how it went when I'm done.

One more quick question though. Since my amp does have line level inputs would that be the best method of hooking it up? I sort of wanted to run RCA's now since I will probably upgrade the head unit one day, but if too much sound quality will be lost with line level converters I'll just run some RCA's when the new head unit comes.

 

You'll have to answer that question yourself, depending upon whether you want to do extra work. If an extra hour of work is no big deal, I'd say use the LL inputs on the amp and run the RCA cable alongside. When you head unit comes in, just plug in the RCA at both ends and yank out the LL wires.

 

Here's a link to my installation post. Good luck with your installation - it will be worth it! http://www.s2000online.com/forums/showthre...p?threadid=6904