Hellloo,

I was wondering if there a preferred way to ground the deck?
Would grounding through the harness, or grounding it manually to you car be better?

or does it not make any difference at all...?

thanks.

 

some people dual ground it, i usually just follow the HU's instruction, some of my HU has a harness connection and some have chassis ground

 

haha thanks for your reply but ur a few months too late. I just installed it through the harness and called it a day.

 

I'd say only if you had to run a new power line to your deck, as my Alpine HU required, then you need a beefier ground than the OEM harness.

 

Yeah, I thought that too because my ground wire was a thicker as well..

however, a lot of guys I talked to on different forum says its really doesn't matter.

 

^^Unless you really care about sound quality and want as little noise as possible...

 

So it does make a difference? I asked this question on a very large car/electronics forum with lots of guys does this stuff professionally...

Are you sure it makes a difference? If so, how?

 

Here's a link to a site with a chart comparing different gauges of wire:

http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm


Check out 18ga (stock) vs the 12ga that many newer HUs come with for grounding.


At the bottom is a calculator for voltage drop. Notice that it mentions "round trip." In the stock setup this is battery through fuse blocks and into the HU, and then back through the HU to the nearest grounding point. I put in 20 ft to be somewhat generous.

My Eclipse CD7100 has a current draw of 3A (as referenced by the manual).

Comparing 18ga to 12ga, 18ga has a whopping .79V drop whereas the 12ga has a .196V drop.

Now, we take our ground point and move it from 3-4ft away in the harness to 1 ft.

18ga drops .632V (16ft), 12ga drops .157V


Given a perfect 14.4V output off the battery, our 12ga run has 14.204V available to the HU for processing and sending out it's pre-out outputs.

That same 14.4V output off the battery through the 18ga run is 13.61V when it gets to the same HU.

 

which = a .1dB loss

lol jk i dont know the actual figure, but I know its not worth the time to see little to no difference..

 

Multiply it out when your voltage pre-outs are probably <1V (forget what they're rated at, most of them don't even crack 2V)...and that bit adds up.

The more power your HU has available, the cleaner the sound signal it's going to produce - and pass on to your amplifier. The amplifier can only reproduce what it's given - GI GO.