Hi, Cris from Crutchfield here, going to talk to you today a little bit about some wiring
for subwoofer amps and subwoofers. There's a couple of different routes we can go,
and there are reasons to choose which way to wire. I'm going to demonstrate parallel wiring
and also series wiring. In parallel wiring, we are joining these subs together in a way that
is going to cause them to present a heavier load, less resistance to our amplifier, and thus
extracting more power out of the amplifier. In this case, we're doing a 4 and a 4 in parallel.
That's going to become a 2, which is what this amp is rated for, so we're going to extract maximum
clean, usable power out of this amplifier. That'll give us our best performance from this setup.
Now, I'm also going to demonstrate for you series wiring. There's a myriad of reasons why you might
do that; I'm just demonstrating today how it works. The concept to remember is that when you put them
in series, they add up. Instead of reducing the resistance to the circuit, they are actually
going to increase the resistance to the circuit. So it's straight, simple math: four plus four,
we get an 8-ohm load. Still perfectly safe on the amplifier, but you get less power out of your
amplifier. The amp's perfectly happy running at eight or four or two, and we're going to wire these
up just as a demo in series to show you how that's done. Let me move this cover here. All right, so
Rockford amp, Rockford subs, got a Sony amp, it's all great gear. We sell lots of this kind of stuff, and
you guys can find it on our site, of course. So we parallel these guys, it's pretty straightforward. We
want to make sure to always remember to match up positives to positives and negatives to negatives
when we're doing this parallel wiring. It's known as putting your subs and your voice coils
in phase with each other. This means they're all working together to move air at the same time,
and it gives us our better sound out of our subs that way. So I've pre-stripped some of this wiring
here make it go a little quicker on the demo, but remember, pay attention to your positives
and negatives. So in this case on this speaker wire, I'm using my white wire as my positive and
my black wire is my negative, so we've got white to red and black to black here on the sub. So now
to make this a parallel connection is very straightforward and easy. What you're going to do
is match up your positives with each other, join these together make a good solid, clean connection,
and match up your negatives,
and now we get our negatives to go together,
like so. Now we have to attach this to the amp. This right here was literally where I made the
parallel connection. I've got both my positives together, I've got both my negatives together,
so these two 4-ohm subs are now a 2-ohm load, and they will extract the maximum clean, usable power
out of this amplifier when it's in operation. So now all I've got to do is hook up my plus
to my plus, my minus to my minus, and I'm done on that, for the sub wiring itself. Now remember,
you also have to hook up power and ground for your amplifier; now be sure to get yourself an
amp wiring kit that's appropriate for your amplifier if you don't have one already.
So there's my positive going in, and here's my negative going in,
snug it down tight, make sure it's real snug and tight.
All right, there we go, got those tightened in now. That is a parallel connection to this amplifier.
I had to join the wires to each other, because I've got one set of terminals. Now there's a variation
on the mono amplifiers that you'll see. Plenty of them on our site, other places out there
on the web, I'm sure. If you take a look at this amplifier, it's actually got four terminals on it,
two pluses and two minuses. This is not a stereo amplifier; this is still a mono amplifier, but the
design of this amplifier has made it so that you can very easily parallel a couple of subs to it.
Instead of having to join the wires to each other like we did with the single set of terminals, on
this amp we can actually just take them apart from each other and hook up one speaker to one plus and
minus and one speaker to the other plus and minus, and by physically connecting that that way to the
amplifier, the amplifier itself physically takes care of that parallel connection. So we had a
2-ohm load here, and we're going to have a 2-ohm load here as well with these two subs. It's just
physically slightly easier to make the connection. On these guys ii need my phillips head for this amp.
So you can see on the amplifier there's two sets of plus and minuses. Again, in this case this
is a mono single-channel amplifier, and if I can get this up here where I can see it, there we go.
All right, there's the first one. Match plus to plus, minus to minus, and we'll do the second one as well.
So whereas before I actually twisted the wires to each other and put them in the one set of
terminals, now I've got two sets of terminals, it makes it a little bit easier to get all the
current out of the amplifier. We want all that power; it makes for a bigger pathway coming out.
And there we go, snug you down.
All right.
There we are, so now unlike this one where I just joined the wires literally to each
other, I've joined them onto the amplifier, so the amplifier itself is physically taking care of the
parallel connection. Both these positives are the same positive; both these negatives are the same
negative. So we still have, just like we had, a 2- ohm load here now. We've got a 2-ohm load here, so
that's paralleling a couple of 4-ohm subwoofers. So this will get max performance out of this
amplifier. Like I said before, sometimes though, you may not have an amplifier that can handle a 2-ohm
load, can supply the current needed when you do that, so you might want to put your subs in series.
Again, 4 and 4, it reduces the resistance, this will extract the most power out of your amplifier, most
clean, safe power. With these guys, I'm going to show you putting them in series. Again, remember that
adds up, so it's more resistance, which is going to cause less power to come out of your amplifier.
Sometimes that's a good thing, depending on the specs on the amp and the particular subs you have,
that might be a desirable thing. So we can detach these other subs, get rid of our parallel guys
for the moment.
Take them out of the way. So now we're going to put these guys in series together. Remember,
this adds up, this extracts less power from your amplifier, but it's pretty straightforward wiring.
We need to connect a jumper in between the two subs. We're going to connect the positive of one
to the negative of the other, and that's how the series wiring works. Positive or negative,
positive, negative, positive, negative all the way down the loop. So on our first sub, we'll take
our positive, connect in there. These are spring clips, so they're pretty easy to use.
So we're on the red one here, so that's the positive, that means in series I need to hook up to
my negative on the other side here, any second sub. There we go.
Now by virtue of connecting this jumper wire between the two of them, positive to negative,
these have added up two 4-ohm subwoofers now become an 8-ohm load, and the leftover terminals
that I haven't connected anything to yet are what we're going to hook to the amplifier. So we'll
get another set of speaker wire, and we'll need to connect. Now again, observe positives and negatives,
make sure that you get all your polarity correct, otherwise your sound's going to really be bad.
So we get our wire, we've already put them in series, this is an 8-ohm load,
and we're going to hook up our positive to our positive here on the first sub,
and we're going to hook our negative
up to our negative on the second sub.
There we go, nice clean connections. Now this and this together, they've added up,
and when I attach these wires to the amplifier... either one, I can attach it to either one of them,
i'm going to have an 8-ohm load, so it's not going to extract as much power as the 2-ohm did, but
it's situational. Sometimes you need to do that to arrive at a safe load on your amplifier, and these
mono amps that have the two sets of terminals, you don't have to use both sets of terminals,
necessarily, you can leave one set blank if you need to, depending on your situation.
Let me get that wired in,
there we go. So now we've added up and these two guys are going to extract
less power than these two guys when they're in parallel, so eight versus two.
So really it's situational depends on your set of toys, you know, what amplifiers you have, what
subs you have. There's ways to get the best, most power out, and there's ways to kind of compromise
and just go let's make a safe load and not burn up the amplifier, right? So sometimes, series comes in
handy for that. Most of the time you'll probably be paralleling either a dual voice coil or a couple
of individual subs. So speaking of dual voice coil, we have one of those to show you as well.
So this guy here, unlike these speakers, all four of these are single voice coil speakers,
so characteristic of these you'll only see one set of speaker wiring terminals on it. But on a dual
voice coil subwoofer, we end up with two sets of terminals, and basically this one sub can behave in
exactly the same ways as either set of two, because one voice coil, one voice coil, one voice coil, one
voice coil, this guy's got two of them already built in so you can do the same series wiring
or the same kind of parallel wiring from this to your amplifier, depending on your situation, so you
can extract the best power and get the cleanest sound out of your subwoofer. So that's pretty much
it, I'm not going to physically wire this one up, just wanted to show you that, and remember: parallel,
the resistance cuts down; it offers less resistance to the circuit, so it draws more power.
In series, the resistance goes up so you get less power out of your amplifier, and that's not
necessarily a bad thing, right, we want to get best clean power we can based on the situation. If you
have any questions, check us out on the web, give us a holler. Thanks a lot! You all have a great day.