Stereo & Electronics - New Headunit, Amp Question

Last weekend I installed an alpine headunit to replace my stock monsoon. The headunit plays sound through the speakers fine, but i turn it up to a volume level of about 5 and it is fairly loud but the headunit goes up to 40. (another friend has the same one and listens to it around 25 or so) My friend who works in car audio at bestbuy told me that the amp would need to be rewired or something like that. He says he did it in his WS6 but I really dont know if this is the solution, and I cant seem to find an answer using the search. Anyone know what my problem might be, and if rewiring the amp is the right thing to do?

I thought this was mostly an issue in the Bose setup - but this is where that Premium Sound system adapter comes in for $40 or whatever it is...

The rewiring he is talking about is done at the head unit - I have a friend who worked at CC as well, and it's fairly common since a lot of systems with external amps are not looking for speaker level inputs (Monsoon is): in short, you run RCA ends from the pre-outs on the back of the HU, and either splice or solder the appropriate part of the signal on the other end into corresponding speaker wires.

Well he asked me if I already removed my spare tire out of the back so it would be easier to get to the amp... I'm not very good with stereos so this is all one big mystery for me

Getting to the amp itself is not necessary.

Figure out exactly what he'd talking about though - have him IM ya or something and post his words here.

It sounds like your using the speaker levels outs from the deck to send a signal to your amp. The PAC-OEM1 allows the signal to be converted to the correct signal. Simply splicing is not good enough. I'm not trying to sell a product but, I have installed different setups in my camaro. The PAC converter is the eaiser thing to do. Look in the stickies for a thread concering monsoon. There is a plethora of knowledge about the monsoon and various amp, hu set-ups.

I am by no means an expert on this. I have an alpine in my TA running my monsoon system just fine. How did you wire the HU to you car? I used the regular gm harness from CC and it works just fine. I think my max vol level on deck is 30 something maybe 40. For normal listening I use about 12. I did not have to rewire anything on deck and the harness from CC was labeled and almost all of the wires were same color as the factory. Don't know if this will help or not, but I did not have to do anything to my amp. Whitebird00 helped me with my questions when I did mine and as far as I am concerned he is man when it comes to monsoon system.

tasilver, i did the exact same thing as you, bought the wiring harness and all of that. but he seems to think that i need to do this. he was saying that without doing this my volume will continue to be louder than it normally would. i trust my friends opinion, but i dont know if its the right one....

tasilver, i did the exact same thing as you, bought the wiring harness and all of that. but he seems to think that i need to do this. he was saying that without doing this my volume will continue to be louder than it normally would. i trust my friends opinion, but i dont know if its the right one....
It's a very valid opinion -- some doe experience this on Monsoon, some do not ......I have no idea why when they are identical systems I am comparing... usually it results from factory amps not expecting speaker level inputs -- but the Monsoon amp does use speaker level inputs....

Maybe it depends on the power of the deck you use? Mine is the alpine cda-9855 18watts rms x4. I do not know the impact on of the HU on the factory amp. I would suggest asking whitebird00 for his opinion. Like I said before I know hardly anything about car audio and he was very helpful.

Have I got this correct...your new head unit works and sound fine but it ramps up the volume too quickly? So you would prefer having a wider range of volume control?

I think tasilver hit it right on. The factory Monsoon system uses an ordinary head unit that sends the speaker level output through an external amp to the speakers. This amp is what we used to call a "booster" because it adds amplification to the already amplified speaker signal from the head unit. If you have a head unit that puts out significantly more power than stock then the amp will multiply that and make the volume go up geometrically.

To use round numbers (that aren't based in reality) - suppose each click of the factory unit adds 2 watts to the output and the amp doubles whatever input it gets. Going from 5 to 6 on the volume control would mean going from 10 to 12 watts from the head unit and 20 to 24 watts at the amp output. Now if your new head unit is 50% more powerful it will change 3 watts for each click of the volume control. So, going from 5 to 6 would be going from 15 to 18 watts from the head unit (already louder) and from 30 to 36 watts at the amp output - significantly more. Again, these number are for illustration only.

This is one of the very few situations where bypassing the factory amp can be helpful. Since your new head unit seems to be powerful enough, you could bypass the factory amp to power the speakers directly from the HU. Or, if you like bass, you could bypass the door and hatch speakers but leave the sail panel subs running off the amp. There was a thread a while back with details about bypassing the factory amp: http://www.ls1tech.com/forums/showthread.php?t=547488

On the other hand, if you don't mind that the volume goes up so quickly and you were just wondering why, then there's no reason you can't leave it the way it is. It isn't necessary to bypass the amp just to run an aftermarket HU - in fact, I don't recommend it except in special cases like volume control problems or if you replace the factory amp with an aftermarket one.

Thats exactly what i needed to hear. Thanks for the help everybody.