Crutchfield: The Podcast Ep. 52 (2024)

Hello, and welcome back to Crutchfield, the podcast. We're back with episode four in our four-part series on how to choose the perfect car stereo system for your car, for your music, for your commute, to make you happy. Yes.

Are you happy, co-host Eric? I'm spectacular. Yeah?

Yeah. Well, that's a new word. I know.

I love it. Yeah. I figured you would.

I'm still fantastic. Okay. That's all right.

I'm going to stick with it. Okay.

Eric

I like it.

Because it's always applicable to me. There you go. There you go.

So, yeah, we're back. And in this fourth episode, we are going to focus on the world of amplifiers. Now, you might be thinking, I don't need an amplifier.

I don't want to get into that. And you very well might be right. You might be right.

These are kind of next-level items in a car stereo. But let me tell you this, every single car stereo, every single stereo period has an amplifier. If you hear sound.

Yeah.

Eric

An amplifier was involved.

Speakers don't move without power. Right. Power comes from an amplifier.

Eric

Now, what level of amplifier you have is what we're here to talk about today. I mean, your phone has an amplifier in it.

Yeah.

Eric

If you can hear it ring, there's some sort of amplifier there.

Your true wireless Bluetooth earbuds have amplifiers. Each one of them has an amplifier in it.

Eric

So amplifiers are in speakers, right? So from there, they're not all created equal.

No. Spoiler alert.

Eric

No.

The job of an amplifier is to combine electrical power with acoustic signal, music signal, and turn it into acoustic energy, right? And so that's the job of an amplifier, to make a speaker move and make sound, specific sounds that the artist made when they recorded the music you're listening to. In episode one, we talked about replacing the radio.

In episode two, we talked about adding or replacing speakers. In episode three, we talked about subwoofers. And in each one of those episodes, we mention amplifiers somewhere along the way.

If you're buying a stereo, you need preamp outputs so that you can add amps if you think that's a thing you're going to do. If you want to put really nice speakers in there, you probably want to power them with something more than just the radio in your dash.

Eric

Yeah. Our aftermarket speakers quite often will handle 50 watts up to 100 watts, and you're never getting that from a factory system or from even an aftermarket head unit. So you're going to need an additional amplifier to get everything out of those speakers that they're capable of.

Yep. And if you're going to do a subwoofer, like we talked about in episode three, you 100% need an amplifier. They do not work with the power from a factory radio or even an aftermarket.

You have to have an amplifier for a subwoofer. So an amp gives you more volume, more headroom. Can you explain headroom?

I think we've used that term a number of times. What is headroom?

Eric

Yeah. Headroom is... To me, I think of it like a car, right?

My car can go 120, and that's nice to know, right? But that just means that while I'm cruising at 70 down the highway, it's in a happy spot, right? I've got more there if I need it, but it's only there if I do need it.

But it feels good that it's there, right? So it's that ability to... I think you used the example of turn that music up every once in a while.

You've got your comfortable listening volume level, but then that song that you really love comes on, you feel like it's kind of cranking it, that's available to you. You can do that.

Yeah. The ability to go a little louder than you need it to most of the time. Right.

Headroom.

Eric

Right.

Going to take more power to get that done. An amplifier also makes music sound better even at lower volumes, which doesn't sound like it makes sense, but it does.

Eric

Yeah, because that power is also... What's controlling the driver? That speaker itself, right?

So the power from the amp controls that speaker, and it controls it, whether or not it's turned up loud or it's not turned up loud. So that ability to be more accurate, that really is relying on that power. So yeah, power is not only for turning it and playing it super loud, but it's to get the most accurate sound as well.

Yeah. And amplifiers are arguably the most boring part of picking out and installing. They're the worst, right?

I'm just going to say it, amplifiers are the worst. They don't have flashy lights and a touchscreen display and a backup camera and volume knobs, right? None of that stuff going on with an amplifier.

They don't make noise, right? An amplifier is silent by itself. It doesn't do squat, unless it's connected to something that gives it music so that it can turn it into power to send to a speaker, and the speaker is what you think of when you think of the thing that makes sound in your car.

Yep. Not the amplifier. The amplifier is the unsung hero.

It's doing all the dirty work.

Eric

It's doing all the work behind the scenes.

It's harder to install. It's usually hidden away where you don't see it. And if you don't do it right, it's going to cause you problems, right?

So you've got to do it right. So a lot of you may be thinking, I don't think I want to get into an amplifier, but you might need to to get what you want to make you happy. This is all about making you happy, driving around in your car, listening to music.

There are amplifiers designed just for subwoofers. There are amplifiers designed to power all of the rest of your speakers in your car. Maybe it's just two speakers in the front.

Maybe it's four speakers, right, front and rear. Maybe it's two speakers in the front, two speakers in the back, plus two tweeters. Maybe you want even more speakers than that.

We have amplifiers that will do all of the speakers. We have amplifiers that will do subs, and we have amplifiers that will do all of the speakers and the sub all in one box.

Eric

So how do you know when you're looking at our list of hundreds of amplifiers what the amp is made to do?

Well, that comes down to channels. How many channels of power do you need, and how much power on each of those channels? What is a channel?

Eric

So a channel is a discrete signal. So think of it as like an amplified path for your music. Often in home audio, we talk about two-channel sound, right?

So that's stereo. Things are recorded in stereo. So that if I'm sitting back listening to music, sometimes it sounds like the music's coming for a little bit from the left, or maybe another sound's coming a little bit more from the right.

That's two channels of information.

That's your left channel and your right channel.

Eric

Exactly. So in that case, if I was just trying to power two speakers, a stereo amplifier, a two-channel amplifier would be the right solution in that scenario.

And each channel in that example is full range. It plays all the highs, mids, and lows, sends them all to your left floor-standing or whatever speaker that plays all of the left, and the other one does all of the right. You can make it more complex than that if you wanted to go nuts with it.

Most of us don't need to, right? You could break it down to an amplifier channel for just the tweeter, just the mid-range, and just the woofer, right? And you would need that for the left speaker and the right speaker.

That would be six channels of amplifier power. Most of us don't need to do that.

Eric

Yeah, yeah. That's getting certainly at a more complex level than what we're... We'll mention it and not go any further than that.

Exactly. I say that to bring it back to, in a car, you're going to see bigger numbers than just two channels.

Eric

Right.

You're going to see four-channel, five-channel, six-channel amplifiers. And what that usually means... Let's start with a four-channel.

Eric

Yeah, I think four-channel and mono, which we'll get into, are probably our two most popular configurations for those channels, right? And the four-channel is really ideal for just your full-range speakers in your car.

Your front speakers and your back speakers. You've got a left and a right in both the front and the back. Four different locations for speakers, and each of them needs their own channel of power.

Eric

Yeah. So imagine in that situation, because you've got those four discrete channels, you can fade it the way you want. You can increase the amplitude or the loudness to some speakers over other speakers.

And just because it's a channel, that doesn't just mean it's doing four speakers. We get a little nerdy here. But you can get a four-channel amp to power up even more than that, depending on your speaker configuration and how things are wired.

Well, a common thing to do, and this is actually a confusing sticking point for a lot of people, is a lot of cars have tweeters in the front. So you've got a tweeter up on the dash and a woofer in your door.

Eric

Yeah, and you just gave an example where you could power all of those with multiple channels, but really you could power all your front speakers with just two channels of that four-channel amp, right? Exactly. So you might have a tweeter and a woofer in your passenger side door and in your driver's door.

And your left tweeter and woofer connect to one channel of power. They work together. Yes.

And the amplifier doesn't know if you've got a separate tweeter and woofer, it just sends out the front left signal to the whatever speakers you've got in your front left, and that's one channel of power. Same thing on your right, two rear speakers, two more channels. That's why a four-channel amp is so popular, because it simplifies all of that, gets the job done, and adding that extra power to some nicer speakers in those four locations, that is a recipe for headroom and depth and impact and just significantly better sound.

More power for all four speakers, it's kind of a big deal. Right. So the four-channel amp is one of the most popular styles of amplifier we sell.

You mentioned sub-amps are the other most popular. Mono. Mono.

Or one-channel. One-channel amplifiers. Right.

Mono. Sub-amps. This is industry jargon you need to be aware of, because all those terms are interchangeable.

Eric

Exactly. So, yeah, those are typically made specifically for subwoofers, and why that's important is, well, we talked about subwoofers needing a lot of power, and your speakers, your tweeters in your car don't need a lot of power. So that single channel for just your bass, having the crossovers be just for the bass so you can tune that subwoofer just right, kind of independently of everything else, that's kind of a big deal.

And that allows for people to get those crazy systems, if they so desire, where they can be heard coming down the street, talking about thousands of watts if desired, to just subwoofers. But, you know, even in the system not like that, it does give the ability to dial in that subwoofer even better. And that's what comes built in to those powered subs that we love so much, right?

That's why you don't have to consider those when you go down that path.

So the difference between power on sub-amps is, like you said, hundreds, maybe thousands of watts for just a sub. The rest of your speakers, they don't need anywhere near that amount of power. Not near.

70 watts, 75 watts, 100 watts per channel is, yeah, that's a big deal. That is going to make a night and day difference in the overall sound quality of your car. Whether you do a sub or not, good speakers with 100 watts of power, huge.

And just think about that when compared to the other ways to power your speakers, right? A factory radio, I'm not talking about like the premium systems, right, but like your base-level factory stereos, typically they're 5 to 10 watts of power per channel. An aftermarket radio, I mean, they're more powerful, but not by a lot.

They're about double that, about 20 watts of power per channel. So the difference between a 20-watt aftermarket head unit and a 100-watt amplifier, ginormous. Having that much more power gives you the headroom and the detail and the clarity and the presence of music that's just amazing.

That's what you need to make that happen.

Eric

Yeah. You know, we briefly talked about it in the last episode when we were talking about subwoofers, but let's take a moment just to confirm that we're talking about RMS power here, right? And we talked about that before as being kind of that sustained measurement for power where you could play a subwoofer in the last episode for a long period of time and it'd be in its happy place and you're good to go.

And that peak power number, kind of, it's a number that gets thrown out there and there's not really a standard for. So we kind of shy away from that. So, you know, for the sake of this discussion, you know, we're comfortably talking about RMS power here.

Yeah. And just like with subs, you're going to see 200 watts of peak power versus a 100 watts of RMS power. And that 100 watts is the number you want to think about.

And should you ever exceed that? Let's talk about this for a second. This is a thing.

Yeah. That's a bit of a... We've had an internal debate about this for years.

And here's the deal. The max recommended RMS power is a number given to us by the manufacturers.

Eric

Yeah.

Right. So JL Audio, Kicker, Pioneer, whoever makes speakers gives us that number. They say, this is no more than this.

Yeah.

Eric

Let me give you an example of that. So a subwoofer might say it can work with up to 500 watts of power. So does that mean at 501, it blows up?

No. It simply doesn't mean that. Probably not.

Right?

Eric

If it does, it might not be because of just the power. Right. So it might be some other factors at play.

It does mean that as soon as you give it 501 watts, they might not warranty that anymore. Right.

Eric

Right.

And if you do have a problem, it's kind of your fault, not theirs.

Eric

Yeah. So here, our line in the sand has always been with the manufacturer's recommended power. And we do that because really we want to protect you.

We want to protect the person using the sub so that your product's always backed. And our manufacturers, they know what they're doing. They're recommending that power for very, very good reasons.

And if you've been around the car stereo block, you might be hearing this going, but I know I can power speakers with even more than the max RMS that the manufacturer said. I've done it before and I didn't blow any speakers.

Eric

You sound like some people I know.

And you know what? You're right. You can.

If you know what you're doing, and you have thought about this the entire step of the way in planning out your system, you've thought about it with what music and how you're getting it. Is it a clean source of music? Is it running through a nice aftermarket head unit with strong processing that provides a very clean, strong signal to your amplifiers?

And then you've gone with an amplifier that you have picked and tuned specifically for the speakers you're installing.

Eric

Right. And you've set those crossover points exactly right where you're not sending the frequencies that the sub's going to struggle with.

Maybe you've installed a digital signal processor or an EQ or something that allows you to totally tweak the heck out of the system so that you're only sending those speakers exactly what they can handle, despite the fact that you're using more power than they're rated for. You're not going to blow them because you know what you're doing. If that's a little bit above your head, don't worry.

It's above my head. I don't do it. I don't exceed the max RMS, and Crutchfield is never going to recommend that.

In writing on our website, your advisor, when they recommend if you call us and talk to an advisor, they will never tell you to get a speaker and an amplifier combination that doesn't make sense, and they're going to use that max RMS as their guide.

Eric

Yeah, that's a good guideline in general. It's where most people want to be. Can you go above it?

Yeah, but you do run more risk when you do, so that's what we're just trying to keep you from doing.

We were really looking forward to talking about that. We totally did that, and I don't think we really finished up talking channels.

Eric

Yeah, we should probably go back to talking about channels.

Let's go back to channels.

Eric

I'm so excited to talk about a hot topic. Like, oh yeah, let's just tell the world what we actually think. Yeah, we know you can, but you shouldn't.

So four-channel amps, very popular, very useful. So are sub-amps. So that's five channels of amplification, and if you're going to do a sub and you're going to do four speakers and you want them all to have power, you need five channels of amplification.

Wouldn't it be cool if they put all of that into one box?

Eric

Hmm. I feel like this is one of those setups again.

Yeah. I was setting it up. Are you going to hit it or no?

But they do. Yeah. They do.

Eric

Yeah, you can do that. So we started with the four-channel and we talked about the mono amps, and yeah, there are five-channel amps, and guess what? Those amps will handle all your highs and potentially have a channel just for your subwoofer as well.

A five-channel amp is a four-channel amp and a sub-amp in one box.

Eric

That's exactly what they are. That's exactly what it is. So often you'll see a power rating where it might say 50 watts times four and then 300 times one, and when you have four and you add one to it, yeah, well, that's five channels of power, but one of those channels is very different from the others.

That's a very popular configuration these days. We've got more and more great solutions in those multi-channel amps that have built-in subwoofer amps, and we're seeing people really like these because the size of them has gotten smaller and the power has gotten greater all at the same time. So now we've got some really good solutions in small packages that can maybe potentially handle your whole system.

Yeah. It's hard to get excited about the improvements in amplifier technology, but if you're into this stuff, it is really exciting that they've been able to refine the design of amplifiers so that they don't produce as much heat, they can be in smaller packages, they can fit in tighter spaces in your car and produce more power than ever before.

Eric

Oh, wow. They really, really can. It's awesome.

Yeah. It used to be for, you know, just throw a term out, a thousand-watt sub-amp, it used to be we would call those surfboard amplifiers because they were this small, but, well, they wouldn't be the size of a surfboard, but maybe the size of a skateboard. Sure.

I've seen amps that big, and if you can picture that, that would be pretty hard to find a good location for in your car. We're looking at you, Rockford Fosgate. That's not a dig, either, because that's a beautiful amplifier.

JL, too. They had a big old one as well. We loved those, and these days some of those same manufacturers are making amps a quarter of the size of what they would have been in the past.

So, you know, that's something to get pretty excited about as far as amplifier technology.

We've talked about simplifying this stuff down so that anybody can kind of understand it, right? Yeah. I think you oversimplified when you made sure everybody knew that four plus one was five.

Hey, we're here. Hot take. Four plus one.

That is a hot take. And you know what's more than five? Six.

Ooh, wait, that is bigger. And eight. Yeah.

Eric

Right?

And you're going to see those. You're going to see two-channel amplifiers on our website. Most of the time, you don't need that stuff.

Right. You need a four-channel amp and a sub-amp, or put them both in one box and get a five-channel. Those two-channels, those six-channels, those eight-channels, those are typically for very specific scenarios.

If you just want to power two speakers, you might need a two-channel amp. That's not the case most of the time. If you want to power tweeters, mid-ranges, and woofers all from one amplifier, a six-channel amp might be perfect for doing that.

Most people don't need that most of the time.

Eric

Yeah. You like to use the term tweakability, and some of those amplifiers that have six and eight channels, they do offer more tweakability, but with tweakability comes complexity as well.

When you're going to put an amplifier in your car, you have to think about hooking it up to the stereo, right? That's where it gets its music, and when you have an aftermarket stereo, if you've done your job right, remember episode one, you picked out a stereo with preamp outputs, that's their job, is to send an amplifier a good audio signal. You might want to put an amplifier into your car without replacing the radio, though.

Maybe the factory radio looks good, fits nice in the dash, does everything you want it to do, you just want it to sound better. Adding amplifiers to factory radios, totally possible. It's a little different in how they hook up, and I want to start with the most magical experience.

There are companies making interfaces designed to take the signal that's coming out of a factory radio and make it work for an aftermarket amplifier, right? And those are some fancy adapters, iDatalink, Maestro, they make the radio replacement modules we mentioned in episode one, they also make amplifier modules that you can use to do exactly this. Basically, it creates those preamp outputs that your factory radio does not have.

We create those in multiple ways. Fancy adapters like the iDatalink Maestro in a DSR-1 from Rockford Fosgate with preamp outputs. There's line output converters.

There are several other fancy interfaces just like that, that that's all they do, is they turn the factory speaker outputs into preamp outputs suitable for sending music into an amplifier.

Eric

Yeah, I always think about it this way, you don't really want to amplify an amplified signal. So when the signal gets to the speaker in that factory system, it's already amplified, right? That's what's giving those speakers juice.

Well, if that's the only signal I have to deal with, if I want more juice and I amplify that signal that has already been amplified, usually it results in noise because you're amplifying things you didn't even know were there before. So you need to basically treat that signal in a way that an amplifier can do its thing without amplifying noise. And that's when these adapters come into play.

Yep, these adapters, line output converters, iDatalink Maestro AR Pack Amp Pro. I know I'm throwing out some jargon and some terms you don't know about, but amplifiers that have speaker-level inputs. These are basically kind of like four different ways of accomplishing this mission of converting the output from your factory radio to an input suitable for the amplifier.

Which one of those is right for your car depends on your car and your amplifier. And that can be a little complicated to figure out, probably deeper than we want to dive on this episode. But you can just reach out to any advisor at crutchfield.com, just the phone number at the top. You can chat with them. There's articles about this. It's totally doable.

It just takes a little bit of extra thought and planning as opposed to just an aftermarket radio with some RCA cables.

Eric

Yeah, just know if you're going down that path of what you're trying to do is keep that factory radio but make it sound better while replacing that amplifier. We're probably going to go ahead and have you replace your speakers as well because the factory speakers aren't going to be really suitable for handling a now, you know, could be really strong signal because we're trying to get it to sound better. So those two things would probably come together in that scenario.

We get people asking all the time, how much power can my factory speakers handle? We have no idea. They don't give us those power ratings and we don't hook up measuring equipment to figure out what's the max RMS of your factory paper woofer.

Just know that if you want great sound, you're going to need new speakers. You're also going to need more power. And you don't do more power without also doing new speakers.

Right. Is that what you just said? I just said it differently?

Yeah, one of those sounded great. Yeah, pretty much. Lastly, when you install an amplifier into your car, it's not like a radio, right?

We don't have a harness that just plugs it in to your car like we do for the radio, like we do for speakers, right? We can use all the factory wiring if you're just replacing the radio or just replacing speakers. We cannot use the factory wiring for most amplifiers, which is because most amplifiers to produce the power they produce, they need a lot of power from your car, from your battery and your alternator.

They're going to draw so much current that none of the wires in your car are thick enough to carry all of that electricity from your car to the amplifier. So you're going to need to install a power wire that goes from your battery all the way to your amp, a ground wire that connects it to the metal chassis of your car, some wires that take the music from your stereo to your amplifier. And the amplifiers do not come with that wire.

Eric

Right, yeah, none of them do. So just know if you're looking at, when you're building this package, right, when you're building this out and looking at all the bits and pieces, an amp wiring kit is going to be part of that. You know, the considerations have already been made for each amplifier on our website.

So we've paired up the correct one with each amp. So some of those cables can be rather thick, you know, if it's a really powerful amplifier, you know, the gauge of that wire is going to get thicker that's connected to the battery. So you know, the good news is, once again, we've kind of figured that out for you.

And yeah, so just buy it from us, you'll be all right.

There you go. And those amplifier wiring kits typically are your power connections, fuses and power wires and ground wires and all that. You might also need some RCA cables to get music into your amp.

You might need some speaker wire, and those might not even be included in the amp wiring kits. And I know this sounds complex, but if you're still listening, you're probably interested in a pretty amazing sounding car stereo, right? Because that's where we're at here.

And so that's what it takes. And all of that information is on crutchfield.com, the really nitty-gritty detail. It's in articles.

Go to the amplifiers and look. You'll find that stuff. If you want some additional personal help, call us.

crutchfield.com. Advisors can help.

Eric

Absolutely.

That's what we're here for. If you want us to answer questions about your car stereo in any way, shape or form, or anything else Crutchfield sells, drop us a line, podcast at crutchfield.com, and we will, if we get some good questions, maybe we'll read them on the air. That would be awesome.

Absolutely. This was the last episode in our four-part series.

Eric

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, let's see, receivers, speakers, subwoofers, amps.

That pretty much wraps it up, right? There's other stuff.

Of course there is. There's other stuff. There's always more stuff.

And I think we might even dive deep on those in some mini episodes. We might have an entire episode dedicated to, should you get a radio with a volume knob or knobs? Oh, goodness.

Don't get us started on knobs. Yeah. That could either be a really short episode, or we could talk about volume knobs for an entire hour.

So we'll probably shorten that one up. We could talk a lot more about, we've mentioned the word tweakability, and the ability to adjust and fine-tune your system. Sometimes that takes extra equipment like DSPs and EQs and processors and stuff.

That's probably a whole separate mini episode. Retro Sound makes cars for, or radios for classic cars, right? We haven't addressed the classic cars really here in this series at all.

That probably is its own separate mini episode. So we've got more to talk about, but what we've done here, or at least what we've attempted to accomplish, is to give you a pretty good start at figuring out the basic car stereo components and why you might need them to get your system sounding good enough to make you happy on your drive to work, or wherever you want to go. That's right.

Eric

So on behalf of JR and myself ... No, I'm just kidding. You do it.

I didn't know what to do. I know. He's throwing me for a loop.

I know.

Are you taking over?

Eric

Just had a panicked look there.

No. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Don't do that. Thank you all so much for listening and celebrating Crutchfield with us. It is our 50th year of Crutchfield.

This is season four of the podcast. We've got more stuff like this planned. Some more how to choose type of scenarios and some mini episodes.

A whole bunch of fun stuff coming out. 50 years of Crutchfield, 50 years of Eric and JR in the consumer electronics industry.

Eric

Combined. Don't age me like that.

Combined. Hey, I can age you because I'm older than you. I'm turning 50 this year too.

It's a banner year for everything going on here at Crutchfield. Again, thanks for listening. On behalf of Eric, I'm JR. We'll see you next time. See you.

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