Alright i have a 2 alpine amps, powering 2 12' jbls. the system sounds great however mainly during driving the amps will reset or something. the light on the amps will flash or sometimes stay solid and eventually the digital screen on the amps comes back up and the subs start again. any ideas?

 

MIne was doing the same thing when i had 2 amps. I talked to an installer at best buy and he told me that i was drawing to much power and it was like a protection for the amp to turn off. I dont know how guys here have the power for 2 amps.

 

Check for loose connections. Start at battery, fuse holder and follow all the way to amps.

 

Amp is going into protect mode so none of the components get fried. What amps do you have so we can see your amperage draw?

 

if it does that constantly, it just gets too hot and therefore goes in protect mode til it cools off, had this on one of my old amps

 

Check all the fuses and connections. If there is a loose connection, it will try to pull more power and will make the amp go into protect mode. Also try changing the fuse. It could be sending too much power, but just not enough to blow the fuse.

 

My first thought would be thermal shutdown due to overheating amps. Are they hot? Next would be that the speakers are showing an impedance that the amps are not designed to handle (which would cause them to overheat also). Next would be inability to draw suffucient current to power the subs (in which case, get a 5 farad cap if you don't already).

 

Cap wont help if he does not have enough current to begin with. Caps do not produce power. They only store power from your existing source. If your source is bad a cap won't magically fix it.

 

Also how do you have them wired? Are you running both straight from the battery? If so it might be time to get a power distrubution block. Basically you run a 1 gauge lead wire all the way from the battery to where your amps are, and then it has taps so you can tap off that to get power to the subs.

 

True -- however what I was thinking was that the amps may be shutting down due to a momentary (instantaneous) lack of current as a limitation of the battery, power cable, etc., and storing voltage for instantaneous, limited current draw above that threshold might alleviate the problem. Kind of a long shot and I agree fixing the root problem is a better approach. Caps still not a bad idea though, IMHO...

 

Nope, If the drain is big enough to turn the amp off a cap won't fix it.