Amp Clipping At Moderate Levels

[cooldoctorb 10+ year member]

I helped my brother hook up his new amps and subs in a custom sealed box. We are using 16 gauge 4 conductor tied together to make a thicker 2 conductor. The subs are Audiobahn 12" compressions (model: awp312t) running it's dual 2 ohm voice coil in seres to pull 1200watts rms at 1 ohm from an Audiobahn amp (model: a12001dt). The amps are using separate 4 gauge wires for power and ground. The head unit is a pioneer (model: deh-p9300). The amps will clip at moderate levels and clip very hard when I have the head unit at -15 for the sub out and the volume about midway and the amps about half way on the gain. I was thinking it might be the speaker wire we are using or maybe the ground isn't good or the amp aren't good. any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks

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[Raisedin305 5,000+ posts]

I helped my brother hook up his new amps and subs in a custom sealed box. We are using 16 gauge 4 conductor tied together to make a thicker 2 conductor. The subs are Audiobahn 12" compressions (model: awp312t) running it's dual 2 ohm voice coil in seres to pull 1200watts rms at 1 ohm from an Audiobahn amp (model: a12001dt). The amps are using separate 4 gauge wires for power and ground. The head unit is a pioneer (model: deh-p9300). The amps will clip at moderate levels and clip very hard when I have the head unit at -15 for the sub out and the volume about midway and the amps about half way on the gain. I was thinking it might be the speaker wire we are using or maybe the ground isn't good or the amp aren't good. any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks

Get a DMM, set the gains using that.

 

[flakko 5,000+ posts]

mr jmac posted a nice sticky to answer questions like this:

http://forums.caraudio.com/vb/showthread.php?t=63933

 

[cooldoctorb 10+ year member]

OK, I adjusted the gains. It sounds better, but It's not getting as loud as I think it should and on certain frequencies it sound a lot louder but with distortion. Maybe it could be the box.