Anyway to measure wattage between amplifier and subwoofer with a DMM?

[Trepkos 10+ year member]

Ditto

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[kross 10+ year member]

Watts is volts * amps. To measure amperage, you have a couple options. The first is to disconnect one of the speaker wires and put a meter inline with the speaker. The meter must be able to handle the amount of current going to the sub, and it must be able to measure AC amps, and not just DC amps. The second option is to get one of those inductive ammeters, which goes over the outside of one of the wires, and it determines the current flow by measuring the magnetic field around the wire.

 

[Fi Car Audio 10+ year member]

Extech MA-200 AC clamp meter will help. You can pick them up online for about $50. Its a DMM that measures AC current.

Measure current, then voltage, and calculate W from there. With an AC clamp you can also find impedance rise at specific frequencies, tuning, and is overall rather useful to have. I think its the MA-220 that also has a DC clamp (not sure how much extra) that allows you to see how much DC current is pulled by the amps from your charging system as well...

I have the MA-200 as a back up (incase the Fluke dies). Works fine, although low Ohm measurements vary some...

 

[thch 10+ year member]

this normally is not a metric that you would care about. in short, you only care about SPL output, not the power required to accomplish this.

I had a long description of all the sources of error you get. in short, when measured, you will get a number that doesn't have much added info over testing that could have been done with a DMM.

why are you wanting to measure power output of the amplifier?

 

[Trepkos 10+ year member]

this normally is not a metric that you would care about. in short, you only care about SPL output, not the power required to accomplish this.
I had a long description of all the sources of error you get. in short, when measured, you will get a number that doesn't have much added info over testing that could have been done with a DMM.

why are you wanting to measure power output of the amplifier?

Basically I have two 12" Kicker CompVT 2-Ohm subwoofers which operate with 400w RMS in a sealed 2.36cu ft box hooked up to a Hifonics Titan Txi1008D Class D mono block amplifier which supposedly is sending both subwoofers 500watts but unfortunately I am getting no real bass response unless I turned gain to 0.2v, and the a bass eq to +5db and the bass boost to max.

But I thought with 500watts to each subwoofers I could avoid possibly clipping the signal to my subwoofers and still get the same amount of sound that one would normally get from 500watts x 2 12" subwoofers, but it seems Im not able to produce that sound without the use of the bass eq and bass boost.

 

[nauc 10+ year member]

Basically I have two 12" Kicker CompVT 2-Ohm subwoofers which operate with 400w RMS in a sealed 2.36cu ft box hooked up to a Hifonics Titan Txi1008D Class D mono block amplifier which supposedly is sending both subwoofers 500watts but unfortunately I am getting no real bass response unless I turned gain to 0.2v, and the a bass eq to +5db and the bass boost to max.
But I thought with 500watts to each subwoofers I could avoid possibly clipping the signal to my subwoofers and still get the same amount of sound that one would normally get from 500watts x 2 12" subwoofers, but it seems Im not able to produce that sound without the use of the bass eq and bass boost.

are you sure you wired them up correctly

wiring info http://mobile.jlaudio.com/support_pages.php?page_id=145

 

[Trepkos 10+ year member]

Yes