couple issues during recent upgrade

shadypac

Junior Member
Ok well I recently upgraded my front speakers with a set of CMX 265 Kicks which sound great btw, just a few issues im having which i doubt is related to the speakers to begin with. Im powering them with a kicker ZX350.2 which puts out about 110 RMS per side which is no wheres near to much for the rainbows. For some reason though I feel like things start to sound shitty and I get some distortion at about 75% gain on the amp with only about 70% volume on the head unit.

I tried to do the gain settings the way many tutorials show you to but even with the calc methods I dont get the voltage that I come up with in the formula, probably because the speakers are under powered and can take as high of a gain that the amp could put out without causing distortion from the amp. Regardless Im not sure where to look to try and solve this, playing with some of the EQ settings in the head unit seem to fix it a little, for instance to get a decent level of base without any distortion I turned the sub EQ up in the head unit, the regular bass down, and upped the lower frequencies in the EQ settings. Seemed to balance out and not be as bad.

Also Im getting hissing in the speakers which I think I had a little of before all these upgrades... its just more noticable now since its being powered by an amp. Wheres the best place to look for this, check grounds for the head unit? Im using the factory ground and im also splitting into the connection to ground my ipod adapter...this a bad idea?

 
actually i think the reason for the first issue is the "LOUD" setting in my head unit was on at higher volumes, i read thats not a good thing to do and will cause distortion so im gonna put it off and re-tweak a bit.

 
I tried to do the gain settings the way many tutorials show you to but even with the calc methods I dont get the voltage that I come up with in the formula, probably because the speakers are under powered and can take as high of a gain that the amp could put out without causing distortion from the amp.
What are you using for a test tone? What source media (CD, iPod)? What frequency? What level (0dB, -3dB, etc)? What are you setting the volume control on the headunit to while playing the test tone?

What head unit? Are you using a line driver?

What meter are you using to measure voltage? What is it set on? Hopefully VAC, and not VDC or anything else. Are you using autorange?

And just to double check your math, I come up with 21 volts for 110w @ 4 ohms.

 
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shadypac

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