So I just upgraded from Eclipse SC 8362 comps to HERTZ HSK 165s. I was running the eclipses on the front channels of a 4 channel EA4200 making 60 watts of channel. The Eclipses were rated for 100. Sound quality was good but I felt I had to crank the volume a bit too much to get the loudness I really wanted so I wanted to be sure to feed these new HERTZ comps as much juice as I could to make guarentee enough head room. The HSKs are rated for 125 so while they were swapping speakers I also had them bridge my Eclipse to the front components for 140-150- watts per side.
Thought I had a complete understanding of bridging. Now the more I read up on it the more Im unsure of myself. Some sites say bridging is the last thing you want to do, some say it's fine. Some say you will now have mono sound only, some say if done right you can still get stereo sound. Before you ask, the owner's manual for these things is a generic crappy piece of crap that covers like 3 different lines of amp and makes no mention whatsoever of detailed instructions to bridge and run in 2 channel mode except to say these things are rated 140 watts bridged at 4 ohms.
My question is, is it possible that Im still getting stereo sound or am I running mono now and needing to make some other modification? How do you tell exactly? When I play a crappy IPOD selection or or a not so great quality CD sometimes my soundstage gets narrow and it sounds like all the instruments and the vocalist are bunched up together in the middle of the windshield, but when I play a good CD with alot of instrumentals going on and I know where everything is supposed to be I get a strong sense of certain sounds coming from one speaker but not the other, or more loudly from one than the other, which I thought meant Im still getting stereo sound. Like for instance if I play some BB King/Eric Clapton there's a good sense that Clapton's guitar and voice come from far left and BB's guitar and voice come from far right.
From looking I believe what they did was take a left RCA and plug it in front left, the RCA from the other side and plug it in rear right. Then they wired the speaker wire in the conventional method to sum the channels. Woulda tried it myself but my owner's manual is crappy and my truck's whole bench seat has to come out to do anything with the amp so I figured why not just go to an Eclipse dealer.
So basically as I said the question is does it sound like Im still maintaining stereo sound with this setup. If not, what do I have to do to get it back.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Awesome speakers by the way... VERY good midbass. Before I had to set my eclipses at about 70 HZ to get a strong up front 'kick', these Hertz comps seem to do a better job of it at 80 HZ and probably would really pound of I set them even lower.
