Hey Folks,
I have a Pioneer 35wX4 amp just lying around and was thinking of hooking it up to my TL. It's nothing outrageous, but it's a nice little amp. Would the stock speakers including the subwoofer benefit from getting a little more wattage?

I was thinking of hooking the amp up to the sub mono, or possible running two channels to the sub and two channels to the front door speakers.

Can you foresee any problems with that? I've been toying with the idea of getting a shallow mount 8" sub to replace the stock one as well. Any input is welcome.

 

i'm no pro, meaning i only do sound installs on my own cars
but while 35w may work for speakers it's not much more than stock, and 70w is very low for a sub

shallow 8" will sound almost the same as stock, or at least the shallow that can run on 70w

so, IMO hooking up a $100 amp is not worth the trouble

 

At 2 ohms it's actually 50w X 4. The stock speakers are only getting like 15w or something like that from the stock amp, aren't they? And the stock sub is only getting 40w from the stock amp. Would it hurt the speakers to up the wattage to 50w per channel?

If I ran the external amp mono to the subwoofer, it could be getting about 150w or so RMS. I wonder if it would handle that?

 

just about anything is better than the stock amp, but i wouldnt go to the trouble to hook that up correctly.

 

let's start with some important questions
what are you after?
do you want a louder sound or a better sound?

and to your original post, if you don't mind going through trouble of hooking it up , just to get a little more volume out of it, then go for it
after all, there is no better way to learn than from personal experience
if you place the amp under the passenger seat you won't have to spend much on wiring

don't worry about ripping the stock speakers, they should start distorting before they fall apart, so you'll have your clues on setting the gain

 

I'm pretty much looking for better sound. I am reasonably happy with the sound of the stock sub, I would just like it to be a bit deeper without distorting it, louder with the volume down and free from distortion when it's turned up a bit.

I was looking today on the forums and saw that some people had used the Basslink. That may be an option too, if I can convince my wife to give up a small amount of trunk space. :P

 

if "better" is what you want then you'd either need a lot of experience in tuning and manufacturing skills to relocate speakers, or you need an auto-tuning DSP

because even IF you produce a much better amp then what you have and replace all the speakers with aftermarket the system will still need to have EQ and TA to sound good

amps are mainly for getting it louder, not better
good speakers can help improve the tonality, but they won't TA or EQ themselves

so, my advice is to do some homework, see what people have installed, join diymobileaudio and plan your update as well as your budget

forget about that amp you have, if you find use for it in your plan, good, but don't build your future setup around one cheap piece of equipment that happened to sit idle on your shelf, it's not a good recipe

good luck!

 

Thanks for the advice. I'm glad I've found these forums.