Dimming lights

[skooter]

Question, I have a problem with my lights on my alpine dimming in a bass note. dash lights don't dimm hardly at all. nether do the head lights, just my deck. is this a ground problem?

[Perry Babin]

Do you have speakers connected to the head unit?

[I Am An Idiot]

Also is it one of the alpine decks that they suggest you connect the constant (Yellow) wire directly to the battery?

[skooter]

yes, I have my 5 1/4 stock door speakers and rear 5 1/4 speakers hooked to the normal speaker wires from the deck. it is a Alpine 9805 deck. has front, rear, and sub RCAs. Only using the sub RCA as of now.

[aleksandar]

As the Idiot sad its better that you connect the alpine directly to the battery because mine has 20amp fuse "alpine 9813r"so its drawing lot of power where the car manufactures dont have in mind that you will need 20 amps for the radio, so the box with the fuses from the car maybe are in danger and you can probably blow a fuse from that box and you will be all in questions what happend now.

So connect the + from the alpine directly to the batery with a decent power cable also i think that the lights from the dash will not going to dimm because probably there are led's and not normal bulbs, where the headlight are other thing.

Other point is to ground the unit properly and maybe your amplifier for the sub is drawing lot of power so you can add a capacitor for the amplifier that is powering the sub and if you use thin cables for all of the setup can cause dimming instead of useing big fat cables, also its better that you do "The Big 3" search on google because am lazy to explain it right now but big 3 is a very good upgrade that doesent cost a lot.

P.S also replace the + that goes from the battery to the main box with fuses under the hood with nice awg2 or awg0 a nice upgrade for future who knows maybe you will add more amps............

[skooter]

Thank you for the heads up! will do that tomarrow!

[Perry Babin]

If the head unit has crossovers for the internal amp, set them to high pass and ~200Hz. That will take some of the stress off of the head unit's internal amp.

A better option would be to use an external amp. Using the internal amplifiers will make the head unit run extremely hot. With no speaker load on the head unit, light dimming should not be a problem.

[skooter]

Thanks perry, I am planning on running my Polk componet set (when I get a chance to install them) to my old school kenwood amp.

[aleksandar]

p.s alpine radios have option for disableing the internal amplifier check the manual its very simple thing Power IC "on-off" offcourse if you use external amp

[jol50]

You can grab an older alpine 30wx2 off ebay cheap and they work pretty well if you run HP on them. Just make sure if it takes plugs or DIN they come with it (the old black ones some have plugs). Maybe $20-50 will get you one of the smaller ones shipped. They sound nice, if you want really loud it will cost you more. Even the 30w x 4 go cheap often, the 40-50w/ch are more. Pretty sure the old black ones are mostly rated at 12v, so 30w is more like 45 at todays ratings. Or of course, get some other amp if you want...if it were me I'd rather have a real 30w x2 amp than any HU running speakers. I keep a couple amps like that around just in case.