Moding Car Amp

[Superblunt]

I Have a old Calibra Steath 4x400w amp I would like to make it more Powerfull. If I replace the Capacitor with biggerones will this give me more power.

I am quite new to amps so anyhelp will be appreciated

Thanks

[Stuart Easson]

Hi,

There is no single easy answer to your question...

Depending on the design replacing the caps may make some, little or no difference at all. The switch mode power supply (SMPS) runs at a very high freq, so you must use caps designed for this purpose or risk damaging the new ones...and the rest of the amp...

If the SMPS is regulated, you can't get more voltage out of it without changing the internal calibration, not easy for someone just starting, hence no more power, regardless of battery voltage...

On the other hand if you have an unregulated SMPS, and the majority of amps are in this category, you can get more power by making sure you have the highest possible voltage at the power input to the amp. It is probably designed to work at anything up to 15 or 16 volts (cehck the manual). If somehow you could get 16v, it would correspond to a power increase of more than 70% over the 12v power.

At full rated power your amp is pulling more than 100amps from the power lines, if they are not very well executed you will be losing voltage and your maximum power output will be suffering, a lot. To put this into perspective, if your power lines have a resistance of 0.01ohms, from the battery terminal to the amp terminal, at 100amps you are losing 1 volt. 0.01ohms is really hard to achieve without huge, perfectly clean terminals, 4 or bigger gauge cables, and a really nice install job...

After a 'perfect' install one of the best upgrades you can give any high power car install is a better charging system, alternator, battery etc, the voltage will tend to stay high and allow the amp to do it's work better.

Hope that helps

Stuart