Powering a car stereo head unit at home!

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Hi guys, got a question for you. I recently discovered my dad's old car stereo and its in working order. Panasonic H07MKII i think, but anyway since I dont have a car and I want to use this in my room, I thought about several ways of powering it but none have seemed rational. I kinda wanna know if its at all possible? and what would be the easiest way?

I like the portability of the car stereo and it doesnt sound too bad either (when it was in the car!) I dont want to blow my neighbours away or anything, just want to connect my 4ohm speakers to it and enjoy music in my room!!!

If you can help I would be really grateful!!

BTW: ALL the wires are cut at the back and I've identified the speaker wires but there's 3 other wires, RED, BLACK & BLUE. I'm not sure which ones are the power ones, any advice would be great! Thanks

Thanks

Harminder
 
if you are feeling a bit ghetto.
You could get a motorcycle 12v battery. and wire a small 12vdc transformer in parrellel to it to keep it charged. that shoud do the job.

what i mean bu transformer is just cut the end off a old nintendo power supply or equivlent. those put out about 3A that will power the deck easly and the small motercycle battery as a big buffer for power pull larger than the amperage arting.

if you are feeling cool you could get a SPDT relay and wire the transformer to the relay and have the remote turn on as a trigger to start charging the battery olny when the deck is turned on...

it is ghetto..but it will be safe and work...
 
PC PSU's have a dirty output due to lack of sufficient caps, not to mention their fairly poor quality and lack of decent cooling...

I highly recommend a regulated 12V power supply. Best ones I've found for the price are Astron and Tenma.

All you would have to do is hook up the yellow battery positive(+) of the head unit to the positive (+) terminal of the power supply and the black ground(-) of the head unit to the negative(-) terminal of the power supply. Hook up the red ignition (+) of the head unit to the (+) of the power supply, but be sure there is a switch there to turn it on and off as a car does (if you leave the power supply on, since constant power is being provided to the battery positive, you won't lose your settings).
 
Thanks everyone for posting your answers, I think I'd wanna go for the 12V power supply, but I want to know in particular which ones can output 12v 5A which is what the head unit asks for. And if I was to use a PC PSU, how would I switch it on without it being connected to a motherboard since the huge connector isnt connected to anything and I couldnt get it to start. Thanks for your help!!

Harminder

I have attached a picture of the head unit. It is of the wires, speaker wires separate and power etc wires separate.

:)
 

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I've used an old AT PC powersupply to power a car head unit. I didn't expect too much of the sound quality because of the switching noise etc. but it worked remarkably well. Not as good as a regular linear powersupply though.

The older PC powersupplies need to see sufficient "load" so I put a resistor (cheap 17w wirewound) on the 5 volt load to prevent ot from switching of.

I also put a 25V 10000uF cap on the 12V to try to get rid of some of the ripple. Maybe it improved the sound, i did not listen critically before these mods which I made directly from the start.
 
A 12v DC @5A regulated power supply would be much cheaper and much easier to use than a computer power supply.

Example:

http://i6.ebayimg.com/06/i/08/d7/28/55_1_sbl.JPG

http://i17.ebayimg.com/04/i/08/d4/cc/aa_1_sbl.JPG

It has the positive and negative terminals on the back.

Some have nice binding posts and clip terminals:

http://i13.ebayimg.com/01/i/08/dc/25/27_1_b.JPG

The previous examples put out 20A and 35A. And they were very cheap when I searched them on ebay, and they can certainly be used in place of a 5A power supply. Ebay would be the best place to get one, too, I just hope they would be willing to ship to where you live (which I believe is outside the US...).
 
I want to try this for a Whole House Audio System!

I building a new home and have pre-wired the home for a whole house audio(WHA) unit 6 sources to 8 zones. My question is how many amps will I need for the converter if I am not going to use the radio speakers, I want to just use RCA jacks from the head unit to my WHA. The main reason is I want to get HD Radio and the selection for Home HD Radio is limited.
 
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