i have a kenwood kac-7204 1000 watt amp with 2 rockford 10" p2's.

at 4ohms it runs 170rms x 2 and at 2ohms it runs 250rms.

i would like to get it to run on 2 ohms so i can have the speakers running at what they are rated for. but i have two problems.

one is the fact that after so long, and depending on the volume it doesnt take long sometimes... my amp will shut off. it wont shut off completely. the red power light still stays on. but the blue light that indicates if my subs are on and off shuts down and no bass! whats the deal?!?!

also i went to bridge the wires so i could get two ohms and blew a fews the second i tried to turn it up. so what am i to do? could i not be getting enough power? i have 4 gauge power wire and ground wire if i remember correctly. i have a 95 ford ranger and even with this small setup, if turned up i see my battery gauge dancin like mc hammer! which sucks because now i dont think i can put in an amp to my speakers so where do i start? i plan on going to mcor's shop soon to get the big three upgrade.

 

We can just check it out for you when you come in for your appointment. I wouldn't experiment much more until then. I would hate to see you kill your equipment if there is just a simple wire problem or something...

 

Don't take this the wrong way, but that amp wouldn't do 1000 watts if it was struck by lightning.

It is a two channel amp with a 40 amp fuse rating, and like most mainstream two channel amps, their lowest acceptable impedance is 2 ohms stereo or 4 ohms bridged. My guess is that you wired your subs to below this impedance and your amp said no-no.

You can't necessarily 'get' your amp to run at the impedance you want by bridging it. The impedance of each subwoofer's coil will designate how you should wire the subs to the amp. If the subs are dual 4 ohm, you can either run in stereo, one sub per channel at two ohms, or bridged at 4 ohms. If the subs are dual 2 ohm, you are limited to only running in 4 ohms stereo with that amp which is the 170x2 rating, so if thats not enough you should look into getting a mono amp that runs at 2 ohms.

All that being said, your truck should handle that amp without a problem, and even should handle a 4 channel just fine also, and 4 gauge is plenty for that amp as well. So overall, it is probably a good idea to have professionals do the job.

EDIT: Matt beat me to it when I was typing my big reply.

 

Yes, but your reply was so much more informative. You are one knowledgable installer!

 

my amp had the power and protect light on at the same time, i found out that my RCAs ground was SOMEHOW touching its own power (shitty RCAs)
So i bought some stinger RCAs and it fixed it....

just some insight

 

rca ground? i thought that just went straight from the back of the deck to the amp?

 

the outer ring of the rca is the ground, and the inner stem is the power

 

rca signal is ac, but it does normally share chasis ground, check you amps ground, check you batteries ground, check you frames ground, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, gounds, it almost always a bad ground,


i bet your radio has a bad ground and is tring to ground thru the rca's

 

well see on the ford ranger forums, a guy had just recently posted up about the same problem, and guess what? he's running the same amp.

 

ford used a lot of sub-par wiring in a lot of their cars. the voltage gauge acting like that is a dead giveaway.