Car Audio- Wattage Explained.

[digi7al ph0enix]

This is for all of you how are building a nice sound system, or if you are thinking about it. There is a lot of hype surrounding the wattage of speakers (mainly subwoofers), and it can be hard to decide what is right for you. While I won't get into the brands debate, I will do my best to explain what you need to know about speaker, amp, and head unit wattage. First things first. For those of you who don't know, a "Head Unit" is the technical name for a CD, Tape, or AM/FM Reciever that you mount in your dash. The wattage on this is fairly important, since most of the time you will be using this to power your component speakers (anything in the car that isn't a subwoofer). Here is where it gets tricky, and you will have to take your time and do the research. All head units, speakers, and amplifiers have 2 type of power ratings. The first, which most manufactuers put on the packaging in large letters, is PEAK POWER. There is one thing and one thing only you need to know about peak power. The the average person it means absolutly nothing. Peak power represents what power the head unit, speakers, or amplifier can put out for a very short burst at any given time. DO NOT EVER BUY A PIECE OF AUDIO EQUIPMENT BASED ON PEAK POWER. It will leave you not only disappointed, but you will end up damaging things as you will end up with over or under powered equipment. What you really want to look for is known as "RMS Wattage". What RMS means is rather useless, so we won't cover it here. Here is what you need to know about RMS wattage: RMS is the amount of power your device can put out continuously. For example, lets say person A buys a 500watt max, 100watt RMS subwoofer, and person B buys a 300watt max, 250watt RMS subwoofer. This means that person B can put out more than twice as much power continuously as person A can, even though the max power on person A's subwoofer is higher. The same is true for head units, subwoofers, and amplifiers. Now comes the tricky part. The ideal way to build a system is to have power that matches all around. What this means is that if you have 20watt RMS speakers, and you have 4 of them, you are going to want a head unit that provides 80watts RMS power to use them to their full potential. The same is true for amplifiers. If you have a 700watt RMS subwoofer, you are going to need a 700watt RMS amp to use the sub to its full ability. There are other factors that also influence what amp etc. to buy such as the ohms the equipment is rated at etc. but that will be covered later. I hope you learned something from reading this-

Dave