How to Choose a Car Audio Amplifier

Choosing the right car audio amplifier for your car stereo system is one of the most important decisions you can make. All of your sound will be travelling through your amplifier so you want to make sure you have a good quality amp that can play as loud as you want it to. It's important to know that your amplifier takes the signal from your head unit and makes it loud enough to be able to power your speakers.

If you have many different speakers, like a couple of subwoofers and a few full range speakers and maybe some tweeters you general get the best sound from using a multi channel amplifier or different amplifiers that are dedicated to each type of speakers. Car audio pros usually use a dedicated amplifier for just their subwoofers because an amplifier will usually do a better job reproducing a specific range of frequencies, bass for example. There are lots of choices when choosing an amplifier, so let's go over a few of the most important things.

RMS Power: This is referred to as the "real power rating" on amplifiers. Many companies list peak watts or max watts but the RMS power is what we are really looking for. The power output of an amplifier should be close to the speakers it will be driving. It's important that you don't drastically over power your speakers or even under power them, as it can cause blown speakers or terrible sound quality. We are looking to match up the speakers RMS and the amplifiers RMS for the best sound quality and amplifier reliability.

Another very important thing to consider is called: THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) is a specification that should be included with the rated power output. An example would be "50 watts x 2 @ 0.5% THD" This spec says that at an output level of 50 watts into each channel the Total Harmonic Distortion will be no more than 0.5%. We do not want anything that is higher than one percent. Anything lower than 1% is usually fine. The lower the THD spec the better the amp can sound. However, don't worry too much about it, as the human ear can't really tell the difference between.05% and.5% as reported by the folks at this.

Built-in Crossovers: This feature tells you that the amp can amplify a specific range of sound. It also prevents you from needing to buy a separate crossover system. A build in crossover is great for a subwoofer amplifier.