I just bought a kicker 200watt 2 channel amp. I let circuit city hook it up and they hacked the job. So now im redoing it. I have a single compvr 12 kicker sub and have it in a bridged conection to the amp. When I plug both left and right rca wires into the input it cuts out when I turn it up loud. I can unplug either the right of left and it wont cut out. One question would be, is it bad to run it bridged with only one input like this? Its only a 200 wat amp but it dims my lights when it hits and the volt gauge goes down. Would I need a capicitor on a 200 watt amp? I thought they were for huge systems. Another question is am i using the amp to its full power by only having one rca pluged in? Thanks in advance for any halp
If you have the voice coils wired in parallel you're providing either a 2 or 1 0hm load both of which that amp wasn't designed to power bridged.
It also sounds like you might have the gain set too high. Most amps that utilize two inputs for mono operation use a summing amplifier to combine both. This essentially doubles the voltage input requiring half the gain to achieve the same output as utilizing merely one rca.
So do two things.
1) verify that the voice coils are wired correctly
2) then make sure the gain is set properly as well
I verified that the speaker is wired in series. It is 2ohm per voice coil so that gives it 4ohms right? The amp says it runs at 200x1 @4ohms. Also I read that a capacitor will only work for a whil for my problem. Kicker recomended a bigger altenator. I would Like to get a capacitor and be done with it. The amp seems to cut off when I turn it up so that the volt meter moves a lot on my dash.
A capacitor is the last piece of equipment you need to worry about and is not going to help you any here. Check your ground(sand to bare metal) and power connections and turn down those gains.