Powering car amp off psu

[sandals100]

Hi, I have a 400 watt pioneer amp that I use in my home thertre  system. It is hooked up to a 12" sub, I used to have a shitty 400 watt PSU hooked up ot it which was barely sufficient. After having enough of not being able to turn it up too high I decided to get a new PSU. I went out and bought a 500 watt psu which gives above 380 watts on the 12volt rails. The existing one was giving about 300 watts ish. I was wondering if there was anyway that I could hook both psu's into the one amp. Keep in mind that I have cut all the yellow and black wires and hooked them into the positive and negative terminals of the amp.

[dalekphalm]

Hi, I have a 400 watt pioneer amp that I use in my home thertre  system. It is hooked up to a 12" sub, I used to have a shitty 400 watt PSU hooked up ot it which was barely sufficient. After having enough of not being able to turn it up too high I decided to get a new PSU. I went out and bought a 500 watt psu which gives above 380 watts on the 12volt rails. The existing one was giving about 300 watts ish. I was wondering if there was anyway that I could hook both psu's into the one amp. Keep in mind that I have cut all the yellow and black wires and hooked them into the positive and negative terminals of the amp.

Short answer? God no.

 

You do NOT want to be supplying power from two different power supplies to a single amp. You could totally do the reverse, multiple amps (assuming sufficient power) off of one PSU, but the reverse is just begging to blow up your amp.

 

Why would you possibly want to hook both PSU's up to the single amp anyway?

[sandals100]

I dunno, in my head I had it as extra power for the amp so it would actually give the 400 watts its rated for.... But thanks for commenting anyway. Haha think I might just stick with 380 watts for now..

[dalekphalm]

I dunno, in my head I had it as extra power for the amp so it would actually give the 400 watts its rated for.... But thanks for commenting anyway. Haha think I might just stick with 380 watts for now..

Yeah unfortunately electrical engineering doesn't work like that haha. Some types of devices might be able to be powered that way, but nothing with circuit boards, IC's, and other sensitive electronics. Variances between the two power sources (As even with the same model, there might be slight variences in power output, amperage levels, noise on the line, etc), and the potential for feedback on the lines, makes it too dangerous to your equipment to risk doing such a thing.

 

Honestly the only thing that makes sense is to simply buy a PSU that is sufficiently powerful for your AMP. Is there a particular reason why you bought a 400 Watt PSU that was only rated for 380 Watts, when your AMP could utilize the full 400 watts?

[zeibis]

Something like this could work, but I have never tested anything like this.

 

 

[dalekphalm]

Something like this could work, but I have never tested anything like this.

 

 

-snip-

Yes it could, and maybe for an incadescent light bulb, or a mechanical switch, it would be fine. But even under ideal circumstances (both PSU's being 100% identical make and model), it's still extremely dangerous to use to power any sensitive electronics, such as an AMP.

 

I would only ever advise someone to do that if they were doing it for educational/experimentational purposes only, where you would be totally fine if the whole thing blew up in your face (Or more likely, it'll work fine at first, then 3 months later it'll blow up). For example, using a series of batteries to power something can be safe, but only under specific circumstances (plus the way batteries work, it's much easier for them to self-stabilize when delivering power in parallel, thus outputting a safe, unvaried power source).

[zeibis]

Yes it could, and maybe for an incadescent light bulb, or a mechanical switch, it would be fine. But even under ideal circumstances (both PSU's being 100% identical make and model), it's still extremely dangerous to use to power any sensitive electronics, such as an AMP.

 

I would only ever advise someone to do that if they were doing it for educational/experimentational purposes only, where you would be totally fine if the whole thing blew up in your face (Or more likely, it'll work fine at first, then 3 months later it'll blow up). For example, using a series of batteries to power something can be safe, but only under specific circumstances (plus the way batteries work, it's much easier for them to self-stabilize when delivering power in parallel, thus outputting a safe, unvaried power source).

 

That would be a fun experiment, sadly at the moment I can`t test this with an oscilloscope. Although there are PSUs that can run in one system simultaneously.

Well, in theory it should work as PSUs are usually high quality and they will give you as close to 12 V as possible. As all the batteries are not the same and one will have 1.5V and other can have 1.3V, its a small difference. As I see the problem could be when PSU reacts to a brown note or distortion in main power line.

[dalekphalm]

That would be a fun experiment, sadly at the moment I can`t test this with an oscilloscope. Although there are PSUs that can run in one system simultaneously.

Well, in theory it should work as PSUs are usually high quality and they will give you as close to 12 V as possible. As all the batteries are not the same and one will have 1.5V and other can have 1.3V, its a small difference. As I see the problem could be when PSU reacts to a brown note or distortion in main power line.

If you have a line filter or line reactor on your power, then running dual PSU's becomes more practical, but still, it's very niche and specific.

 

The thing about batteries is that if you string them up, even if they all have slightly different voltages, etc, they'll equalize. Especially if you run them in series, you'll just get the combined voltage of all your batteries, but the same average capacity of any one of them. Running them in parallel, you'll get essentially the average between the batteries with douple the capacity. Obviously this works best if you use similar spec'd batteries with similar charges.

 

In terms of systems that use dual PSU's (Such as servers), there's power conditioning equipment involved, and they are specifically designed to handle two separate power sources. Also note that the system can be ran off just one PSU with the second being a backup.

[sandals100]

Well I bought a 500 watt psu, which was about $45, I didn't have too much spending money on me at the time. After purchsing the item I was reading through the specifications of the psu only to find that the 2 12 volt rails only gave a total of 380 watts. But I prefer this over my old one because the previous one would drop below 12 volts when the sub hit the lows (about 11.5 sometimes 10.9) I knew was bad for the amp. The new one is 12.5 volts idle and at full tilt is about 12 volts exactly. So I am still happy. Thanks for all the help. 

 

Also I know I should open a new topic but I was wondering if any of you gentlemen could be able to help me out on another issue. I was playing around with some software on my desktop pc and something went sour.For some reason all my drives have no image just a white box (in the list in windows explorer). They still function fine but it's just a little irritating, I am running Windows 8 64 bit. 

 

 

[Guest]

Well I bought a 500 watt psu, which was about $45, I didn't have too much spending money on me at the time. After purchsing the item I was reading through the specifications of the psu only to find that the 2 12 volt rails only gave a total of 380 watts. But I prefer this over my old one because the previous one would drop below 12 volts when the sub hit the lows (about 11.5 sometimes 10.9) I knew was bad for the amp. The new one is 12.5 volts idle and at full tilt is about 12 volts exactly. So I am still happy. Thanks for all the help. 

 

Also I know I should open a new topic but I was wondering if any of you gentlemen could be able to help me out on another issue. I was playing around with some software on my desktop pc and something went sour.For some reason all my drives have no image just a white box (in the list in windows explorer). They still function fine but it's just a little irritating, I am running Windows 8 64 bit. 

 

 

You didn't delete the drive images?

[sandals100]

You didn't delete the drive images?

Sorry that I took so long to reply. And no I did not.....well to my knowledge at least. Is there anyway to get them back?