i dont listen to cd's or the radio, so the source of my music comes from my ipod.

i just wanted to know if anyone has set up a 4 channel amp to their car speakers without a head unit.

i made a pretty little picture in hopes that i am not confusing anyone.

all i want is a hidden source of music in the glovebox and an auxilary wire coming out.

 

im no audio guy but this sounds interesting and seems like it would work... great idea! cant wait to see how it turns out. Hopefully some audio pros will chime in .

 

I would think you could just get a headphone to RCA cord and plug it into the amp input. The only thing is you wont have any way to switch power off unless you wire in a toggle switch someone since the head unit has a remote power wire that's hooked up to the amp usually. I'm interested as well, hopefully someone will chime in

 

You're hooking the iPod directly to an amp?

 

Sounds like a pretty good idea... on top of that, I'll get my cubby back that I lost due to radio relocation.

 

This has been completed by David Buschur. He is supposedly very happy with the results.

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-Acree

 

Thanks for the links Acree.

 

Not a problem. Even I have to admit that was a pretty difficult topic to search for. I just remembered David Buschur posting that a while ago.

-Acree

 

omg thanks. you have no idea how long ive been lurking on this forum lol ... the search bar does not do much justice

 

Yes, of course you can do that. In essence, you'd be using your ipod as a preamp and source all in one. The problems arise when one actually cares about sound quality, as the ipod is relatively noisy and its gain stage (an opamp) distorts wildly when driven hard. It's like driving a car with your feet; you can do that, but why would you want to if you care about controlling the machine? Same logic applies here. If all you care about is hearing a sound, well, good luck.

 

You could use a dock cable to a 3.5mm jack. This would bypass the crappy opamps of the ipod/phone and give the amp a line level input. I would think the amp would need a remote volume switch, but I've seen one or two of those around if I remember correctly.

 

I have personally done this with a few of my cars, I should have done a write up. I first decided to do this when I was 16 years old because I couldn't afford a stereo. I have since done it 3 times in the past 14 years and I will probably do this again with my Scirocco since it is my track car.

Honestly, there are ups and downs with having this kind of stereo setup. One issue you will have to resolve is a remote wire. You can have this set to your ignition(switched) somewhere or you can setup a toggle. I would try to avoid a toggle switch. I also used server fans and made a metal box for my setup so I would have a win tunnel to cool my amps. I used 2 amps, 1 for my door speakers, 1 for my subs. If you have questions I can make you a diagram on MS paint real quick. The other downside to this is, some songs are not as loud as others so it can be annoying to adjust the volume constantly, especially if you have subs installed. Nothing sucks more than the feeling of your ear drum being blown out because a song was over produced and 10x louder than all your other music. This is where it is nice to have a zune with legitimate music, but you still tend to run into this problem. You might also run into issues with having to adjust your amps constantly because your door speakers may not be able to handle some songs and distort bad. You could resolve this with crossovers for your speakers to prevent too much base.

I highly suggest purchasing a used head unit off of craigslist with a "line in" rather than going this route. It's well worth it IMO, and the price of a cheap player is close to the price you will be spending on cables. In the end this is very simple to do, and I would recommend purchasing all your cables off of amazon.com for cheap.