Lat's '19 Screw Stereo build

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The Car Stereo Company

aka grumpy car stereo guy
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use 12 for the subwoofers. its a dedicated channel from the zen. they give you 6 channels out for the people doing 3 way active. just use 1 and 2 if going passive
 
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lateralis

lateralis

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Sounds good. I guess it will look something like this if I need to use the RCA's.

ZEN 1-6 to Front stage DSP
ZEN 7,8,12 to Rear stage DSP.

Hope I got enough extra RCA connectors laying around.... lol... ugh.
 
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lateralis

lateralis

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Welp... I don't know wtf is going on anymore.

Can't confirm if the Zen SPDIF actually works or not.
The DSPs aren't outputting anything over RCA's.
When the Zen is hooked up to amps directly via RCA's I'm not getting the correct voltage out the amp. Gain maxed out on a 100Wx4ch amp was about 9Vs. I should be getting 20Vs for a 4ohm speaker.
And now my 6CH amp is in protect again after I "fixed" it and benched tested it before install.....

So basically the whole thing needs to come out....

I either need a new DSP... maybe a new amp or 2 or something...

Out of all my installs so far this thing has been the absolute worst and I'm not sure what to do now...

Super sucks since I know for a FACT this stuff was working prior to removing it from my other vehicles/installing in the Truck. Well except the Zen would be the only wild card in this.

EDIT: Ok so figured it out. The Phoenix PX6 was giving me issues initializing the android side. With that here's where I am now...

1) Optical Does work.
2) The optical cable I have installed does NOT work
3) My 6ch is still busted.
4) Whole thing will still need to come out....

I do have an extra 4ch and a 2 ch laying around so I'm going to rip the amp rack out and see if I can put those 2 in. If not I might just rework the entire setup.... I also need to figure out what the input to the DSPs.

Oh the joy...
 
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lateralis

lateralis

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So after a whole bunch of on and off trouble shooting I was forced to rework the entire amp rack setup. Not sure what's going on with the 6ch but it refused to work in the truck but would work on the bench. I swapped out that with an Alpine PDX F4 I had laying around. I also had issues with my DSP not saving any of the crossover set points that I would input so that had to go too. I decided to give Audiocontrol a try with their DM-810 (Thanks @Hush Car Audio for getting me the unit) so hopefully when I put the rack back in everything will go well.

Since I had to swap out things on the board I was some how able to cram everything on the amp rack. It's stupid heavy now lol... Also since I did that none of my current RCA cables would work so I made my own out of some old RCA cables I made a long time ago. The color bands were all bad so I took them off the connectors and decided to use some para-cord I had laying around to color coordinate everything. The colors aren't that pretty but whatever... You literally have zero reasons to go back there at this point unless you have a problem. I kinda feel like that the layout is cleaner now than it was.

Anyways here are the pics of the new layout. Should be going in tomorrow.

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lateralis

lateralis

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Everything is in and working properly now! I had to put on some 90 degree adapters for the sub amp to clear the fabric hump thing but the rack fights in there like a glove. The DM-810 did the trick and 10ch's worked out perfect. I know that some people are against center ch's but I'm pretty happy on how this turned out. My setup gets pretty damn loud with out it feeling like it's attacking me so this all smiles here.

I need to figure out something though to get some air flow behind the seats though. My amps get friggen HOT. Specifically one of my Zapco 4ch's that I have bridged to run my mid bass speakers. So far for about an hour of bumping everything I haven't had any thermal shut down but better safe than sorry. Plan is to make something to hold some computer fans to blow over the amps.

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Hush Car Audio

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Fans will help and you can also place all the amps on an aluminum sheet. The heat will spread across the whole sheet and you can use the other cooler amps housing to help dissipate the heat since they all have heat sinks.
 
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lateralis

lateralis

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Kinda forgot to update this with what I did. So I had a PC case fan header laying around that I didn't need and 3 extra 120mm fans. So I 3D printed some angled bases for the fan, a box for the fan header circuit board and used some Velcro held down to the fans via screws. I wired it into the Relay for the amp turn on signal since that circuit doesn't have any load to begin with. My finger is pointing at the fan header box I made. So far they have done the trick and I don't hear the fans spinning away! Not the cleanest look but... it works lol.

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