How Many Speakers Can You Connect to a Car Stereo?
Different people ask questions about connecting one or more speakers to their car stereo. The thing is they don’t know the requirements for connecting more than one speaker to the car stereo. In this case, the question of the people can be answered in a better way by telling them that they could connect more than one speaker to a car.
However, there are a few things that they need to take the car. First of all, the speaker is not directly connected to the car stereo but the head unit. So, the real question here is how many speakers we can connect to our head unit.
In this case, you need to know the capability of the head unit to power car speakers. The most important thing that you need to take care of is choosing the right speaker for your car stereo. A car stereo can only support 4-ohm speakers. You can add 6 or even 8 speakers to a Car Stereo.
When you get a new and cool stereo for your car, you feel that it is cool to upgrade your speaker or increase its standard by connecting more than one speaker. In this case, you should upgrade your head unit instead of buying a new unit. The difficulty that is faced by many people is wiring the novel head with the speaker. Most of the people didn’t have a clue that the newly purchased unit is going to be compatible or not with your brand-new woofers.
How Many Speakers Can You Connect to a Car Stereo?
In this article, our editors have explained all the necessary details required for you to connect more speakers with a Car Stereo. You need to be sure that your speakers are of 4-ohm. Otherwise, it cannot be wired to the common ground system.
A typically stereo can connect up to two or four speakers but if you are using a high power stereo then the number can increase. Latest car Stereo can even have the capacity for adding 6 or even 8 car speakers.
The number of Speakers You can Connect with Car Radio
Unfortunately, there is not a direct answer to this query regarding the number of speakers. The reason is that there are some speakers in which a head unit has the capability of powering the other one. that a large number of head units have the power to connect four speakers. However, some head unit has high power and some have less power due to which the number of speakers varies accordingly.
In this case, you should be familiar with the model or brand name of the head unit so you could understand its capability of connecting a large number of speakers.
To know the direct answer to your question, you need to inquire about the maker or manufacturer about your head unit. Commonly, each head unit has a capacity of powering four channels (two fronts, two back), but it is better to double-check.
Many technicians recommend that you should stick to 50-Watt or more speakers. Furthermore, you need an amplifier with an RMS power output per channel, which is about 50% greater than the speaker’s most rated RMS power.
If you use 50-Watt speaker or less and your stereo can support up to 150 wattage of power output. Then you can connect 3 speakers. If you connect four speakers then you may face some downfall in quality a little bit. I am using Apple Carplay Radio that is just perfect for my car.
Can you power speakers other than the recommendation of the maker?
Most of the amplifiers in the car are already built-in inside the head units. These amplifiers can power a small size speaker with the right amount of output power. However, there is not enough power in these speakers to give a thriving music or sound.
Unfortunately, the number of speakers you can attach to your unit is the ultimate final. There is no such simple solution to get over the truth that the head build-in amplifier cannot power additional speakers. There are many other options. You can avail of them as you require.
We can see that the above statement does only hold for the true head unit’s built-in amplifier. In this case, you can buy an exterior amplifier, but that’s another side of the story. If you want to connect some extra speakers with your car stereo, then you need to get the right signals to your speakers.
Sometimes, the speakers can be installed in four corners of your car. In this case, running a whole new separate speaker can pose threats; for example, it can create complications in getting the wire over the car door. However, there is a simple way to transfer the right amount of current or power to your speakers.
What to consider while connecting car speakers in series?
There are two ways in which the speakers can be connected to your car stereo. One is a series, and the other is parallel. To know the number of speakers you can connect to your stereo, you need to understand the requirements for the connection.
To connect your speakers in series, you need to understand the essence of the series, which is simple. When the two or more speakers are connected in series, the load for the impedance is increased. The more speakers we add to the stereo, the higher is the impedance. In this case, the output of the speaker is declined. To avoid this thing, you need to keep the impedance below 16 ohms as most of the amplifiers are not able to handle higher loads.
You need to know that when a large number of input or impedance is given to the speaker, it produces lower output. The lower output destroys the quality of the sound, and the music system gets rippled. To avoid this case, you need to understand how much power an amplifier can deliver to each speaker.
6×9 speakers are a perfect choice for a family car.
What to consider while connecting car speakers in parallel?
The speakers connected in parallel have a different way of working. The impedance level in this case drops. So, when the number of speakers is increased, the impedance level is decreased. The lower impedance indicates that the acoustical output is increased.
However, the actual figure of speakers that can be linked in parallel is partly due to the least load impedance. Commonly, the load impedance should be held to about 2-ohms as it can provide the capacity to the amplifier to handle speakers at low impedance.
Whereas, if you connect more than 4-speakers in parallel they will not put much load on the stereo. In series, the speaker’s resistance adds and cross the ohm limit of the stereo, but when you connect in a parallel way, the resistance of the speakers decreases. Hence more speakers can be attached in parallel connection.
Speaker Level Outputs
Different speakers are designed to support only four speakers. The speakers gain power from the head unit, which is limited by the voltage that is no more than 14vDC. Such type of voltage limits the RMS power to about 20 watts per channel. In this case, some of the manufacturers usually unguided you about your head units by saying that it can produce 30 or more watts.
In actual, there are only a few of the head units, which can increase the supply voltage but those are very rare. In this case, you only need to consider the CEA-2006 compliant ratings. Furthermore, you should know that the amplifier on high power units gets instantly damaged in case if a wire comes in contact with another one, even your volume is set to zero. If it happens, the damage is so severe that it can blow up the entire head unit.
You need to make sure that there is no power to the unit while making any connections. Moreover, you also need to confirm that the terminals should not make any contact with the door. As a result, it could ground the output level of the speaker and damage the whole head unit. While connecting more than one speaker, you also need to make sure that the fuse is not so larger than the recommended one.
Car Stereo wattage is also important to determine the number of speakeers that can be attached to it.
If your car stereo is of 75 watts, then it would be best to go with the 14-gauge speaker or the 16 gauge speaker. Some of the people, in this case, consider the factory speaker, but you need to know that wires of the factory speakers are not so thick. So, they can lose power when a higher amount of wattages forces to get along with it. However, if you have a 75watt stereo, then you are safe because it doesn’t get exaggerated by this condition. So, in this case, running the output with the help of the factory and its wiring can be considered as a convenient solution.
Common Grounding and Bridging
You also need to consider the common grounding and bridging of the car speakers before connecting it to the car stereo. When a speaker is fit into a car, it uses a chassis ground point for the negative speaker, which is known as common grounding. To produce a good quality sound, you should purchase a good quality adapter or rewire the speakers.
You need to be careful about the aspect that a car speaker cannot be bridged. Bridging is a process in which two speaker wire outputs are connected to increase its power. However, this thing does not work with our car stereo. You need to make sure that wires of unused speakers do not touch others or short out and damage the unit. If you can do that, then you can connect as many speakers as you want.
To wrap the things, I could intimate that there is no simple way of answering the question regarding some speakers you can connect to a car stereo. However, one of the best methods to improve your audio system is to spend some extra money and buy a good external amplifier. Other than this, buy a new head unit that can provide enough power to support your speakers.
Team – Howstereo.com
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