3 replies to this topic

[Justin S70T5M]

So right now I have a decent sounding system. Pioneer HU with stock speakers. Bought the car this way.

I'm looking into building a CarPC with a 7" touch screen.
Can I use the factory amp in conjunction with the CarPC. I think I'll be useing a Dell Latitude latop as the computer with an external USB sound card.
Can I just take a audio out from the sound card and plug it into the factory AMP somehow?

Maybe in the future I will replace speakers and get a new AMP, but for now this will have to do if it's possible.

[Justin S70T5M]

So...I guess my question is how do I hook my computer up to my factory amp?
Is the factory AMP and 6-channel amp? It looks like I have 8 speakers in my car. (2 dash, 2 front, 2 rear, 2 deck)

How would I wire this with Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro Sound card with just a left and right RCA out jack?

[andyb5]

I don't know how your would get the 5.1 channel card to work with the factory amp, hopefully guys who have CarPCs installed can give you some help, but I can tell you that the factory amp is a 4 channel.
1 channel drives each pair of speakers in the front door/dash, and each of the speakers in the rear door/parcel shelf are driven off 1 channel each. The speakers are all 8 ohms, wired in parallel to present a 4 ohm load to each channel of the amp.

[Dan A]

You need a harness adapter to rca. I got mine on ebay. From rca you will probably need another adapter to go to the card output depending on what card you are using.Are you using a usb or pci creative card? I wasnt happy with the usb and I had problems with the pci one on bumps. It would lock up and make an ear splitting noise until i powered off. Instead i went from onboard audio to a cheap car equalizer to factory amp.