How to ground my Amp on Yaris Hatchback

[talnlnky]

if you want the best ground you can get (from the chasis) you will want to sand any painted metal like stated above.... also... you won't be using self tapping screws. You'll want to use a bolt of some kind whether it be oe or your own addition.

for reducing noise, rca placement has very little difference... the whole car is the ground... and interference can be induced from both the positive & ground... the "ground" in a car isn't a "true" ground there is still voltage and amperage passing through it... its not like a 3 prong plug in a wall outlet which has a pos/neg/gnd. Cars are actually more like pos/neg (ground is kind of a misnomer).

sheilded RCA's are usually a waste of money too...as the noise problems are usually nothing to do with the RCA's or shielding.

AND... as architect tried to say.... Sometimes running two runs directly to the battery, one for power, one for ground (pos+neg) is the best ground you can have. It all really depends on where your amps are installed, whats your power draw, and what your cabling is like for your Big 3.

To say anything otherwise is a hasty generalization that ignores many variables that come into play.

One last bit... if you want the best ground.... always use bigger power+gnd wires than needed. For example. Your amps have 60amps of draw and your power cable is 15ft long... you could get away with 4awg... but 2awg or 4awg would be even better. Thats expensive yes... I know... and thus some people may not be willing to do it... but you won't have the best ground then. If you are ever reaching the limit of your cables potential.... UPGRADE!

the biggest and most common offense for this concept isn't for amps however, but for the decks.... 99.9% of the time decks are installed using 16-18awg wire. Yet the fuses on decks are usually 10amps. Upgrade to 10-12awg for the power + gnd.... that will also help reduce the noise... ESPECIALLY if you ground to the same place as your amps!

In my mazda I ran 8awg to my deck... and it had a max amp draw of 2amps!!!! (no internal amp).... Seems overkill.... but I never had any noise problems.

noise problems are easy to prevent, but hard to isolate once you have them. The cost in copper is usually cheaper than the cost in labor you'll spend trying to solve noise problems.

[RUFFSTUFF]

Originally Posted by talnlnky

...for reducing noise, rca placement has very little difference... the whole car is the ground... and interference can be induced from both the positive & ground... the "ground" in a car isn't a "true" ground there is still voltage and amperage passing through it... its not like a 3 prong plug in a wall outlet which has a pos/neg/gnd. Cars are actually more like pos/neg (ground is kind of a misnomer)...

Actually you are wrong. In your home the 3-prong outlets are POSTIVE/NEUTRAL/GROUND with the larger slot being NEUTRAL. NEUTRAL and GROUND are actually both connected to ground. This is a safety feature that allows a short to the casing of whatever is being powered to trip the breaker.

In a DC system (like a car stereo) ground always has current flowing through it as long as there is a path to the positive power source. In a car most people call it GROUND when referring chassis metal in a negatively grounded electrical system.

Some people advise against routing your RCA cables next to your power cables because the high current the power cables pass may be enough to induce a voltage into the RCA cables which would appear as noise.

[talnlnky]

Originally Posted by RUFFSTUFF

Some people advise against routing your RCA cables next to your power cables because the high current the power cables pass may be enough to induce a voltage into the RCA cables which would appear as noise.

thank you for proving my point... power still flowing through the chasis... still a good amount of power (about 20-50% more power than over the power cable in fact depending on what kind of amp you run). And noise being induced into the signal via RCA's is still one of the least common reasons for noise in the system. So even if placing your cables did make any kind of a difference.... IT STILL WOULDN'T MATTER 99.9% of the time cause its all about bad electrical connections and voltage differentials.