ICE All About Amps

1. Built in crossovers
A crossover can consist of both a high-pass and low-pass filter. What they do is filter out frequencies that aren’t within their set range. These can usually be controlled by a dial on the amp.
A LPF (low pass filter) will only let frequencies past that are lower than the set frequency.
A HPF (high pass filter) will only let frequencies past that are higher than the set frequency.

Using the crossovers allows you to set the amp to deal with a specific frequency range, which is highly important when phasing through your car audio system. This allows you to filter out all the high frequencies going to a subwoofer for example, or filter out the bass for the high range components, or both the bass and treble for mid range drivers!

2. Bass Boost
Some amps (usually mono bass amps) have a bass boost button or dial. This simply boosts the input signal between the 40 to 90Hz range to give more emphasis on the bass.

3. Speaker Level and RCA inputs
Some amps also have speaker level inputs as well as RCA inputs. Speaker level inputs allow you to connect a normal speaker wires to the amp and make benefit of using a standalone amplifier. This is good for those that don’t have a headunit with RCA outputs. RCA inputs are already levelled, and are much more common. These are better quality too compared to speaker level inputs – but if you haven’t got RCA ports, you cant complain!

4. Gain
The gain controls the sensitivity of the input signal of the amp. If you have it at full whack, you will have a much louder output, but also will distort much earlier when the volume is steadily increased. The common consensus is to keep the gain around half way

5. Remote input
This isn’t for a remote control, although some do have remotes that can be connected. In this instance it refers to a wire fed into the amp which switches on the amp when the headunit is switched on. This is a means of ensuring your amps aren’t switched on wasting power when they’re not needed.

Other parts of the amp should be the speaker output terminals and the power input terminals, but these are self explanatory I hope.