Hello all.

Anybody a whizz with car audio or electrics? I'm easily fazed..

For years I've had a really cheap active sub in the boot of my Deuche and its been worth every penny. Its fun pumping out the tunes in a car like this. Its tired now though so I scored an Edge EDB12 sub for £11 on fleabay.

Trouble is I thought I was buying an active sub and its not, its a passive one. What I'm wondering is can I just connect the wires I already have coming from the head unit to power this thing? At the moment my old active sub has a fused power line and positive and negative input from the head unit. I'm hoping I can just connect those two pos and neg wires and that'll be it?

Or do you think this thing will be more power hungry than that?

Heres the manual if that helps at all..

http://edgecaraudio.co.uk/manuals/passi ... osures.pdf

Thanks!

Take the lid off and have a look.
Maybe swap the speaker old for new, if they are the same impeadance or put the amp bit in the new unit...

A passive sub will need an amp and a frequency splitter to work properly. If you plug it in as-is it'll just be a speaker with low frequency response. Does your head unit have a dedicated sub output?

Hmm I doubt it has a separate output from the head unit. But good point, I'll consult the manual when I get home tomorrow. Thanks guys.

Ok, so your current active sub is just a sub and amp in the same box, basically? The wiring to that should consist of RCA cables from the back of your head unit, a live feed and an earth and I assume a remote wire which turns the unit on and off when you turn the head unit on or off?
If that's the case then you will still need to buy an amp to use with your new sub. You cannot run one just off of a head unit as you appear to be suggesting. Once you have an amp then you will find it'll probably have exactly the same wiring requirements as the active sub you have now. One live, one earth, two RCA cables and the remote wire.

There are some amps and more commonly active subs (which are, as previously mentioned, just a sub and amp packaged together in a box) which can take the sound signal from speaker channels on the head unit, these tend to be a bit mickey-mouse, and if yours currently works like that it might be worth having a look on the back of your head unit and if it's got them using the RCA output in your new amp should you decide to do that.

Yup, you're right I can't use it straight off the head unit as is. I'll probably just buy an active one and be done with it, can't be arsed having a separate amp too.

You can run a passive sub from the original head - it's not the most efficient way of generating thump but if you wire the sub across the positive outputs on the head it will work OK until you sort a power amp....

That's the positive speaker outputs for anyone who might be slightly inebriated like me....