My riding buddy takes his bike to a local shop for a new install against my better judgement... He ends up with an Alpine HU, Arc Moto 600.4, Digital Designs AW6.5 mid-driver and VO-B3 tweeters mounted in the gauge holes. It sounded very flat and didn't have much volume at all.

Fast forward to yesterday, he asked me to pull the fairing and see what the problem is. First thing I noticed is the speaker wiring. Channel 1&2 from the amp are set to bridged and both sets of speakers are tied to the same channel with Stinger "bass blocker" on the tweeter positive lead. The 600.4 bridged makes 250 watts per channel bridged and the VO tweeters are rated at 100 watts peak.

I'm inclined to move the tweeters to radio power first off, but I'm open to suggestions here. Thanks guys.

 

That sounds pretty crappy. I would put the woofers on channels 1 and 2, and the tweeters on channels 3 and 4 and lower the gains on the tweeters. Not sure what the stinger bass blocker is, those tweeters should have come with capacitors that work as crossover/high pass filters. You can bridge the woofers and try the tweeters off the radio, but I think bridged....you'll need more juice than the HU for the tweeters to keep up. Post pics if you have them please.

 

Haze is on point. The downside to the 600.4 here is the output in 8 ohm ( horns should be 8) is same as 4 ohm. I tested mine yesterday to safely put out tad over the rated 300 rms bridged. Also same power bridged 8 ohm as 4 ohm. Do as Haze suggested. The input switch at top of amp is tad confusing and not explained in the manual.

 

Haze, I'll post up some pics this evening before I change anything. I thought about putting them on channel 3/4, but he intends to add lid speakers down the road so how would that work? I've done several installs but only coaxial stuff so far, this is new territory for me.

There aren't any crossovers wired in and I don't see any built into the back of the tweeters. And it looks like a blind guy wired all this stuff up... Thanks again.

 

Thanks Matt, I didn't notice the horns have an 8 ohm rating...

 

Double check them but most the DD vob3 are 8 ohm but can be changed to 4 ohm. Better sound quality in 8 ohm. If you change to 4 ohm you can run in series to the mids later when other speakers added. You would still have 150 rms at 8 ohm per channel. Now this is where the 600.4 has an advantage.

 

I just checked. Only bridged does 8 ohm not reduce power output. You would have to swap to 4 ogm diaphragms then run in parallel 2 ohm to get the output still 150 rms.

 

Alrighty. I'll leave them in 8 ohm and move them over to 3/4 channel for now, hopefully that will clean them up. I'll post up some pics of this mess tonight along with the amp settings and maybe you can help me out with those too.