Stereo & Electronics - New speakers and amp installed. Now I need advice on adjusting speaker volume..

Car is a 99 z w/out monsoon

I have infinity components w/tweeters up front powered by two channels from a 200w x 4 channel amp. The rears are factory running off a 50w x 4 ch. kenwood HU. I have a JL 10in. sub in a stealth box powered by a 300w mono amp.


I have a pac HU interface and the front components connect to the headunit via the PAC front rca connections.

My sub is connected to the HU with the HU rear preout RCA connections.

What is the process to correctly balance the volume from front, rear, and subs. I want to be able to turn up the volume on the HU to max and have each speaker pump out the loudest, but most clear sound. My factory rears start breaking up when my HU voulme is turned up half way!!! I also don't want one any one pair of speakers ( front, rear, sub) to drown out the others.

Basically, how do you make adustments for the best sound balance between speakers?????

I have been fooling around with the front PAC interface gain controls, the HU volume, the amp (powering the fronts) volume controls, and the sub volume controls and I believe that there must be some process that stereo tuners use to fine tune car audio systems that is better than what I am doing.

Most shops will have you do both the rears and fronts with amp power so it's much easier to setup and tune that way.

If it were me, I'd get it setup where you know what the volume limit is on the speakers that the deck is powering and then turn the amp up or down accordingly. The rear speakers are just filler noise anyway. Set it up to where they won't distort and get the clearest sound you can out of the front. If that doesn't work, then just fade some more of the sound to the front to take some of the load off of the rear speakers.

Either that or have the rear speakers amplified and not have any problems anymore.

I lot of competition guys don't even run rear speakers. I personally think you'd be better off disconnecting them until you can amp them, power from an amp is much much cleaner than from the HU. The correct process for setting gains on your amp is supposed to be done with a multimeter and various frequency test tones I think, but the way I usually do it is to turn the deck somewhere between 3/4 and full volume with the gain on the amp all the way down, then increase SLOWLY until you start to hear distortion, then back it off a little bit. I don't know that you'll be able to do that with the rears hooked up. I ran my setup without rears for a little bit, and I barely noticed when I hooked em up. The balance should be forward to sound like someone is playing in front of you, hence the term "soundstage" when you're talking about sound focus.