Since your Epicenter looks for harmonics, which are made of higher frequency information than what your crossover provides from the sub out connectors, it cannot be installed in the subwoofer path of your crossover. In your installation, the Epicenter will fight to find fragments of harmonics that are being sent elsewhere by the crossover. When it does find something, it struggles to restore a fundamental bass note based on what it thinks is a harmonic. This surging bass note is at an extreme level that causes the Orion amplifier to blow a fuse. I have the same Orion amplifier here at the school, and it performs perfectly with the Epicenter. Simply install the Epicenter immediately after the source unit and before the crossover, and you will enjoy greater and more accurate bass, with no fuse problems.
QI have a Kenwood 4015 CD player, a set of CD Technologies components and 2 Diamond Audio Hex Series 2 way crossovers. I have noticed that my sound system has a background hiss. It isn't noise; it is just like a background hiss that comes just through my 1" silk dome tweeters. I have done everything that I know to do and cannot figure out what is wrong. I have a 1-ought wire that runs from my chassis up to the floor board and I removed the paint and attached a bolt to an 8-gauge wire that runs to my MTX Thunder 2150x amplifier. I measured the resistance from the head of the bolt that attaches my 1-ought wire to the end of the 8-gauge wire. My meter read .2 ohms of resistance, so I am assuming that is very good as far as grounds go.
I ran an 8-gauge wire to my head unit, and I have an Alpine 11-band EQ with BBE processing and the strange thing is that when I turn the EQ on is when the background hiss is present; and when I turn on the BBE feature it gets even worse. But when I turn the BBE off and bypass the EQ the hiss is still present. If you can help me with this, I would greatly appreciate it.Chris SherrillVia the Internet
A Not only does the signal path dictate where components are installed, it also considers how much the signal degrades at various points. There are usually two major causes of hiss in a signal path. A low signal-to-noise ratio specification in one of the components is often the "weak link" that can make a premium quality system hiss. To acquire this problem, you would need to have at least one active component of a quality you might find at a flea market. You have no "cheap" gear in your system, so I would rule out your equipment. The Alpine EQ seems to increase the problem, but according to the Car Audio and Electronics (2000) Directory issue, the Alpine equalizers have 100 dB S/N ratio specs. Even if this value were to drop by 10 dB when the BBE feature was engaged, you would still be hiss free.
Your grounds and resistance reading also have no bearing on hiss. If you had engine noise, then you may have a reason to consider this as a clue. Also note that all non-laboratory Digital Multimeters are highly inaccurate below one ohm. If you were to touch the two probes together, you would still read 0.2 ohms, due to the resistance in the test leads, coupled with the meter inaccuracies. Even if 0.2 ohms were a correct reading, the quality of a ground is current dependent. In other words, a head unit with a 10-ampere fuse would result in a maximum voltage drop of 2 volts, but an amplifier with a 50-ampere fuse will cause a catastrophic 10 volts of drop.
The most common cause of hiss involves the "gain structure" of the signal path. Input gain controls on amplifiers and processors are often confused with volume controls. The objective of this adjustment is to allow the component to match to the other components in a system. When hiss occurs, it is almost always because an input gain control has been raised too high.