Professional Power & features for a Do-it-yourself price

I have a Mazda6 sedan with the Bose Audio system. The system as a whole is very poor, but the Bose sub was really disturbing. I wasn't getting a full rich sound so I decided to put in an old sub that I had from my previous car.

I started with a 10" down firing sub run by a 100 watt max non-bridgeable amp. I was only getting about 35 or 40 watts from this cheap old thing and I could barley even tell it was turned on. The Mazda6 has great sound proofing from the trunk area. I decided more power would give me the sound I wanted.

I looked around and other than a really cheap Wal-Mart amp, the Dual was the next best thing. It had all of the specs I was looking for and wasn't really too expensive. Off I went to purchase and install the Dual XIA2460.

Specs:

- Power Out 100 watts RMS x2 @ 4ohms
- 300 watts RMS x1 @ 4ohms bridged
- 145 watts RMS x2 @ 2ohms
- Freq. Response 20Hz-200kHz(-3dB)
- Speaker out 2~8 ohms (2 channel stereo)
- 4~8 ohms (bridged)
- Low and High level in
- Bass Boost 0~12dB @ 45Hz
- Built in crossover 40~400Hz
- Crossover slope 12dB/octave

Install:

The first thing I noticed was how heavy this thing was when I picked it up. It has some serious weight to it. In the home audio arena, weight to a receiver usually means it's pretty good. Yamaha and other higher end home audio receivers are nice and heavy. That told me that the Dual amp probably has a good power supply and is built with quality material.

Dual recommends an 8 gauge wire for power and ground. I had power and ground and line level from my Bose system already in the trunk, so I decided to use those leads. They were using 16 gauge power and ground wire.

The first thing that caught my attention were the terminal posts. Dual uses an allan wrench screw that binds down on bare wire. No terminal rings or connectors are needed for any of the wires. That made the install really go quickly. All I had to do was strip the wire back and put it in the terminal posts. Dual even provided the proper size allan wrech with the amp.

I'm running a single 10" sub, so I hooked up bridged for more wattage. The speaker posts had a screened on diagram showing the connection for + and - when bridging. That was a nice feature. It helped take some guess work out.

I connected line in (RCA-low level) from my line out of the Bose system. SUper easy and again, clearly labeled. I powered up and noticed a hum. I added an 8 gauge ground wire and attached it to the body of the car for better grounding and got rid of the hum. Seeing as that was what Dual recommended, I'm not shocked. Because I'm not running the recommended gauge power wire I metered the power to make sure I'm pulling the specified voltage. Dual says this amp pulls 11-16VDC and I was at 14.4 volts. I was well within the range and my 16 gauge wire was not hot at all. On to the controls and calibration.

Had I needed it, the instruction manual is well written and has great diagrams. I didn't think a cheaper model amp would come with such a complete set of instructions and installation diagrams.

Controls and features:

All controls are set via a turn dial that does not require a screw driver to use. This is a very nice feature when you want to switch things up and aren't at home.

Input level adjust (gain control)
- Gain from 6v to 200mV. I set it half way and it was plenty.

Crossover
- The crossover can be set from 40HZ to 400HZ. I like a nice full low tone sound with my system, so I set this at what I thought was about 100Hz.

- The crossover can also be set if you aren't using this amp for a sub. It has a High Pass, Low Pass and Full setting. Because I'm using a sub only, I set it to the low Pass frequency or LPF.

Bass Boost:
- If all of the other controls weren't enough, you can set the bass boost from 0dB to 12dB. Again, I set it at half and it was more than enough.

Sound and function:

This amp really has some power for the price. The sound from my down firing 10" is nice and deep with this amp. The ability to adjust so many settings is excellent.

After using the amp for about two weeks, the only cons I've noticed are the lack of mute on (speaker pops when turning the unit off) and no remote gain control.

All in all I've been very pleased with the overall quality and features of this amp. I got more for my money than I thought I would.