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OK, here is scenario- Got a 20A relay on remote turn on wire with 3 amps and some leds on it. The 15A fuse on the relay popped today... that means it drew WAY too much current... i have a short somewhere... I check- 3 wires were pulled out of the remote turn on distro block that was reading ground.... 1 of these wires is an LED wire. The other 2 wires go to my sundown 100.4 and the other wire goes to both AQ3500Ds remote turn on... The LED wire reads 0.0 ohms and the turn on wires for all 3 amps are reading 0.2 ohms.... Is the remote turn on's grounded? Did the led wire cause a massive surge through all the remote turn ons?

Would someone like to do a video demonstration to settle this disagreement?

Letting us know how much space you have would be helpful also some pics would be nice. If you don't mind rigging it you could mount your amp somewhere then just take your box out when you need to, but once again im unfamiliar with your trunk space.

This thread is a year old...understandable how it may be confusing due to it being October of '08.... You may have seen it several times, but it wasn't because they were running separate amps. There was something else at play. False. Another misconception. Even if there were "a slight difference in signal" from the amplifiers (which would be very slight in two even mediocre amplifiers....like, slight enough to possibly be measurable but certainly not audible), the subwoofer would not be damaged. It would play the sum of the signals, not self-destruct. What do you think the original use of DVC was? It was to allow connection of both channels of stereo sound to a single driver (subwoofer, for example) so it could reproduce the signal contained in both channels.

Generally the all-in-one systems from low- and mid-end manufacturers are generally not great (Bazooka, etc). What type of bass are you looking for? Ground-pounder loud or just something to fill out the bottom end? If you are just looking for something to fill out the bottom end without being overbearing, and myself being completely unfamiliar with the trunk of a Cobalt or how much room your mountain bike takes up, I might suggest you investigate an IB setup. No enclosure taking up trunk space...it might be possible to locate the subwoofer somewhere under the rear shelf firing up into the cabin in a location that is out of your mountain bike's way. Hide the amplifier elsewhere in the trunk and you'd have a system that takes up little to no trunk space and you wouldn't have to worry about removing/reinstalling anything.

I never said anything about unloading. An enclosures effect on a woofer and it's various performance aspects runs much deeper than simply when unloading occurs. You are looking in the wrong place. Plain and simple. Just because you heard a similar setup in a different car that happened to have different amps and liked that setups sound better is completely unrelated to the amps. There are a couple dozen variables that could be at play that would cause the differences you noted, all of which have nothing to do with the amplifiers damping factor. A new amplifier is not the fix. It would be helpful if you could go into a little more detail about what it is you are having issues with. Is it like an overhang problem...notes not sounding tight and controlled? I really couldn't get a good handle on what exactly the problem is from your previous description.

Its been discussed before. You can do it with no consequences.

You can run separate amps per coil and separate coils on different channels.

KU40 pretty much hit the nail on the head. Also, don't forget that the RMS of the speaker has absolutely NOTHING to do with how much power it requires. Period. Additionally, you'll want to match the gain between the two amps as close as you can. The sole reason for this is you don't want one running out of gas before the other, and one working harder than the other (one might not last as long as the other if it is doing more of the work). If they aren't matched, they DO NOT fight each other or hurt the sub in any way whatsover, the power they produce is additive when it reaches the subs voice coil only.

Actually, each amp would have seen 2 ohms if he had a dual 2 ohm sub and wired one amp to each voice coil. and Rattlz, thank goodness you know about the gain being there to match the voltage from the head unit. You have no idea how many new people we get on here that have no idea about that. However, matching the gain to the voltage is the maximum you should go with the gain. However, you can always turn it down after that matching to get less power out of the amplifier if it is too powerful for your sub, which it seems to be in this case.

DO NOT I repeat DO NOT !! ever run separate runs of speaker wire to different coils on the same sub. which means, you don't run a different amp on each coil, and you don't use separate channels from the same amp on different coils. you need to get a dual 1 ohm sub, and wire it in series to 2 ohm and bridge it on the amplifier. yes, people have been known to run more than one amp on a single woofer, but that is when the amplifiers are strappable, there for they work together as one amplifier, and the wiring is a little different. you don't need to worry about that though, just bridge your amp in series to a dual 1 ohm BTL. nice choice of equipment though, hope you have the electrical to back it up!