Hooking a car sub to my home theater?

[steelhitman12456]

I got a home theater system that i like but the subwoofer for it is lacking. I did the research, and discovered that while buying a different sub preassembled, it would cost atleast 200 bucks i could get a pioneer car sub for 60 bucks and build a box and then just connect the wires. My system in my room is a 250 watt system, the included subwoofer is rated at 3ohms. The pioneer sub i bought is 250 watts nominal power with 1200 watts max. When I plugged the sub into the home theater without installing it in the box i have for it just to make sure it worked, it was really quiet. The surround sound has an amp built in so i dont get why it isn't working loud like the stock sub. i also have a friend who's done this same thing with no issue so i don't really get whats going on. if someone could help me out, it would be appreciated.
i forgot to mention, the sub i bought is rated at 4 ohms

 

[bbt91945]

Car audio and home audio are designed differently. Car audio is designed for small place and home for large room. They are operate in different current, AC versus DC. You can burn out your power amplifier on your home audio. You don't find many home sub woofers that are higher than 150 watts and when you do they are more expensive. Most home audio are in the 8 ohm load while car audio in the 4 ohm load and some in 2 ohm. My recommendation is buy a home audio subwoofer.

 

[N2Audio]

The issue is power.
USUALLY the surround sound amp only drives the fronts, center and surround speakers and the sub will have its own small amplifier that is mounted to the enclosure.
If your processor DOES have power for a sub you can be sure it is very little power and the old sub was probably designed to produce some usable output with that low power.

Being a 250w sub your new pioneer is probably going to need at least 100w rms to come to life.

Check Partsexpress.com for "plate amplifiers". These are amps that bolt to your enclosure and operate a lot like an external car amplifier. You plug the amp into the wall, you plug an rca subwoofer signal cable from the receiver to the amp and the back side of the amp has speaker leads that connect to the woofer.

I recently built my own home sub to replace my little 30w Jensen 5.25" sub I bought several years ago. The new sub is 1100w rms driven with a 500w (Bash 500s) amp. It produces clean output into the mid 20hz range at SPL levels I'm afraid will eventually vibrate pictures off the walls and mantle.

 

[Roy]

you amp is will not amplify the low pass signal. it amplifies the left and right channel speakers but simply sends a signal to the low pass filter because in home audio, 10 times out of ten, the sub is powered. you can still do what you want but you'll have to buy a dc to ac converter. or plug a car battery charger into your wall and hook it up to that. your best and cheapest route would be to just buy a powered sub. it will be louder and cleaner, less work and less money.