Car PC

[hitch_united]

Hi fellas, Im integrating a windows based PC into my 2008 Mazda 3. Im doing some research and designing the system. I realized I will not have a headunit, being as the touchscreen will be ther instead. So i realize I need some way for my computer; which will be located in the trunk, to play the audio of the computer through the speakers in my car using windows media player. Is there an amp out there I could use that would accept the output of a computer? like hooking up your computer speakers to the jack located on the back of a computer? This way I figured the computer gives the amp the signal and the amp powers the door spekers. Thanks alot!

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[bland 10+ year member]

If your talking about a headphone jack, you can get a adapter to turn it into rca jacks which would then hook up directly to your amplifiers.

 

[Lothar34 10+ year member]

The output on your sound card usually take a mini stereo plug like this:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=090-326

and the amp input usually takes an RCA input like this:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=263-351

so what you need is an adapter like this:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=240-135

Now some sound cards will have RCA outputs on them. If that's the case then you just need an RCA cable, with no adapter.

 

[jdc753 10+ year member]

Depending on the sound card you get you may want to have a Line Driver to up the voltage on the RCA's before they get to the amps. For my install I just stuck with an HU but I know it can be done without one. Honestly I would go over to http://www.mp3car.com and do some searching around on there and someone who has done this already will have some good answers for you and should be able to point you to some good gear.

Another thing you could look into would be getting a motherboard with S/PDIF or Optical out and use it to feed the audio signal into a processor such as the Alpine H701 (will need Rux-C701 to control it.)

I haven't actually done it (was thinking about this earlier though.) BUT, I imagine you could get the headphone jack to RCA cable and then run RCA's your 4 amp and then daisy chain it out to any other amps. All the audio processing would have to be done on the amplifiers and again a line driver might be needed to boost the signal to the amps.

 

[hitch_united]

Ok so I'm going to need a descent sound card with a line driver to amplify the signal. What sound card would you recommend? I wanted to use a 5 channel amp to also hook up a subwoofer. How can this all be done? Thanks!

 

[1rockford1 5,000+ posts]

http://www.mp3car.com