Is a Capasitator the same thing as a power regulator when it comes to audio systems?

[Accord Man]

Originally posted by illusion
Ok this has piqued my curiosity. How? The only time I've ever heard of a different regulator being used is in high SPL systems. They've been known to cheat a bit and crank the voltage up on the regulator on the alternator to overdrive the amps, but in 20 years of installing I've never heard of using one in any other way. At one point in my life I was an MECP Master Installer, and certified by just about every major car audio company(I've been to an orion class, apline basic, alarm, and senior classes , kef enclosure design, and several others) and I've never heard of that. All serious car audio amps that would require that clean of power to begin with will have internal regulators. Just curious..

Thats great man.. The one vehicle that comes to mind is a early 80s subarban we loaded with a dozen old school Solo Barics..
And roughly 300w in tweeters, 1500w in mids..

Now to supply power, we left the stock alternator (rewound to roughly double the amperage) and added a few more alts. Obviously that was kinda hard, had to reroute the drive belt to accomodate the new alts.

All the additionalt alts were regulated the old fashion way, but before the amps, we had a second regulator to combine and normalize the current. All this @ 14.6v

Whats strange is when we tried to feed the power from the alts unregulated direclty the regulator before the amps, the voltage kept bouncing around between both peaks like a bad mofo..

So thats why we did what we did.

What was beautiful about this setup is that the regardless of how much current the amps would use, there would never be too much stress on the alts. Everything was wired so that the second regulator would totally isolate what was on both sides of the circuit.


Now this was an extreme setup, and a very efficient one.

This is totally useless to the general public, but for those of us who like to take things a notch higher..


I'm only 20yrs old, so I might not have as much experience as you, but my mind is kinda tuned for Science/Physics (and yet I'm about to become an Accountant.. :o )
Anyways I'm quiet capable when it comes to electric/electronic/mechanic..


How did you like your class with KEF ? I once did one with Paradigm, man it was soo interesting..