Actually, at a audio convention a while back when caps were getting popular and everyone was scared of them, Richard Clark (If you know about the history of the greats in Car Audio, you know his name - think the Buick Grand National with horn drivers and aperiodic membranes) took a charged 1 farad cap, shoved it in his pants, and jumped 2 wrenches together to prove that while the sparks are pretty and will put burn marks on your tie, it won't blow up. He did this in front of a crowd of around 1000.

I always did the resistor deal when initially charging a cap, too, but took it off immediately after the voltage across the terminals stabilized, usually took only 30 seconds or so, and the resistor was small. This was the first time I ever heard of leaving it on.

I had 2 Soundstream amps in my Audi.. 700w (RMS) x 1, and a 75 (RMS) x 2, and each one of them got their own 4 gauge from the battery....mostly for asthetics using the 4 gauge on the smaller amp. The sub amp had a 1 farad cap within 12" of the power terminal on the amp, and both had 100 amp fuses 8" from the battery terminals as well.

Twin 4 gauge is easier to hide under carpet, too.

I've won my fair share of trophies with that system in the Audi, and the same system in the CRX before that... Now blowing my own horn, but I'm no rookie at this stuff. I got out of comps when having a cleanly installed, excellent sounding system wasn't enough, and having waterfalls across the amps was becoming commonplace.

 

Well, I'm definately going to rerun the wire and do at least 2 gauge to a distribution block and a short 6" run of 4 ga to the amp. This way I can eliminate my little 8 gauge power wire for my front speaker amp. One less wire makes it that much cleaner (plus that purple wire just looks gay ). I'm tired of half butting things. I'm gonna do it the right way this time. More importantly, I'm gonna do it MY way.

 

on my 94 Impala SS I run dual 4ga to dual 8ga distro blocks and run 2 8ga wires to each amp, using the other two for various other goodies that are back there... works pretty well...

 

It only has a Positive Post and a Negative Post. I have it mounted about 10" from my amp and I used the same size wire as my amp has going to the battery and the ground wire is about 5” bolted down with the seat. What do I need to do to get the full effect from the cap?

 

This is about how I do it- you can also use a high amp diode before the shunt to further minimize the influence of other devices with a high current use.
The cap is used for supplying flat DC to the amp only with a setup like the following:


Without the shunt and the diode tha cap will try to buffer for all the systems in the vehicle- eg the intake grid heaters, other amps etc- with the diode it will only be charged by the vehicle and drained by the amp- the shunt is there to limit the pulse load on the vehicle's system and to accomodate for high impulse loads to be taken from the cap only- most amps have an intake voltage adaptive circuit that isn't fast enough to adapt within eg one beat of the base drum, but fast enough to cope with 0.2-0.4V less than vehicle voltage in continuous mode as long as the drop is rather slow- like 0.03 -0.5 seconds.
On running multiple amps for eg woofer, medium range and high I prefer to stabilize each one separately because the woofer amp will use up enough to drop voltage until the high range amp gets all blurry and you can't have that with Wagner
The diode-shunt version will also help the stock electrical system by just using an allowable peak load for the system and will therefore keep your voltage regulator happy. (Those pesky PCMs will start thinking of their own if something is getting amiss- had quite some time to find out that one source of my TC lockup apply or not problems came from a little bit too much draw from my amps. Could play up to 50 with my lights off trouble free, up to 47 with low beams and only 42 with high and PIAAs on. Any higher and the TC lockup started to act up- enough draw on the system to get the PCM thinking that I was moving the go pedal- found out about it due to a code saying generator field driver malfunction.)

HTH

AlpineRAM