How to Disconnect a Car Amplifier

A car amplifier can be easily removed from your vehicle, and it takes very little effort. The main thing is to ensure you are not leaving open lines to power in your vehicle, and that you reconnect the speakers to your radio once finished, so that you still have sound. The amplifier is powered from the battery, generally through a power cable hooked directly to the car battery, which also contains a fuse. If you are removing the amplifier because it is not working properly, you may just want to check this fuse and replace it before going through the process of removal.

Step 1 - Disconnect Power

Before you start to remove your car amplifier, be sure to disconnect the negative terminal from your car battery to ensure you are not shocked, or a power surge cooks your wiring from a short circuit. Also, on the positive terminal, you should see a secondary wire, with a fuse in it, also remove this fuse before moving forward, to protect your vehicle from shock as well. You can determine which wire is for your amp by looking at your amplifier and identify the power line by its color, it should be the same, unless an extension was used to reach the battery. Simply disconnect this line from the battery's positive terminal before moving forward.

Step 2 - Remove the Lines from the Vehicles Stereo

There should be 2 added lines running from your car amplifier to the stereo. The turn-on lead and the actual signal cables that transmit the sound to the amplifier itself. Disconnect these and follow where they go through the cars interior, many times these are run under carpet and trim along the doors and can be removed and replaced with a screwdriver. You will want to utilize this concealment when running your speaker lines back to your stereo, once the amplifier is removed.

Step 3 - Reconnect the Speakers to the Stereo Outputs

Once you have the power lines and the added signal cable and turn-on lead cable removed from your car amplifier, simply take the speaker lines and run them back through the same hiding places these cables came from. You can now remove the amplifier and re-secure all your vehicles trim and covering once the speakers are reconnected. Test your sound quality, you will most likely have to adjust any of the advanced equalization settings as they generally become distorted from adding an amplifier to the system. Replace all your interior trimming once the speaker wires are run back to the stereo, and your vehicle should look the same as it did before you started.

Your last step in this process, is to reconnect your negative line wire to the pole on your battery. The positive connection should have been replaced as soon as you had removed the car amplifier power line and fuse from it earlier. The other thing is that this power cable should run the length of your vehicle to where the amplifier was sitting, and you will likely have to work a little to remove it from the engine firewall.