Low volume distortion during installation

No, the head will more than likely send a signal for each speaker and a common ground for all speakers to the hidden amplifier. The factory head will still control the fade and balance. You must attach the LOC wires after the hidden amplifier. The simplest way to do this is to find either the front or rear speaker wires and tie into them. Another good suggestion here is to not use the built in LOC in the amp, buy yourself a good outboard LOC from PAC, Soungate or Scosche. These are far superior and offer far more flexibility than the built in LOC does, especially in the amount of signal that the amp receives.Top Secret, I can tell you but then my wife will kill me.

Finally got back to this, I think I'm going to buy an LOC, but I'd like to make sure it will help before I spend the $$. One other question I have, will noise and resultant crackling of the sound lead to weak bass? The 6.5" mid is mounted on a custom 1/2" mdf baffle with deadening and using the door as an infinite baffle, and the bass is pretty crappy (it doesn't compare to the factory Bose in our '97 Maxima). Or is this most likely a problem with the speaker install itself? There is a large opening with no metal in the inner door where the little factory speaker box was. I did not reinforce this (mdf baffle is just large enough to hold the speaker in place and does not cover the hole) but just laid the deadening over it. Could the deadening be flexing enough to trash the bass or is something else the problem?

Finally got a David Navone NE-774V and hooked everything up tonight and.....much better. I don't get any distortion now until much louder volumes. I do have a couple more questions though: 1. Gain setting: the LOC says to keep the gains at max if possible. Doing this barely allows me to raise the gain on the amp before hitting distortion (at a reasonably loud level, but it seems to me it should be better). How do I properly set these (I don't have a test CD)? 2. From my post above, do I need to better reinforce the deadening over the holes in the inner door? I'm looking for SQ here and am not sure how important that is to the speaker performance.