car stereo's

Best way, if they're not immensely powerful, would be to run one zero or 2 gauge lead from the battery into the boot/cabin and use a distributor block mounted somewhere safe, then run separate leads (2 or 4 gauge) to the terminals on the amps. Keeps it tidy, safer, and slimmer, plus you can add and remove them as you like then as well. If you're amp is mounted to your subwoofer box then if you use a thoughtfully positioned distributor block you can quickly remove the entire sub assembly for the times you need extra load capacity.

not overly powerfull I'm thinking of a 200w and maybe a 6-800w aswell the sub box and amp wont neeunconveme out as its a second car and swmbo has the main family car hence the mortaly slow very uncool clio the long term plans include some minlights or banded steels with some stretch and some stick attention

You're probably right on the overkill sizes, but to me a 'small' amp or sub is anything under 500wrms. If I remember right I ran 4AWG cable for the 150W active sub I had in the 'rat and it really made a big difference over the recommended smaller gauge.

Lilbob - simplest thing you can consider is a good quality 4 channel amp - you can bridge 2 channels to power a sub, and the 2 remaining channels can power your fronts.

Simple is sometimes best, better to buy 1 good amp that'll power a sub and your front speakers than 2 that you'll end up wanting to upgrade.

If you have future plans of going a little mental with your stereo then you cant go wrong with running over-spec power cable.. but its all down to cost vs need..

If you find a few models of amps that you might be interested, we can check out the real power ratings etc and give you more accurate advice.

And its not really that hard to wire up and sort out, you'll be fine.

4awg is completely mental for 150w though, you must have to chop half the strands of the cable out to get it in a connector to wire it up.

I don't think the original dude is talking 2.5kw amps and 10cuft boxes, just a simple upgrade, 0awg is a major pain running down a car, 8awg is lovely and easy.

put your fuse at the battery end but also you are safest to use a fused distribution block as well. Belt & braces for the extra £1 or so it costs you!

WTF are you high?

rule of thumb - balanced system means 4 times the power in the sub that you have in the front speaker chanels. so 2x100W in the fronts with a 400W amp on the sub is "about right"

Last proper install I did was 2x150W RMS into the front component speakers and 1x400 into the sub. I'm not a basshead so that worked well for me.

I've done a few which were 2x50 and 1x200 which is plenty in most cars.

Most component speakers are designed with the expectation of being amped.

IMO/IME you get the best out of a system by putting a good amp and comps (or even quality coaxials) up front, feed them plenty of clean power and make sure the crossovers are set so the speaker doesn't get asked to reproduce frequencies its not happy with. For most of use a cheapo amp and budget sub will (if well set up) be all you need, I'd even say decent 6x9s through the shelf run on a high pass is a decent alternative to a sub in many applications - but if you are going above like 100Hz you want a decent amp for them...

Edit: for clarity