I don't know how fast the voltage regulator is in the mean green. It would be really cool if it re-used the PCM regulator already on the jeep. But if you are running a good 1 farad cap, you'd have to be draining a very heavy load before you worry.
Audio amplifiers need high voltage (the one i built for home need 75 volts DC), something a car does not have. Since reisiters only work for lowrering the voltage , and a transformer only work off of AC, you need to desing a special step up DC transformer. A cheep step up DC transformer uses 2 transistors to swith posative and negative to give a square wave AC volatge. Then the square wave is ran through a step up transofmer, then bridge-recvtified and ran through some caps to clean it up. So really, you could have a decent amount of AC on the power in side, and as long as it does not interfeer with the switching transistors, and have clean steped up voltage on the amp side.
The battery takes care of the ups/downs varying amps and the alt follows as needed.
For us normal folk, that is right. When we turn on a load that is too heavy for the alternator, the bat. will take it up for the needed amount of time. But if you were to watch the voltage it would drop down to battery voltage while the alternator could not keep up. Since we are talking about an amplifier that steps up at a fixed ratio, the voltage difference is multiplied by that ratio. For example. Lets say you had a 300 watt RMS amplifier that needs a constant 130 (about 10 times more than charging voltage) volts in order to pump out a sustained 300 watts. If your alternator can't handle that load and drops 2 volts to bat. voltage, you didn't lose 2 volts at the amp, you lost 20. The high voltage is the difference between clipping and a nice clean note.
That is why you see those chromed shiny capacitors hooked in line with a powerful amplifier. A capacitor is like a battery but it has a variable voltage and discharges much quicker. you can charge a capacitor to 15 volts, drain it then charge it to 9. With a good capacitor you can get thousands of amps out of one in a second, something you canÆt do with a battery.
