BOSS Audio Systems CE102 2 Channel Car Amplifier, High/Low Pass Crossover

Use this in random with a Kicker line level adapter to add the factory sub to my car. The woofer isn’t rated for much more than the rating for a single channel on this amp, so i get ample power out of it for my use case. The low pass filter also works exceptionally well. It’s a bit larger than a bar of soap in size so it was very easy to install it in the same area the factory amp would have been located. It sounds good, runs cool, and does exactly what i want it to for $30.

Was nice and compact, but failed two months in! Started by shutting out one speaker, the the other

Nice power out of a small package. I used this to power 2 40 watt dash speakers. Works great. I had to buy separate ground loop isolator to cut out alternator noise after install. Otherwise great unit.

Purchased to replace Lepai 2020A+ that released magic smoke after power supply bit the dust. The Boss is the smallest dedicated car amp I've ever seen. Bench tested with clips and 4" 3 way outdoor speakers, A-to-B against a tiny 30W+30W kit amp. The Boss generates loud volume, but sounds very bright and the bass is thin. Guess it was designed for small motorcycle speakers with poor low frequency response. Case gets very warm under constant use, which indicates that the heat dissipation works as designed. Permanently installed in boathouse, driving two 6x9 speakers. Working well after a day. Hopefully it lasts a good long while.

Nice little amp for the price. Easy hookup. Enough to supply the watts you need to drive a mid or subwoofer for excellent sound but not enough to piss off your neighbor at the red light. I am using it to power a dual coil Pyle 6.5 mid woofer with the coils connected in parallel for 2 ohm resistance, and it delivers excellent mids and highs to complement the low end of 2 6x9's and 2 6.75's. Good for giving some extra boost in the tonal range of your choice. The three-way switch that allows you to select tonal range is a plus on this amp and gives it a versatility that other amps this size and price do not. For my purposes with the 6.5 Pyle, it sounds great in the high filter position and accents mostly mids.

1 star for the price. 1 star for the fact that it can drive a set of 6x8s.. almost as well as my Pioneer deck. In spite of that, I gave it a star because I can definitely see where I might find this small amp useful. I bought this to complete the setup for my truck. My Pioneer deck is 4x50w peak, 22 watts per channel RMS driving the factory 6x8 speakers. I added a cheap $89 12" Kicker subwoofer rated for 150w RMS/300w peak @ 4 ohm. I was just needing a small, cheap amp with LPF to drive that. I connected this BOSS 100w amp using the RCA connectors. At about 1/2 volume from my deck, my sub experienced distortion. At full power from the deck you would think that I had a blown voice coil. I initially had my doubts since the subwoofer was as cheap as you can get a Kicker 12" to be.. but I pulled my 800w Pioneer amp from my car to test, and boom! Great bass from the cheap sub. Now I'm just pissed at myself because I mounted this BOSS amp onto my enclosure without testing it first. I tested this amp on my factory speakers (rear). They sound about the same as my fronts, which were driven by my deck. Issues start when you get to the upper end of the volume range, where the speakers driven by the BOSS amp start getting distortion while the speakers driven by the deck continue to perform well. This makes me doubt that this amp is 100 watts, even if that number was peak instead of RMS. Each channel on this BOSS amp is probably less than the 22 watts RMS that my Pioneer deck can do. Where I can see this amp being useful is maybe in a smaller ice house or mobile home, used to amplify an iPhone or other small gadget out to a pair of 6x9 or bookshelf speakers. Definitely not for driving a subwoofer.

For those who might be curious about what goes into these things, here are some answers. A single inductor is by the power supply input, along with the one discrete (bipolar) transistor that appears on the circuit board. It seems like a circuit intended to deal with voltage fluctuations, and maybe confer a degree of idiot-proofing, and I approve. Most of the other parts in evidence are the minimum needed to do about a third of what this amp's spec sheet claims. Aside from some small value mylars and a couple of ceramics, all of the capacitors are Taiwanese, aluminum electrolytics. At least 3/4 of the resistors appear to be carbon-based. Buffering is provided by a UTC4558 dual op amp chip. Amplification is provided by a 4-channel amp-on-a-chip, the $2.50 STA540SAN. At 12 volts, this chip is good for 4 channels x 9 watts @2 ohms, but can be bridged to provide 2 x 18 watts @4 ohms instead. That's exactly what we have here. If I were making this amp, I'd spend an extra couple of dollars to use higher quality resistors and capacitors, because they'd last longer and sound better. On the other hand, it's not much over $20, and I couldn't build one of them for that. Parts are a lot more expensive when you buy a few, than when you buy thousands at a time, and I'd probably get gouged for >$10 for the box alone. Yes, it's cheaply made, and inflates its wattage from 36 to 100. My "90 watt" Pyle amp produces 6-8 watts per stereo channel. Inflation of car audio specs is SO nearly universal, that doing 36% of what's claimed is, relatively speaking, not bad at all. If you use it in a car and are maintaining something close to the 13.8v maximum that most alternators can produce, you might hit 25 watts a channel. If you're driving a couple of subs with it, that will give you sound levels about 17 dB over the efficiency of your speakers, so if you bought efficient speakers, let's say 96 db/watt, you'd get about 113 dB. That's loud enough to damage your hearing pretty quickly, and is more than most buyers would ever want. Continuous exposure to over 90 dB is deemed harmful for hearing, and a pair of 98 dB/w speakers could do that on about a twentieth of a watt per channel. (Hey, if you bought 82 dB/watt speakers and need 7 watts to get to 90 dB, don't blame me... ) One thing I found in the data sheet for the STA540SAN, was mention of the idea that manufacturers could save themselves the cost of a part, plus circuit board real estate and insertion costs, by using a single DC-blocking capacitor for both of the stereo channels. They also mention, in vague terms, that it will harm stereo separation to do that. While I did see some pairs of caps on the board, none of them were very near the output stage, so I suspect that Boss may have done that with these amps. If you're using them for subs, you'll never know or care, but if you're using one for higher frequencies and get crosstalk, that might be why. It's common in budget amps. In the rare event that an output capacitor fails by becoming a short circuit, it can allow the DC power supply to flow directly through both channels of your speakers, which is likely to fry many drivers almost instantly. I'd have felt better if just that one cap was a solid type, rather than an aluminum oxide paste cheapie. But hey, did I tell you it was only about $20?

Got this to replace an amp in an RV entertainment system. From the photos it looked similar to my original one that died. Sure enough it was almost identical in size and connections making it easy to install. It was less wattage than the original, so I was worried about volume, but it has enough power to be hear over a very loud air conditioner and sounds nice and clean. Very happy so far.

Muy buena fidelidad de audio y excelente calidad de ensamble.

Excellent little unit very straightforward and compact easy to understand instructions not overly complicated. Works perfect for adding a little extra kick to either Factory speakers or my single cab truck with some speakers behind the seats was able to slide the unit inside the dash and not have it hang out anywhere

I am using it as a bass booster for my home theatre woofer. It works free. Cheap but of great quality.

Works and sounds decent

He quedado muy satisfecho de los produtos boss, previamente compre un autoestero con bocinas fue necesario adquierir este amplificador para conectar las bocinas restantes, funciona muy bien pero estaria excelente que contara con las 'pinzas' para atrapar los cables y evitar asi el cortar y unir cables, ademas lo unico que no me agrado es que cuando apago o enciendo el estereo/auto, se escucha un 'tronido' en las bocinas; por otro lado cuando comienzo a reproducir sonido las bocinas se escuchan antes y despues de apagar el auto en comparación a las bocinas del autoestero