my setup:

kenwood kdc-8015 headunit
kenwood kfc-xr60p components
kenwood kfc-xr600 coaxials

now i want to add a single woofer in the rear. nothing fancy.. just add a little bass to the muzak! im thinking of a nice 10" woofer. i want to be able to amplify the rest of the speakers too, is it possible to do this with just one amp to save weight?!

 

There's many five channel amps on the market. I'd go with a Soundstream Rubicon 805.

 

There's this company called Arc Audio that is coming out with a 5 channel amp that outputs 45 x 4 and 110 x 1. Their amps are underrated so it outputs a little more than that.

The reason I'm recommending them is because their amps sound pretty awesome, on the level of McIntosh, A/D/S and so on. My friend is a dealer so he should be able to get you a good price on one.

If you're interested in hearng more about them, do a search on the forums at http://www.elitecaraudio.com. Many of the members love the amps too and I'm sure you probally think I'm a wee bit biased.

 

You can do a single 4 channel amp, bridge the rear channels for a sub, run your fronts of the front and power the rear speakers off the deck. Most your sound should come from the front. Rear speakers should be faded out a bit so it acts as ambient fill so don't need that much power. Does your headunit have nonfading preamp outs for a subwoofer? It's a neat thing to have to control your subwoofer level. One amp will do fine, provided it's beefy enough.

 

Great way to save some money without compromising sound quality very much. Rears are really not that important. With this setup, you can always just buy an additional more powerful amp to power the sub.

Often a 5 channel amp will provide modest power to the 4 channels and the 5th sub channel won't output that much power unless you give it a 2 ohm load. With what dc24me recommends, a good quality 4x50 watt amp will output about 200 watts with two of the channels bridged which should be adequate.