Car Stereos: Wiring speakers to amp, wiring speakers, passive crossovers

Question
Can I connect 6 speakers plus a sub woofer to my PYLE PLMRA420 4 Channel 1000 Watt Waterproof Marine Bridgeable Mosfet Amplifier? Is it ok to wire the speakers in parallel? I have 4 PYLE PLG69.8 6-Inch x 9-Inch 500 Watt Eight-Way Speakers, 2 PYLE PLG6.4 6.5-Inch 300 Watt Four-Way Speakers, & 1 PYLE PLMRW10 10-Inch 500 Watt White 4 Ohm Marine Subwoofer. I am building a stand alone system in an Ice Chest.
Thanks,
Nelson

Answer
Hi Nelson,

There's not really a safe way to do this without using external passive crossovers.  

You can connect four speakers, plus the sub, to the amplifier without a problem.  To do this, you can connect two 4-ohm speakers to each of the front channels, then bridge the rear channels to run the sub.  It's okay to run two speakers in parallel from a single channel, but you can't connect three speakers to one channel without dropping the system impedance too low for the amp to run safely.  In addition, you can't connect more speakers to the two channels that are bridged for the sub, unless you install passive high-pass and low-pass crossovers so that the speakers and the sub aren't playing the same frequencies.

Are you using a head unit as part of your system?  If so, you could run two speakers from the head unit's outputs, then run four speakers and the sub from the amplifier.

Hope this helps!

Brian