Ah the old home stereo speaker set up.... you had enough watts in your headunit to actually drive them?
lets see, if you were on a budget (ie, poor teenager) you bought the biggest amp or amp/eq that Pyramid offered, usually from a pawn shop. You may be buying a 1500 watt amp, but you were lucky if you were getting 100 watts out of it. If you had some cash layin around, you may have been able to buy a Pyle or Kicker amp, and if you were big money (or just got your first credit card, one from the electronics stores...best buy, circuit city, etc), you stepped up to Hifonics, Rockford Fosgate, Orion, Boston Acoustics, or ADS.
I went thru just about every iteration of that....but went from Pyramid straight to ADS, Orion, Soundstream, Boston Acoustics in the span of 1.5 vehicles.
An odd friend of mine named Eddie would buy all the amps he could that were blown, or most folks would just give them to him. He would rebuild them, and improve the mosfet stuff and other chips, and get stupid wattage out of them. He had 6 18 inch subs in the back of his 1st gen 4r. When he would roll into local car audio contests, everyone would be blarin bass music. He would crank metallica or judas priest or megadeath. He spiderwebbed his windshield several times in that 4r. At one of the car audio regional events, he got busted, because it was competing in the 251-500 watt class, which if you looked at the amp labels would have been correct. But he was sitting somewhere around 980 watts, due to his rebuilds and enhancements. He was DQ'ed from the event, and asked not to return to competition. LOL
