[mikegett]

You have mis understood how to rate your altenator. The amp rating is a max draw that your amplifier will ever see. The same goes for every other electrical system in your car. If you have a power window on a fifteen amp fuse then fifteen amps is the max it will ever see. The first thing to do is have someone like autozone do a load check of your entire car. Keep your amplifier out of this test. Turn on every other electrical circuit you can. That mean putting the airconditioner on, your stock radio( without the amp), lights and even open and close your windows (all four at the same time). This will tell you what max amount of load the car will normaly see. You will deduct that from your altenator rating. I have not rated the olds yet but my taurus had a 145 amp altenator with a max load of 45 placed on it. That left me with one hundred usable amps. If you would like, then you could check the system with your amplifier going. More than likely you will see that it pulls about half of its rating at a high volume. Since this high volume is not normaly kept for extended periods of time it is suggested to alot for one third of the combined amp rating of your amplifier. Since your amp is rated at eighty I would safely say that you should assume around thirty amps are used continuously. Of course, the rating will vary on the type of sub and how loud you do use it. I had three amps in my taurus at one time. One was rated for seventy five (a four channel) one was rated for 60 (a six channel) and the other was rated for fourty five (my subs 2 channel). The stock altenator ran with no problems for almost five years. I will say that the GM altenators are extremely unreliable. Every GM car I owned had the altenator replaced before two years.