Just picked up my new HU!

MacLeod

No. Left is coming from the left side of the car, center should be coming from the center of the car and right is coming from the right side of the car.

If the center is right in front of you with left and right equal distances from center then your stage is about 2' wide which isnt wide. If your center is in the middle of the car and left and right are at the doors then your center is about 6' wide which is pretty wide.

1996blackmax

I just started laughing reading this stuff again. I just got back from some errands, and noticed that the "center" of the stage somewhat to the right of my steering wheel. Either way, I am very happy with how it sounds. The bottom line is that the T.A. feature works heck of a lot better with this HU, it is not narrow like with the Pioneer. I was listening to the Doors and it sounded pretty nice. I am specially happy that my old Polks are still sounding very nice, and they were not at fault. .

MacLeod

1996blackmax wrote:

Either way, I am very happy with how it sounds.

And that is all that matters!

exalted512

cam5860 wrote:

You have to get the time alignment centered from where your sitting at which is the driver side. Your not going to be sitting in the middle so there's no need to try to center it from sitting in the middle. You have to make it sound as if you were sitting in the middle though. That's what makes it a pain in the **** to get it right.

for yourself, thats great. For competition--thats a no
-Cody

MacLeod

Right.

The problem is that youre sitting at the left most side of the truck so if youre image was in front of you it would have to be only a foot across to be equal. My personally, I dont want my center to be 6" away from the left and the right to be all the way across to the passenger door.

neomagus00

according to SLAP Street dBQ rules, the soundstage should be centered precisely between the left and right extremes of the stage, wherever those might be... so if your left and right edges are at the left and right edges of the car, you should aim for a sound centred in the middle of the car... if your left edge extends three feet beyond the driver's window, then the centre of the stage should be in front of you...

when you sit in a home, you sit such that there's equal distance between the left and right endpoints of the stage, and that creates the illusion of the centre, but in a car, i think the goal is to extend the left and right bounds as far as possible and then put the centre in between those bounds...

1996blackmax

I had some free time and I finally took a couple of shots of my new HU. By the way, this is the happiest I have been with a stereo in a long time. This thing is very nice .

PoweredByDodge

holy high end deck batman!

cam5860

Im not a eclipse fan. But I must admit thats the best looking deck I have seen out by eclipse.

MacLeod

That is a very good looking head unit. To bad your taste in music sucks!

Im looking at that one, the Pioneer P9600 and the Alpine 9853 for my upgrading.

The Pioneer has a 13 band EQ compared to the 7 on the Eclipse and 5 on the Alpine but the Eclipse is $600, the Pioneer $500 and the Alpine $400.

They all have time alignment and I really, REALLY hate to admit it but I may have to give in and use TA. My door speakers are so freaking high up that no matter what I do, my image is centered waaaay too far left. If I move the speakers Ill move up in class and Im not ready for that quite yet.

I guess Ill have to cheat.

audiobliss

Mac - I'd suggest looking at the P860MP instead of the 9600. Note I didn't say 8600. The Premiers don't have that last zero, and iirc, the pre-outs are higher as well as a few other things (I want to say more extensive crossover, but I'm not sure). The 9600/960 just has too many moving parts, and I've heard the mechanism isn't that reliable.

MacLeod

Yeah but I dont like the "auto" crap. Are the EQ and TA adjustable? The Alpine has 6 channel TA which is pretty cool! That way I could adjust the tweeters and mids independantly of each other.

cam5860

The TA on the Alpine is pretty darn good. You can set front, rear and subs with there TA feature.

MacLeod

Ive always been partial to Alpine anyway but thought Id try something different.

But if the Alpine has the better features for $200 less then I guess Ill have to stick with em.

exalted512

IMO, id get the 860
-Cody

1996blackmax

MacLeod wrote:

That is a very good looking head unit. To bad your taste in music sucks!

Im looking at that one, the Pioneer P9600 and the Alpine 9853 for my upgrading.

The Pioneer has a 13 band EQ compared to the 7 on the Eclipse and 5 on the Alpine but the Eclipse is $600, the Pioneer $500 and the Alpine $400.

They all have time alignment and I really, REALLY hate to admit it but I may have to give in and use TA. My door speakers are so freaking high up that no matter what I do, my image is centered waaaay too far left. If I move the speakers Ill move up in class and Im not ready for that quite yet.

I guess Ill have to cheat.

OOooooooh now you see that cheating is not so bad . The cool thing about it is that you can also just do the time aligment for the mids relative to the tweeters, not left to right. This will help the mids and tweeters blend in better.

As for the 13 band eq on the Pioneer it is a lot of bands, but the Eclipse one is very flexible. In the pro-mode there are two settings, one for 3way active, and one for 4 speakers and a sub. The 3way active will give you a 5 band parametric EQ for the mids and a 5band parametrice EQ for the tweeters. The other one will give you a 5 band parametric EQ for the front and 5 for the rear. I think this is way more flexible than the Pioneer EQ, as you can adjust the frequency, level, and Q (from 1 to 5) of each of the bands. This becomes very easy once you do the auto frequency response thing. You can go on the net and do all this on your computer. You will see the peaks that you might have on your system and tackle them. Also once on their site you can go to custom mode which gives you way more control over the settings than on the HU. You can vary the Q value on the EQ in 0.5 steps as opposed to the 1 full step method. You can also change x-over settings to basically any frequency you want (78, 79, 80, 84, 94Hz), your not limited to 63,80,100 and so forth. You can also pick way more frequencies to tackle, like 105Hz if you wanted. In the time alignment mode you can adjust in 0.5 millesecond steps instead of one millisecond (by the way in either mode, except easy, you can adjust the level of each speaker independenlty as well). One other thing in the pro-modes the HU also gives you the ability to adjust the bass (centered at 80Hz), midrange (630Hz), and treble (10KHz) settings. This is handy as you can make quick adjustments if needed pretty quickly just by pushing the volume button.


I did not like what the Pioneer did when used in conjuction with the T.A., it made my stage very small. One of the other guys here also mentioned something about the T.A. doing something to his tuning that he did not like. This became very apparent when I disingaged it, as the music seemed to open up again. This is not an issue with my 8455.

The Alpine has nice tunig abilities. I never encountered the weird T.A. that my Pioneer HU had with my Alpine HU's. I am not a fan of the whole glidetouch thing, give me buttons. I have played with it on many ocassions, so not being familiar with it is not the issue.

I would suggest you take a listen to all of them because that is a good amount of cash to drop on a HU. I have owned a Pioneer unit with basically the same guts as the one you mentioned, and probably one of the better HU's Alpine has produced in a while (the 7998, two of them). I also think that my Alpines and my Eclipse units were/are better at tackling discs that are in less than prestine condition. I have a whole bunch of CD's that I would not play in my 8600 due to it not reading them correctly, it would make some kind of noise. These play fine in my wife's car which has an Alpine, and on my HU. I truly believe the top of the line Eclipse unit produces the best sound out of all these units, is the more flexible one, and also has the best preamp section, but you have to let your ears make up your mind. Either way, those SR's will sound good with any of these units.

1996blackmax

Hey Mac, I got my unit for $450 dollars from an authorized dealer. I paid $35 dollars for the installation to get the 3 year warranty from Eclipse. This is the time of the year to get good deals on 05 stuff .