racebum

prices will blow your mind. 700-1000 seems to be the going rate and you have old *** caps, old components. decks really should be gone through and recapped at this age.

the eclipse cd7200mk2 was made until 2010 if i remember right. the 7909 a special piece. it's just old and hard to even buy

02BlownZ06

Yeah, I looked and they are crazy in price. I am checking prices on a 957 right now and it looks like one could be had for between 1000 to 1100. I think I will pull the trigger and try it cause I am getting nowhere trying to tweak the 7200. I did order the plug in microphone and will try the time alignment before I yank it out though. This was my first departure from Alpine head units since 1986. I have easily gone through 10 or more different Alpines and liked every one of them.
I bought the Pioneer on specs and features and boy does it have them. I can't believe they would skimp in the most important area of all.

racebum

best sounds for less has them for 989 on ebay. that's nearly 100 in ebay fees they will be paying. may barter locally and try for 900-950? my local dealer gave me that 960hdmi for 550 so there is room to barter. that same seller also has a warranty exhange 967 for the same price
.
you're going to put this alpine in and you'll hear the highs again, the midrange will be right. you'll hear the flaws in your speakers but you won't have all the artificial flavor of pioneer and it will bring a smile to your face

the thing i realized is most people in home theater and in car audio shop by features and spec sheets. the days of sitting in hi fi stores demoing gear don't exist like they did when we were kids. companies can't put sound on a spec sheet and even if they tried most car audio shoppers use deck power and cheap speakers. most HT buyers use some receiver and whatever is on sale for speakers. for each pair of B&W or martin logan speakers even best buy sells i bet ya they sell 20x more entry level pioneer or klipsch speakers. that's the market now a days. alpine has a heavy OEM business which is keeping them going but even still. the guys at the local audio shop say they sell more pioneer and kenwood than they do alpine because people read the spec sheets online and get sold on features. it's also possible some people do not have the ability to process sounds as well as others. audiophiles may actually have a genetic trait that allows them to hear things others can't and may be more tonally sensitive. possible? sure...also possible that we have been spoiled with good sound and after hearing it you can never go back because you know what you're missing. a civic may feel fast until you get a corvette which may feel fast till you get a GTR which may be fast till you get in a GT cup car and so on. maybe that's what happened to us?

02BlownZ06

There is no doubt that has happened. I am not going to sit here and say I have genetically superior ears. In fact, I have some hearing loss due to loud stereos, loud tractors, rock concerts, and firearms, but I do know what sounds good from years of having good equipment and hearing good equipment. My local installer can get alpine but he is quoting me kind of high so I might swap the head unit myself. If I can get him down to around $1100 I might go local as he will do the swap for me for no extra charge as I am always short on time. And yes it is all relative, I thought my Onkyo pre-amp sounded great until I plunked down on a $4000 Marantz. The Onkyo is junk by comparison. Others, with more money than me, will take it to another level with McIntosh and the like (I used to sell McIntosh back in the day) and that is some seriously great sounding gear. I just want an awesome sound and am now willing to forego some features to get it. I think for many the top Kenwood and Pioneer units would be more than enough and sound well enough. I feel like with technology the way it is, I should be able to sit down in my car, crank up the tunes and they rival and in some areas even surpass a nice home system. It shouldn't be a downgrade to hop in your car to listen to music, it should be like putting on a sweet pair of headphones and skiing down a wicked slope at Vail.

Note: Sorry to the OP that we are dissecting the quality of head units when you asked about JL and Hertz. That discussion can resume anytime but the head unit discussion is paramount as it is the source of everything. Nothing down the line will sound as good if your source isn't solid. Just my .02.

racebum

i would make the $1100 an offer. cash if possible. saves him credit card fees. walk in, say look it's 989 on ebay. i have 1100 here. do you want to make a deal? mention how you like the business and generally would rather deal with him. do the dance, chances are he will accept. the margin on head units is often less than 100% unlike amps and speakers which often are. dealer cost on the JL c5 components is $300, this i have actually seen. full retail on that 957 is $1299 so $1100 is a pretty solid offer. i really doubt cost is more than $750

also agree on the thread. you could always make an alpine upgrade thread and go over the changes you experience when switching out. oh, by the way. is the rest of your system done? i have a JL 10w6v3 sitting here i need to sell off. it's a month old. tried it in the 4runner, now have a 12w6v3. the 10 works in a box as small as .55cu net but sounds best in .8 to .9 cu/ft. qtc .707 actually happens at .91cuft. in a corvette with all that cabin gain you could probably squeeze by with .6 or .7cuft and have a great response. dealer cost on the 10w6 is $275, $549 retail. this thing is basically new and perfect, looking for $320 with grill if anyone in here has interest.

02BlownZ06

Back in the day cost on speakers was generally half of retail or even less. Cost for all other audio components fell in somewhere around 60% of retail in most cases so it sounds like things are fairly similar still. I don't think the video market is anywhere close to that. The long time high end store here where I live closed a few years ago as a result of all the online sales. There remains only one shop left in town and they don't sell JL Audio and Alpine is special order. They have Rockford, Audison, Arc Audio, Phoenix Gold, Kenwood, Hertz, and Pioneer. I might take you up on the 10w6. I want to see how existing system sounds once I slap the Alpine in first and go from there.

racebum

it depends on the brand and it depends on what it is. a manager walked away from the screen when i was buying at best buy. speakers were 100% but tv's were like 10% if it was a tv on sale. i have no idea how they use so much store real estate for such small margins. i think receivers are around 100% as well. it's tv's that are or were very slim on some sets,

car audio hasn't changed at all mark up wise. cables and connects are over 100% mark up. speakers are right about 100%, same with amps, it's decks that are less and i have no idea where alpine is but i have a feeling it's a slimmer margin brand than many

i LOVE high end audison. if you ever get a chance to play with their class A thesis amps i think they are probably the best amplifiers in car audio right now. the bit 1 is also top tier for a DSP. arc i have never directly played with but the guy who designed them is who made the old school zapco stuff that was so good. just not sure how that translates into the digital small amps. also haven't heard the reborn PG stuff. their old ZPA amps were excellent and still are a top SQ choice, low end stuff sucked but that brand had some magic and built their good amps right here in portland oregon.

02BlownZ06

You and my installer both! He has been trying to pimp that bit one on me like crazy. He thinks it would transform my system but I still want to address the front end first. I didn't realize the zapco dude did arc audio. You are just a bundle of knowledge, sir. Love catching back up with the car audio world!!

racebum

i grew up literally next door to one of the lead engineers at the old phoenix gold. glenn phillips. he ran a side business out of his house and helped me design my first car audio system. we used programs like LEAP to calculate box sizes, crossovers, impedance compensation. i learned a lot from him. so much in fact it's kind of put me at a level above most in car and even home audio. like we were saying earlier, once you get spoiled with good sound and know what you're listening for you never go back. i see comments online like "you can't hear a difference between amps" or "sub all sound the same if the distortion is low" neither of these are remotely true yet they are said often. sound waves are perceived in different ways by the brain and even if 2 speakers measure the same they may sound different. one major problem with subwoofers in car has been resonance. there has been this push for smaller and smaller boxes which boosts the .qtc higher sealed and the peak higher if ported. to me this sounds terrible but it is loud and that seems to be what a lot of people go for. anyway, like i was saying about resonance. in smaller boxes you have resonance behind the sub bouncing mostly off the back wall then making it's way through the cone again. if you have a critical ear you can hear it and it's why something like say a 10w3 which specs at .625cuft on the JL site completely transforms if you put it in 1cuft. in the larger box the overall Q drops to .707, efficiency on the low end is increased, the sub will require less power to hit xmax AND you have much less of a resonance problem. if you've ever heard a sub kind of hum or have a resonance around 50hz chances are it's in too small of a box. the only thing you have to watch here is the vas number in the specs. if the speaker is placed in a box above vas it becomes an infinite baffle which means the sealed box is providing no increase to the suspension. the reason i bring this up is because things like this are rarely talked about anymore. people just do what the spec sheet says and live with it. now in smaller cars with a lot of cabin gain you can sometimes squeeze by with small boxes because of the cabin gain. larger SUV's often model similar to home audio and those larger boxes help the bottom end and also help control resonance. using acoustic foam on the back wall of any enclosure is always a good idea. typically i do on all of the walls inside the enclosure and or just use enough polyfill to break up the rear sound waves. start with a little and add until you have no more benefit. most the time it doesn't take a lot especially with foam on the rear wall. a lot of car audio is centered around the subwoofer running hot at 40-50hz. people like to shake their cars.....but it's not accurate sound reproduction ! in fact here's a response curve of a 13w7 in the JL spec ported box and in the ported box i designed. green is me, blue is JL. my design has this sub hitting 3db down at 23hz and requires 3.8 cubic feet. the jl box is smaller and can get louder but look at how it does it. massive peak at 45hz that will drown out everything else



http://www.arcaudio.com/c/amplifiers_signature-edition

i'm not sure if it's just the signature edition arc amps but robert zeff was the lead at zapco in the 90s when they made some of the best sq amps on the market

02BlownZ06

Case in point, my rear corner enclosures are around .8 cf/each. The Sundown Audios I bought are designed to go in as little as a .55 cf box and they sound way better than the old JL's I had in there which I believe needed at least .75 at the time. I also tried a pair of Hertz 10's designed for .75 and they sound horrible, too. Both pairs are loud as hell, but no low end below 60 hz or so. Before I knew a little about enclosure design, like you are talking about, I learned back in the day by trial and error to always make the box bigger than you think you need, always go sealed, and you were usually in pretty good shape. I later on learned about porting, length of port, and right enclosure design. I hadn't considered your point regarding an enclosure larger than vas, but makes total sense. I can't stand the sound of a sub in too small of box, it has the most horrible mid bass resonance that you can't get rid of. A lot of guys crank that up and love it. It like fingernails to the chalkboard for me.

racebum

that's it in a nutshell. programs like the free version of winisd are wonderful for helping a guy figure out Qtc & box size off the T/S parameters. companies often quote small boxes for 2 main reasons. #1 small sells. i mean who doesn't want to save space in a car #2 many people like boom and a pronounced midbass.

ported is hard to get right in car audio simply because the boxes get big and if you shrink them they get peaky aka boomy. a single 10w3v3 requires 2 cubic feet ported to play flat and would only need about 250w. it would however dig REALLY low, not resonate at all and give you a lot of low end. thing is....2 cubic feet is a lot for a single 10 so things like this rarely happen. with cabin gain the bottom end of that is likely to drift even higher

sealed is usually the best choice because you can be off....a lot...and it still works. you have a rolloff that drifts down and cabin gain often times brings up the bottom end. subs like the new JL w6 have an on paper f3 of 40-41hz so in car with minor eq work you can get close to flat down to 35hz or so in boxes not all that much bigger than spec. JL however does often quote boxes smaller than their subs should be in for the before mentioned reasons. most JL subs can sound extremely accurate and function lovely in SQ installs but the boxes are often 20-40% larger than spec. the w6 for example. the 10w6 specs at .55cu, however it digs deepest in .9cuft and needs .75 stuffed at a minimum for an SQ install. the 12w6 specs at 1cuft but again needs 1.25 stuffed minimum and digs deepest at 1.35 to 1.4 net. both subs however will take more power and get louder in the smaller boxes....but like you said...nails...chalkboard...it's not a good loud. you can hear the resonance. i don't mind giving up 1-2db of max spl for a sound i actually enjoy at every other volume

some subs, kicker being a terrible offender, require gigantic boxes to play flat. kicker designs their subs to peak between 45 and 60hz. you seriously can not flatten these things out and giant boxes only help. they push the parameters to such that they just "boom" with anything played through them. the only real use i have found for this type of sub is in a large area where you have to use a very small sub. think of an 8" in a cargo van. you have no cabin gain worth talking about and will not get low end so this peaky 8 can be crossed over with a steep slope at 63-80hz and just add a small bit of rumble to the pair of whatevers you have in the door to make a budget work truck system have some kind of bass to it

sundown is a neat company. they remind me of what phoenix gold use to be only they are more focused on just SPL. if they ever make a couple of SQ amps and experiment in that direction i would be excited. the company is ran by people who enjoy audio. not bean pushers and that makes them a stand out

02BlownZ06

Hey Racebum, I have just one other question. On your INE-W960, how are the ergonomics and also how is the brightness of the screen? The 960 and even more so the 957 get a lot of bad reviews regarding screen quality, software design, features, etc.. The Pioneers and Kenwoods, for the most part, get rave reviews on all of that stuff. Does no one actually listen to these things? Being on on island so to speak, without any real expert car audiophiles to consult with, I did my research online and read a lot of reviews before deciding upon the Pioneer. I would just like your take on the Alpine cause I find a lot of the reviews I read you must take with a grain of salt.

racebum

screen is as good as a resistive nex. very responsive. software seems quirky at first and is not as easy to get the hang of as kenwood or pioneer but once you do get the hang of it it's very easy. i have the 960 in a 2005 4runner so the side buttons are a benefit. easier to reach. the 957 and 967 step up to a larger screen but the really interesting one feature wise is ilx-107 due out in a month or two. cap touch screen and wireless carplay. no mention of auto android though

it also uses a 2v pre out which is odd for alpine on the high end. not sure if it will sound the same.

the 960, 957 and 967 are great SQ decks, they just take some getting use to when you look at the ease of use and feature ridden NEX decks.

one very big perk with the alpine is i have yet to have an issue. gps never drops. bluetooth never drops. no resets, no quirks. it's rock solid. the thing that drove me to the 960 over the 957 or 967 is cost vs features. i get the feeling alpine is planning an update to the top models over the next year or two. the 960 was updated recently but the 957 and 967 haven't been. if the ilx 107 is any hint they may be perfecting their auto android and carplay interface. kenwood for example is still having issues with this. the nice and responsive 9903s gets a massive distortion increase the second you go auto android

i should make a video on the 960 and it's basic function and how it's generally used. i notice their really are none on youtube. maybe i'll do that today or tomorrow. once time alignment is set and you tweak the eq and your levels the deck is amazing. it's just again, harder to setup than pioneer which is basically so easy a monkey could do it.

02BlownZ06

Hmm....with that in mind maybe one should get the 960 and get by with it for cheaper until they update the higher priced models. Only thing that concerns me is elimination of the CD/DVD player which I believe the 967 has already eliminated.

racebum

960 still has a cd player. did you mean the 107? i think the move to multimedia is just a sign of the times. cds can sound better than mp3s but they don't always. fewer and fewer people are buying the actual cds and of those many aren't recorded to take advantage of the potential for better sound. the cd player on the 960 is stellar though. no skipping and it does sound lovely.

02BlownZ06

Of the three models in question, the 960, 957 and 967, the 967 on Alpine's website has a spec sheet that says CD/DVD are "optional" and an accessory control are "optional". How does that work? I would be interested in that model knowing how it sets up for playing CD's and DVD's. After having the 960, I know what I want now, and it is Alpine up front, no question so I could actually slap the 960 into my Suburban and get the 957 or 967 for my C5.

racebum

i have no idea. i haven't tried playing a dvd or even music dvd through it.

once you get the amp gains right, the levels right, eq right and time alignment right these decks delivers

next it will be the speaker addiction. w6's, w7s, morel etc

did notice the number of views too. it's definitely a well read thread

i actually created a subwoofer design tutorial below and will keep adding info about entire systems as i have time

http://www.mountainviewcarpetcare.co...o-electronics/

02BlownZ06

That's good stuff Kyle! You lucked out living in proximity to such a great resource like that. I would have been soaking that chit up like a sponge. I was addicted to it like you, as a teenager and before I went to college I worked at a couple high end audio stores and learned a lot, at least within that brief window of time (two years or so) that I was there. I am glad I decided to leave and get an education but will never regret working in the industry and appreciate what I learned.

I don't consider myself an expert, just an enthusiast, but I know enough that some of the stuff that comes out of people's mouths about this hobby/passion just makes me laugh. And many of these are the supposed experts who are selling the stuff. It's a breath of fresh air to find someone that knows what they are talking about and what really matters with car audio!

racebum

there are 2 real reason i have found with this. first is the obvious. guys repeat what someone told them and follow the hype. second, and this one is more confusing but quite common. guys in car audio, at least some of them...aren't into a hi fi sound. they just want to get loud. i have read comments like "my sub sounded better in a smaller box and with no foam or stuffing in it" this sounds ridiculous at first until you consider what actually happens. resonance goes up and you create a peak, likely around 50hz. you don't really hear bass below 30hz it's more of a feeling. if someone wants to hear boom it's 40 to 50hz and that's what that comment was aimed at. to me this sounds terrible but i've heard this comment more than once.

there really aren't many guys left in car audio who actually try and make systems sound like quality home audio. it's all about features and getting loud. focal sells well and those are not a tame speaker. they do however get really loud

02BlownZ06

You mentioned focal and also you can back to Hertz. The way many talk, Hertz are the holy grail of car speakers and Focal get pretty rave reviews as well. From what you are saying, both are not what I am looking for. Evidently, loud and bright, to the point of being harsh sells?