diymobileaudio.com seems to have some good info on audio tuning and SQ related stuff. Here's their "PC based measurement system": http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum...-pc-based-loudspeaker-measurement-system.html They also have some tuts that look like they might get me on my way to using some of the software. Man, I already want to ditch my whole setup - new not-even-arrived-yet deck included - and start from scratch. I get sucked into projects so easily ....
Just got the Alpine iDA-x305 hooked up. No Imprint - that comes tomorrow. Without touching a single setting anywhere (and it was already fairly well tweaked to get the most out of the Pioneer deck, so probably way off what will work best with the Alpine) - so without a single tweak it was significantly better sounding and was able to drive everything else quite a bit louder before unbearable distortion. I should be able to improve it quite a bit with tweaking & the Imprint.
Disappointing. Auto-setup lead to what I believe was additive EQ distortion. It was good until I got in the loudest 20%. I was getting considerable mid-range distortion that simply was not there with the MultEQ off. Also, pretty much everyone on the net said the auto-setup keeps the current cross-over settings, but this was definitely not true in my case. Too low of frequencies were being sent to the F & R causing massive distortion at medium to high volume. I'm actually wondering if I'm over driving my interiors. IIRC, fronts are like 120RMS and rears are 100RMS or so, but my PDX 4.150 is birth-sheeted at 180 RMS, and I dialed it in to 160 with a voltmeter. I did manual setup with measured distances, but it wasn't that great. I believe I will be able to achieve something quite decent by manually retuning by ear, but it will take some time. I think if I simply set left front to max delay and then the same for right front - then dial back the right front delay until I get a stereo image that sounds best. Similar for rear and fade them in. Subs are easy to dial in. When not in MultEQ mode, the active crossovers in the deck are great - settable frequency and slope, plus level adjustment. EQ can be 5 band parametric or 7 band graphic. Both seem quite capable. There's a limit on the parametric EQ that one band's center frequency must be at least 1/3 octave from any adjacent band. Q is settable at 1, 1.5, and 3. One thing that was odd is that the first band - low frequencies - was causing mid-range popping when the frequency or q or level was changed. Sound quality when not in MultEQ is quite good. MultEQ has very impressive statistics, and it definitely helps the staging quite a bit, but it doesn't seem suitable for very high volume operation. The deck's operation has been acceptable. File names are in alphabetical, but folder names don't seem to be. That is problematic when I try to find artists (folders). There could be a setting I haven't found yet. The display is quite nice. The volume knob is a little stiff, and the push-in feature is a little too easy to accidentally push (but its not bad, I'm being very very picky to say this). My one beef is that when I simply twist the volume knob, no numeric value for the volume is displayed. If I cycle through the Imprint button options to Volume, it will show me a dB attenuation number for the volume (e.g. -23 dB). I like a number because I often know the exact number for a song where my amps go from not clipping to clipping (easy to hear in the subs at that level). I feel the Imprint processor was worth it for the manual tuning options, but I'm disappointed in the Imprint auto-tuning. For systems less concerned with SPL (loudness) and in less harsh vehicle environments (my suby is a wind-noisy sob!), I am sure it will make very impressive improvements for the cost, and I would like to hear it in a scenario like that. Maybe when I get to building a carputer sound system I'll pass this on to my GF's Foz and see what I more moderate stereo system could be put together.
