DAKSTER
Beam me up Scotty!
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2011
- Messages
- 1,981
- Reaction score
- 40
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- Location
- Woodford QLD
- Members Ride
- VS Berlina
I think we are on topic, its not power thats blowing his speakers up..
Welcome to Just Commodores, a site specifically designed for all people who share the same passion as yourself.
So my assumption from that is that your Alpine unit doesnt allow you to turn it up beyond a certain level, that which starts creating too much distortion.
Most factory units dont have that feature (neither of my Kias for a start, and one of them has less than 1000km on the clock so it should be a modern enough HU lol), and the volume knob/switches will push max power and distort horribly if you crank them up. I assume a lot of aftermarket HU's also behave the same.
You've used your system as a benchpoint, and possibly your head unit is helping out here. On the Pioneer system in the Berlina, the distortion comes in at around 40 on a scale of 50. give or take a few depending on whats being played. This applies from the HU outputs, or from amps via RCA, makes no difference.
Am I correct in thinking the HU preamp is what supplies the signal to the RCA outs in the first place?
No, this your thinking is incorrect. It has nothing to do with the brand of headunit I am using, it was the same situation with my previous Sony unit and the JVC unit before that, its about appropriately setting your gains and tuning the system as a whole. You could have crappy speakers and a crappy amp and crappy headunit, tune it properly have no audible distortion, though it probably won't be overly loud. Please note the difference between audible/harmful distortion and THD in general, there will always be some THD, but its a matter of keeping it low.
Simply running your amps at minimum gain and cranking your head unit to max is not tuning the system... And yes there will be clipping at max on the head units...
If it's at the point where he is BLOWING speakers, then I'm fairly sure that the distortion would be very obvious.It IS difficult for guys new to car audio. My mate's all thought they set their gains correctly and weren't listening to distortion but they were wrong. So many people can't hear minor clipping or mechanical speaker distortion and need to actually be shown it before they will learn.