the cool thing about the hu...is that it puts out 8 volts...so the gain is completly down so there is even less distortion! ...i hear ya...in my excel i had 4's in the dash, 5 1/2's in hte door and custom 6x9 panels in the rear sides and 8 inch mids and a 12" woofer...trust me i know what is like to be an audiophile! tongue.gif wink

 

Wanna have the signal set up real well?? This is what I do:

(1)Hu with 4v pre out.........volume stays at a constant setting of 24,which is about 3/4 of the range.

(2)From the hu, sig hits a 2ch Audio Control line driver.This is set for about 7v.

(3)Next we have the Audio Control Master Volume Control,which actually controls the sig level right before it hits the amplifiers.Amp gains are left alone.

This set up has very good noise and linearity performance!! Much better then using the volume control on the hu,and turning up the amp gains a little bit.The only hiss that is heard is what is in the recording.

 

um...i pretty sure that the eclipse deck does all of that internally. moon

 

Doubt it!!

 

so some reading....the top hu puts out 16 volts when it balanced and 8 unbalanced they make some pretty nasty stuff!

 

Balanced only helps when you are using an amp or processor down stream that has balanced inputs.16v is great,but guess what.........that is a peak rating.The continous output is about 11v.Now, 11v is great too,but..........this is only achieved at full volume.Now there are 2 problems with that:
(1)Why would you want to listen to your system at full blast,all the time?
(2)I gaurentee that hu is at it's distortion limit once you get to about 3 volume steps below the max volume level.

So with a balanced output,max,of 16v peak and 11v Rms,at normal listening levels the signal is more like 4 to 8vrms.Which,don't get me wrong is still a pretty damn good thing.The point is,the signal level traveling the length of the rca to the next piece in line is not always the same.It is varying according to your hu's volume level.The way my system is set up,I have a continous level traveling from the hu to the trunk mounted master volume control.This keeps radiated noise out of the system,and increases dynamic range and noise/linearity performance.Beleive me,the way this is set up is very loud and clean compared to a system that does not have this set up.