[gijoe]

My mids amp is 150W RMS per channel @ 2-Ohms, but my mids are 100w RMS @ 2-Ohms each. The tweeter is 15w RMS and 100w max but I keep being told they are not going to draw more than 15w.

When you double the Pioneer impedance load from 4-Ohms to 8-Ohms, 29w RMS should in theory not be cut down to any less than half @ 14-15w RMS though? At least that is how my amp works, it gives 4-Ohm wattage ratings and you loose 25w every time you double the impedance. For example I get 150w @ 2-Ohms, 125w @ 4-Ohms and 100w @ 8-Ohms.

I understand there is background distortion but is that not the amps fault? If your signal chain is a stable 4v with good shielded cables, and your amp is of high quality you should be remaining at a low background distortion.

I guess from your explanation even though my tweeters are 15w RMS I need to supply them with around 50w RMS to keep up with my mids?

Yeah the Zapco amp has a noise of about 0.1-0.3% THD and accepts up to 16v but I just figured 4v is something I should try to keep consistent. I guess I will have to buy a second Zapco to run my tweeters which is like $500.

I am just going off listed specs, the Dayton says 10-band EQ while Pioneer said 31-band. So your saying 31-bands is divided by 6 channels or 31-bands per channel?? You lost me there with that comparison.

Yes the Dayton is USB controlled.

I wouldn't worry about the power. Power is something that is almost always misunderstood and misrepresented.

For a tweeter, 90dB/watt is a very reasonable sensitivity. To put that into perspective, when we speak at conversation levels we are speaking at around the 60dB range, so with a single watt those tweeters will be about 30dB louder than a conversation. You're looking at high frequencies coming out of your speakers at around the volume of a heavy machinery with only a single watt. For low volume listening, the tweeters are seeing fractions of a single watt. You can get more than 108dB out of a tweeter (if it can handle it) with 64 watts, and 99dB with only 8 watts. So, 8 watts will make your tweeters uncomfortably loud (helicopter, jackhammer, subway train loud).

Don't worry about not having enough power for your tweeters, a handful of watts is plenty.

 

[gijoe]

In that case, this Pioneer in theory has enough power. Now it comes down to how clean is that built-in amp. Really not sure I can hold it to much of a standard in THD for the price.

It has enough power, but I have no idea how clean it is. That wouldn't be my concern though, like rton20s said, it's not a very good value when you consider the other DSPs on the market. It doesn't even seem to have independent left/right EQ, Pioneer makes head units that have better DSP's built in. I'm not really sure what Pioneer was thinking when they made this, it's not really any more powerful than their double dins with network mode, I don't see the point of this product.

 

[gijoe]

I agree with the sentiments that tweeters only ever use very little power... but that’s a given when you start with an amp setup clean with lots more power

Use my example of a zapco 150.6 as an example... if you set it up clean and conservatively and with reduced input it may only give 75 watts clean (with a 1khz sine wave at 0db) yet the tweeters will see less than 10-15 watts at full chat due to less information in the program material at high frequencys and it will still match nicely with the mids run off the same amp which sees 75 watts plucking numbers from thin air

So an amp that’s capable of 150 watts set to give half power only gives 1/8th power give or take...

Push the guys zapco with some fun levels of listening and the little dinky pioneer headunit amp simply will be pushed to its limits in seconds and won’t stand a chance regardless of how little power the tweeters require, distortion will be through the roof and the last place I want an amplifier on or near it’s limits is with high freqs where distortion is very obvious

That and considering using headunit power (effectively) vs a zapcos 150w rms regardless of how much power it requires is nuts... a Sony xplod would make a better job of amplifying the tweeters and I’d never recommend that...

It’s like using scan beryllium tweeters matched to a set of 10 dollar midranges imo, just not even worth considering sorry

I'd be really interested to put this to an objective test, because I disagree with you.

At a single watt you're already well into good listening levels, that leaves a ton of head room to get those tweeters screaming. The distortion will still be very low, even though the amp is only capable of 14 watts. I think you're dramatically overestimating how far a single watt goes.

I would not be at all worried about the sound quality suffering if using this amp to feed tweeters. But again, there are plenty of other reasons to avoid buying it in the first place.

 

[gijoe]

Ah well you quoted me before my edit

I can try and measure some real life power after the uk finals and wind my amps down to the power levels at 0db this 150watt rms vs 25 watts rms on tweeters from my ground zero uranium sq setup (I’d have to take 7-8db from my tweeters... -3db would be 75 watts, -6db 37.5 watts, less a bit gives this figure) ?? It would reveal how unbalanced the system would become I feel and how hard the 25 watt amp would have to be pushed (and I’d have big power supply’s on tap for the amp so at its limit it would behave far better than a headunit amp)

I know from my gain structure and levels settings I am only 3.5db down on identical gain settings with my tweeter channels from my helix (ie all amps are gain on min and 3db is full power with 6db input, mids are set at 1db and tweeters at -2.5db for my passenger side mid/tweeter combo

So I’d have to wind my 120watt amp down on my mids by an extra 4.5ish dB to match the tweeter levels (that they actually see) which to me is a miss matched amp as one would have a very easy life and one would be on the edge of sounding awful having done the same

And having run tweeters from a pioneer just like this I ran the mids from a headunit also using network mode and the internal amp so I speak from experience (see my build log for system info) I can tell you the volume levels while not massively difference had I put my current amps on the mids they simply wouldn’t keep up

So for my structure I certainly wouldn’t consider using an amp with 6 times less power to start with (and I’m being optimistic about the power of the headunit amp in the dsp off a ten amp fuse I feel)

At this point, without any real data, my response is:

The mids don't need nearly as much power as people think either. Having a tweeter on 14 watts doesn't necessarily cause a mismatch because the mids are also receive very small amounts of power compared to what the amp is capable of (and what people think they are using). We also know that the low frequencies need more power, so I don't believe there will be a mismatch at all, until you exceed the 14 watts from the head unit amp, and by then you're already over 100dB for the highs, so they won't need much more power.

 

[gijoe]

I may have to disagree with the collective here. I am actually planning on using this as the focal point of my next build. My approach will be simplistic and as stock as possible. In my old ranger, I used a newer pioneer h/u with this same technology, and really liked it. Youre all right, there not excessive amounts of settings, but i was dang happy with it. The DEQ IMO is just one of their h/u's That is basically plug in play for someone wanting to keep their stock radio or not fuss with the extra expense and effort to change whats there.

My individual goal is to keep the stock radio, replace the door speakers with something like JBL Club coax's (93dB IIRC) and have a pair of GRS SW-12's IB. The coax's will be on the front channels seeing 14ish watts, and the subs will be bridged on the rear channels at 70w.

Some of you may be shaking your heads, but for less than $400 I can upgrade the whole system including door treatments with a small amp/dsp utilizing high efficiency coax's and large surface area IB subs; all with dsp at the fly through the app. No I will not win any awards for SQ or SPL, but I wont have $10K+ into it either. It will be a fun daily driver. And isnt that what we all want?

But, the Dayton DSP is less expensive, and much more powerful.

This Pioneer DSP has less tools than the DSP they built into the single DIN P99RS. Why buy a bulky (compared to a single DIN head unit) DSP that does less? It can't even do L/R EQ. A Pioneer double DIN with network mode does what this DSP does, and it's an all in one package. I don't understand why Pioneer left out so many useful features. It certainly would have been easy to do, if they can fit more processing into a single DIN, why couldn't they have fit it the same amount of processing into an external DSP.

It's a pointless product when you compare it to better, cheaper DSP's that are available.