Again, price should not be an issue for this one... please vote to indicate YOUR CHOICE for BEST HEAD UNIT ON THE MARKET. Your expertise, knowledge, first hand experience, and opinions are greatly valued and appreciated. First hand experience is, without a doubt, the most accurate vote - however all input is welcome. An explanation for your vote is not required, but encouraged.
We thank you very much for participating. Voting results will be revealed within 1 week.
Come on!!! Please vote, man. I know you're out there... reading this... with your choice already all chosen and $hit! Who cares what anybody else thinks - when it comes to your opinion? Let's have it. And yeah, maybe it will effect other peoples' opinions after reading yours - but hey, current opinions supercede old ones, right? Come on!!! It is your DUTY as an E-coustics citizen, dang it! Stand up for what's right... stand up for your forum!!!!!!!
lol Seriously though - if you read this, just vote before leaving. Thanks.
I am an Alpine fan in this department. But I will not mention the model number because diff people have diff uses so therefore its really upto the user to decide.
I will however say that a good HU shall have quality in sound reproduction, durability, and userfriendly features. I would look for high oversampling on the cd player, 1 bit converter, etc...... next I would look at channel separation and THD.
Personally I am not a fan of high power decks. I believe in separate amplifiers. It is hard to find quality parts small enough to fit in a HU, so I recommend separate components for EQ, X-over, and amplification.
I also am not a fan of a gazzilion features such as multi illumination, clocks, local/dx, 99999999 station presets, loudness, breath freshner, etc............. Actually I wouldn't mind breath freshner (lol).
Separate bass and trebble controlls are almost sufficient enough for adjustment. No need to become a sound mixing engineer while driving to work and the freeway. Separate fader and ballance is also sufficient.
I believe that a manufacturer should fill my HU with quality parts instead of features, but that just my own opinion.
One thing that I am in favor of are; 4 channel RCA outputs, separate Sub('s) RCA output as well. It seems you just cant have enough RCA outputs.
And NO, PLEASE, NO MORE COMMON WIRING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! a antannae should be just that, an antannae, not a grounding source.
i'm also a fan of alpine. but they seem to be falling by the waist side as japan continues to build their products instead of the u.s. imo, they slumped after the fabulous 9835. i'm not speaking on the dvd players, just the stereo units.
But they are trumped ever so sligtly by Walmart HUs.