so today marks the end of my DSP woes.
I am no longer running the DSP amp in my car and the stereo sounds about 50 times better than it ever has.
We replaced the DSP amp with an Alpine PDX-v9 4+1 channel amp.
It's a pricy one, at £385, but still within the ballpark of a replacement secondhand DSP amp (I've already spend £700 on replacement amps!!)
We also threw in a set of inPhase passive crossovers, as the tweeters and fronts are independently wired and are managed by the DSP amp's internal crossovers.
But that was it - that was ALL that was required..
And the best bit? Carver/DSP car headunits have a pre-out connection at the amplifier.
they are NOT, and i mean NOT high-level inputs...
All the pinouts that have been banded around are not correct for my car (prefacelift with top-hifi/carver)
so, for those looking at this themselves, here's some bullet points:
1: The headunit provides a single set of full range (left and right channel) pre-outs, which you can wire up to a pair of RCA cables directly. There is no need for a hi-low converter. There is no need for a high-level input.
2: The headunit does NOT provide ANY high-level outputs to the amplifier. None at all. the only one is the pre-out mentioned above, plus a control wire to tell the DSP amp what to do in regards to fading front to back
3: the front woofers are capable of full range sound
4: The front mids are just for mid sound. they cannot handle bass or high treble frequency
5: the front tweeters are wired independently from the mids (all the way into the amp) and do not contain any passive crossovers / caps
6: The two rear subwoofers need to be ran in parallel in order to bring their impedance down to 5ohm and thus work better with an amplifier.
7: the rear mids are the same as the front mids (no high or low tolerance)
All in all, the whole process took about 4 hours to complete, with most of that time trying to figure out why things didn't line up with the pinouts.
The best advice I can give you is to ignore the pinouts and concentrate on finding the single set of pre-outs from the headunit.
Once you have these, you're just left with speaker wires, which are twisted pairs, power (obvious) & i-bus (grey+violet).
Front and rear woofers are the heavier gauge wires, the rest are the front mids, tweeters and rear mids.
The wiring colours make ZERO sense.. whilst both front doors have a set of blue and set of yellow wires (one for each speaker), the same colour is not used across the doors.
(yellows on the left were for tweeters, but were for mids on the right.... nice one BMW).
Anyways.. anyone with carver/dsp issues - go down this route. I HIGHLY recommend it - the quality of sound that you get from your existing speakers is day and night in comparison.
so yeah.. just changed the amp - left all of the speakers and subs as they were, and transformed the sound quality no end
I am no longer running the DSP amp in my car and the stereo sounds about 50 times better than it ever has.
We replaced the DSP amp with an Alpine PDX-v9 4+1 channel amp.
It's a pricy one, at £385, but still within the ballpark of a replacement secondhand DSP amp (I've already spend £700 on replacement amps!!)
We also threw in a set of inPhase passive crossovers, as the tweeters and fronts are independently wired and are managed by the DSP amp's internal crossovers.
But that was it - that was ALL that was required..
And the best bit? Carver/DSP car headunits have a pre-out connection at the amplifier.
they are NOT, and i mean NOT high-level inputs...
All the pinouts that have been banded around are not correct for my car (prefacelift with top-hifi/carver)
so, for those looking at this themselves, here's some bullet points:
1: The headunit provides a single set of full range (left and right channel) pre-outs, which you can wire up to a pair of RCA cables directly. There is no need for a hi-low converter. There is no need for a high-level input.
2: The headunit does NOT provide ANY high-level outputs to the amplifier. None at all. the only one is the pre-out mentioned above, plus a control wire to tell the DSP amp what to do in regards to fading front to back
3: the front woofers are capable of full range sound
4: The front mids are just for mid sound. they cannot handle bass or high treble frequency
5: the front tweeters are wired independently from the mids (all the way into the amp) and do not contain any passive crossovers / caps
6: The two rear subwoofers need to be ran in parallel in order to bring their impedance down to 5ohm and thus work better with an amplifier.
7: the rear mids are the same as the front mids (no high or low tolerance)
All in all, the whole process took about 4 hours to complete, with most of that time trying to figure out why things didn't line up with the pinouts.
The best advice I can give you is to ignore the pinouts and concentrate on finding the single set of pre-outs from the headunit.
Once you have these, you're just left with speaker wires, which are twisted pairs, power (obvious) & i-bus (grey+violet).
Front and rear woofers are the heavier gauge wires, the rest are the front mids, tweeters and rear mids.
The wiring colours make ZERO sense.. whilst both front doors have a set of blue and set of yellow wires (one for each speaker), the same colour is not used across the doors.
(yellows on the left were for tweeters, but were for mids on the right.... nice one BMW).
Anyways.. anyone with carver/dsp issues - go down this route. I HIGHLY recommend it - the quality of sound that you get from your existing speakers is day and night in comparison.
so yeah.. just changed the amp - left all of the speakers and subs as they were, and transformed the sound quality no end
