New Deck - Thinking of going active from passive

[jrobie79]

So I just bought a new deck, Pioneer DEH-80PRS, because my old deck, DEH-9400BH was stolen from my car...they actually just took the faceplate, but it has been giving me issues, so I decided to upgrade.

Now that I upgraded, I was thinking of running active instead of passive as I have been forever.

Current setup:

PPI-356cs components - woofers in doors, tweeters in e30 stock location hooked up to this amp: Orion HP-4600 4 channel. I am using the stock PPI crossovers currently.

http://www.sonicelectronix.com/item_10004_Orion-HP-4600.html

I've had some issues in the past with getting the RCA's hooked up to this properly (http://www.r3vlimited.com/board/showthread.php?t=157882) and I believe presently I'm only using 2 of the channels. I'd like to avoid getting another speaker amp, but if anyone can recomend something better to run the PPI's that's not super expensive I'm open.

I have a 12" Fi SSD woofer in a custom box being driven by a Memphis 1000.1.

I've never run anything active, so it's totally foreign to me, and I want to utilize this head unit to the fullest extent possible, can anyone offer some insight on how I go about this, or direct me to a thread (haven't had good luck searching) either here, or on a car audio forum that will help me understand what I need to do to calibrate the deck. Like I said total newb when it comes to more advanced car audio setups.

[AndrewBird]

When you say you want to run it active, what exactly do you mean? I think you are not using this term correctly, but maybe I am just misunderstanding you.

[robrez]

I'm assuming you want to use an active (powered) sub, since your HU only has 4 preamp channels. I run a similar set-up, four RCAs from the HU to the amp, powering the front and rear speakers, and a blaupunkt avctive sub. I like it because I can use use the radio fader to properly fade the front and rear speakers. But there's no way to control the sub from the cabin, and the sub leaves much to be desired.

[jrobie79]

I wanted to ditch the passive crossover for the speakers. I have no rear speakers, and currently have 4 RCA's running front to back - 2 for the front speakers, and 2 for the subwoofers. There's two more outputs on the head unit for the rear speakers, but I don't have any nor plan on having any installed.

[StereoInstaller1]

Nobody seems to get what this dude is talking about: he means using no passive crossovers at all, meaning half of the 4 channel to front tweeters, the other half to the midbass.

To answer your question, as long as you are OK having a front stage only, why not?

In active mode Im pretty sure your deck with do a 4.5khz crossover, if you want you can run it lower, especially if you use the 24db/oct setting, but even at 24db, Id not go under 4khz unless you only listen quiet.

Now, once you do all this, please do me a favor, do some listening to the PPIs, then yank them out and drop in a pair of E34 midwoofers without changing any settings at all, and post your results

[e30if]

Here's a link to the 80prs manual, I have the same deck that I will be running active on a set of Helix P52C's once I pick up an amp. Take a read through the manual, to run active your going to be using the 3 way network mode. I need to play around with the radio settings to confirm some of the things I'm saying so I'll update my post if I need to fix anything.

http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/StaticFiles/Manuals/Car/DEH-80PRS_OperationManual072616.pdf

The biggest thing to be careful of is to get your base settings on there to keep tweeters and woofers from playing frequencys they simply aren't designed to play, so setting a bandpass filter on the mids (on the 80PRS they're refered to as the Mid LPF and HPF) of roughly 80hz HPF and 5khz~ LPF is a good place to start. Most mids can play lower than this but you'd need to play around with it and find what you like.

LPF is a low pass filter, basically it will attenuate any frequencies above what you set, at the slope you set it. HPF is a high pass filter and will attenuate frequencies lower than the number you set. So setting a HPF of 80hz and a LPF of 5khz (also known as a bandpass filter) will mean your mid woofer will play frequencies 80hz-5khz without any attenuation then will fade them out on either side of those frequencies.

Generally speaking most passive crossovers will set the HPF and LPF somewhere in the 80hz HPF and 3-4khz LPF area which is right in the vocal range so you can't get a good sound stage, when I tune with a DSP I will usually set the mids to play far higher than this in a 2 way setup with the mids playing around 60hz to 6khz and the tweeters taking over for the rest of the range (mileage will vary depending on your speakers, it's impossible to tell you exactly what to set).

Then you get into time alignment which will probably be the easiest thing to get a basic setup on. Pretty much just grab a tape measure, sit in the drivers seat and literally measure the distance from each speaker to your head. TA can get really involved and can be a royal pain in the ass but when you're starting out just do the basic setup this way and if you notice the sound heavy on one side of the car as opposed to the other you can shift it around as needed. The goal is to have a sound stage above the dash and as deep as you can. I haven't set my car up yet so I don't know what can be done with an e30 just off one of these decks but it has a reasonable amount of control.

All of these settings will be set on the radio itself, you can have the filters turn working on your amplifier while you are playing around to be safe if you want but ultimately you will set them to "Flat" so that the sound signal is not altered by the amplifier.

I can also tell you from my 80PRS that you shouldn't ever hit clipping from the radio itself, even at max volume. Use this how you will but just be careful with your gain settings on the amp as you can quickly clip the signal to your speakers by being too aggressive with amp gain. Most aftermarket tweeters run off 20~ watts of power while mid woofers can take a fair bit more.

This is a really big subject and harder to explain in short posts but there is a ton of info out there. DIY Mobile Audio is a great place to learn this stuff, and as always Google is your friend.

Oh and I completely forgot you mentioned RCA's, the easiest way I can explain this is that when you run an active system each RCA connection is going to be a single speaker in your system. You have 2 tweeters, 2 midwoofers and a subwoofer. So you will need 4 RCA's to run the front stage; one for the front left tweeter, one for the front right tweeter, front left woofer, front right woofer. Those 4 RCA's will go to your 4 channel amp, be sure to keep the types of speakers hooked up to the same gain adjustment (tweeters on the same, woofers on the same). I always use the same setup when I do this stuff, channel 1 is the front left tweeter, channel 2 is the front right tweeter, channel 3 is the front left mid woofer, channel 4 is the front right mid woofer. The last 2 RCA's will run to your subwoofer amp.