Personal opinion

Many years back, I heard a pioneer HU and thought that is the highest SQ and TA in car can get.

Since my HU TA is bad, I bought the Pioneer DEQ S1000A, which is quite mediocre considering it's price. I didn't want to go anything expensive since I thought the only thing i need is Time Alignment.

I never believe there are HiFi components in a car due to its environment, and I thought it will be never as good as desktops. Hence, you can check there are some people trying to put desktop DAC into a car.

My mind been fighting for months, to stay or get the Helix DSP everyone is talking about in US forums. My current setup sounds decent right? Do I really need to change? Will I get only minor improvement? Some people say you pay 1x for a 1x component quality, you pay 10x for 1.3x component quality. The circuit looks digital.. will it sound cold? (personal judgement )

I pulled my trigger when I truly understand my car audio sounds harsher than my desktop.

Images:
https://imgur.com/a/QxuY7o3

Box is solid.. case is solid.. expected. Won't talk too much here. I feel like abusing it by not installing properly on a mounting board, but my boot gets very hot when the weather is really hot.

After hooking up, at stock settings, I'm really amazed that it sounded better than most RM2k range desktop dacs. (never tried anything around 2k-9k range so can't comment further) I think it is because it parallels the output so it output 8 volts. The bass is so detailed and solid, while not affecting other frequencies, without any equalizer. My previous setup can't even match this bass volume with equalizer.

Very very low noise (due to that I suspect my gain could set too high, I'm still adjusting gain by ears). This is the similar feeling when I switched from on-motherboard audio to a DAC around 8 years back. It has auto sleep feature on amplifiers so its runs colder when you not playing music for a while (this feature can be turned off). The sounding is really smooth as well, playing low quality mp3's won't make it extra harsh due to 'high resolution', the instruments are still there in detailed manner. It is 'thicker' instead of 'harsher' which I prefer thicker & smooth & keeping the details.

I'm still amazed by it's technology, in tradition, we say that head unit to amps, having less component, although no time alignment, should sound better than adding an external component, a dsp. This dsp is totally different tier than my kenwood 9019s.

Time alignment is done within 30 secs, sliding the bar and clearly knows the vocal is on my left ear and right ear (*slide to right carefully* uh, too much. *slide to left* no no, back a little). The mid point is very obvious when i feel my head dips in the middle and sound receiving equally from both ears. Could have been done better but ill keep that for now.

Another thing is automatic RTA, I heard its about plugging a mic then it will automatically adjust things for you. Without this feature I already happy with the price. Never expect this kind of sound come out from a car component, with really low noise.

Just to spread the information if no one knows about this brand, it's very famous in the US. This is my personal experience and I could be wrong in some points.

This post has been edited by NoobHacker: Aug 25 2020, 10:04 PM

Play with TA.. try seat at passenger side than you will know is good or not.. haa haa..

This post has been edited by Oldskolboyz: Aug 26 2020, 09:00 AM

Yes, a good DSP does make a difference when tuned properly. I'm also running a Helix DSP.3 for my 3-way active set up, really happy with the adjustability of the software. My TA is aligned to the driver's ears, so the front passenger will not be happy at all.

What tracks do you use to tune your soundstage?

What's your setup speakers amp etc