Please Help: High-End car audio

PPI is not making any new products and the art series have been discontinued for about 3 years now, however if you are lucky enough to find them they are very good amps. PPI is not making ANYTHING at this time and there last creation amps had beaucoup problems so stay clear of them. Also worth mentioning are the Audison Thesis series(they are no longer imported) if you could find a HR-100 buy it plain and simple it is the best car audio amp ever. The HV sidici and the HV trenta are also terrific amps if you can find them. There was also mention of eclipse stay away from used eclipse and this has nothing to do with ESN, some models from year to year have tons of problems and eclipse is less then accomidating with any problems you have. That is not to say they will not take care of it but it is not uncommon for 10+weeks of turn around time. Currently I have a out of production Clarion deck and zapco signal proccessors and amps(comp. series of course) with focal drivers and custom made passive X-overs. Yeah I do know a thing or two about this stuff my best friend owns I respectable/successful car stereo shop. So I have seen/heard just about everything. Best of luck and if you have any questions feel free to ask :-)tim on that note I am liquadating my car system and everything is going cheap(I bought at wholesale and am willing to take a loss) most of the stuff is new sealed in the box if any one is interested send me an email and I will give you the specifics.

Ez: I strongly recommend that you get your home gear from the house and drag out the extension cord and replace the head unit with your home stuff. I would also hook up the front speakers to your home 2 channel amp. These two tests will tell you where the bad sound is coming from.

The speakers you got from Zalytron are built by Focal but are not the best Focal makes for the car. On the other hand it is probaly not the speakers that are the source. It is probably the mounting & location of the drivers.

Please preform the above tests so we can then recomend new electronics. BTW older Honda's heads were from Alpine and were pretty good cassette decks! I think the CD units may be from Clarion. (I could find out if you care)

Chris

Ez- If the 6.5s are low in the door and the tweets are up high near your ear, that could be a big part of the problem. You will loose most of the bottom. Vis-a-vis the head unit, I will say that I have had a Nak, Alpine, and Eclipse. The NAk was better than the Alpine, but both were casette only. The Eclipse is CD only, so hard to compare.

I have done some checking. Untill just a couple of years ago the Honda used a Alpine built head unit. It has a plug on the back that a special din (like?) cable can be atached that provides a preamp level out and it is BALLANCED. This might be the ticket to the sound you crave.

I also agree with Swampwalker about the position of the drivers

From Poster: The unit reads "Matsushita" on top. The guy at the Honda dealer mentioned alpine built them, I didn't know if Matsu owned Alpine, they do panasonic and technics. I'll look on the back again, but memory only recalls the antenna hookup and then the big pin connector/harness. But it didn't sound that bad of the spkr-line level adapt. Its a 97 Accord.