Alpine or Kenwood.......

My head unit got stolen out of my car =( Now i'm looking at a kenwood kdc-mp919 (plays mp3/cd, d+mask motorized face, 22x4watts rms, 50x4 peak) i am also looking at a few of the alpines, and they all have 27x4 watts rms, and 60x4 peak watts. will the difference in watts make a huge difference in my speakers? i have an infinity perfect component system (tweaters and speakers) in the front door and sail panel, and infinity kappa speakers in the back deck..............can anyone help me?

no, the small differences in power between high output head units will not make much of a difference

yeah and if you want good sound, upgrade your component speakers, get some crossovers and then have an amp for you comp. speakers and a seperate amp for your subs.

yeah with infinity perfects to really get the quality they deserve they need there own amp. id just let the HU run the back two speakers because they can handle that kind of power.

sorry to hear about your old HU too. 2 of my friends got the same deal in the last month. :(

ehh, i dont htink i'm gonna put subs in my car, i dont really want the extra weight in the trunk, and i dont think they are reall necessary for me.


you know what makes it being stolen worse? that my car was at the shop getting an engine swap and some f*cks broke in and stole $100,000 worth of stuff from the shop. 2 cars, all the turbos, headers, electronic pieces (stand alone engine managements, fuel comps, boost controlers, etc) 12 sets of wheels (48 indiv. rims) each with tires on them, and various other parts. luckily most of my parts were already on my car, so they didnt want to mess with already out of the box pieces. no prints were lifted, and they cut the alarm before they went in.......sounds professional.

look for those stuff on ebay soon. sounds like an inside job, they knew where everything was and what security system they had. anyways back to the question; get the alpine, imo alpines are very durable and has good sound quality. btw it takes an extra 100 watts to make 1 additional db.

Originally posted by gnushit
btw it takes an extra 100 watts to make 1 additional db.

it takes double the cone area and double the power to gain 3db. it doesn't go by "X" amount of watts. if that was the case, it'll be easy to reach 150+dB

Originally posted by GSteg


it takes double the cone area and double the power to gain 3db. it doesn't go by "X" amount of watts. if that was the case, it'll be easy to reach 150+dB

damn cartoys are wrong again! maybe he said 1,000 watts?

it takes 10 times the power to double your apparent loudness. Doubling the power only gives a 3 dB increase. That is regarded as the min increase where you can definitely say A is louder than B every time. Unfortunately, hearing is not linear - it's on a logarithmic scale. To figure increase in volume, use the following formula ..... 10*log(power1/power2)

GSteg - that is only true if you are adding a second sub. You have to double the watts too because each speaker needs the same as the original was getting seperately. Example: if you had one say brahma 12" sub with 500 watts - to get the 3dB, you would have to have 2 brahma 12's, double the box size (for the extra speaker) and and now have 1000 watts (500 for each speaker). The last one isn't that difficult since putting two speakers in parralel on an amp will halve the impedance - and often double the power output. In real life, the two subs will couple together, and give a little more than the expected 3 dB. If you just keep one sub, you only need to double it's power input for the 3 dB (theoretically). The problem comes in when the power you originally had is near the speakers max handling. Applying more power to the speaker may cause what is known as power compression, where more power does not result in the same increase in sound output as before.

yes paulD, thats why i said double the power AND cone area. :)