Alpine 9856 Crossover

[joey_corleone82]

Hello everybody. I just got my 2001 mustang GT with mach 460 audio and I am trying to replace the head unit with a new Alpine 9856.

I read an article that says you should have a headunit with low pass and high pass crossovers built in for this setup, or you would need to purchase them seperately. The article is here: http://www.stangnet.com/Tech-Articles/Replacing-Your-2001-Mach-460-Head-Unit.html

I'm new to car audio installs and am not sure if my new unit has crossovers built in, I don't see that mentioned anywhere in the manual. Is it necessary to have them?

 

[Ocelaris]

Your headunit does not have those features you are looking for...

That guy has no idea what he is talking about... 170hz to a tweeter would destroy it instantly... the tweeters probably already have bass blockers in them already... That's the only way his survived. 99% of the cars I have seen have the capacitor (bass blocker) build into the tweeter pod.

What the door speakers are looking for is a bandpass line level (RCA cable) output... I would reccomend using a FMOD Low Pass of 2500hz

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&DID=7&Partnumber=266-288

for your door speakers, you would need 2 pairs of these ~50$

The tweeters are powered directly from the headunit, so you would need a capacitor in line to prevent high frequencies to getting to it... however I am 99% sure there is already a capacitor at the tweeter. If you take your tweeter out, chances are there is a cap on it. If you wanna be extra careful... get yourself a 10 uF bipolar electrolytic capacitor and put it on the positive lead of your headunit's speaker outputs to those tweeters. This is assuming they are 4 ohm tweeters.

Just my .02$

Honestly, I wouldn't mess with it though, if it sounds decent, just maybe add a subwoofer or something... those systems don't sound half bad, and you get yourself into a whole bag of worms... you're not adding much if any sound quality... may look cooler, but unless you're going to start from scratch, you end up fighting what's already there...

 

[xplod1236]

Honestly, I wouldn't mess with it though, if it sounds decent, just maybe add a subwoofer or something... those systems don't sound half bad, and you get yourself into a whole bag of worms... you're not adding much if any sound quality... may look cooler, but unless you're going to start from scratch, you end up fighting what's already there...

I concur. The guy said it himself:

The sound quality is pretty much the same as the original Mach 460. I really just wanted to add MP3 functionality and Sirius to my setup and this worked perfectly.

The sound quality is worse than stock. He has a big gap between 50 and 170 hz. Plus he never really mentions mids. All he says is this: 5.5 X 7.5 subwoofer speakers (4), 2.5: midrange / tweeter (4). He doesn't even know what a subwoofer/midrange/tweeter is, so I don't know how he can be picking XO frequencies like that. I wouldn't recommend following that guy's article.

I can't contribute anything more useful because I don't know the specifics of the stock setup. But as Ocelaris said, it would be better to just add a sub.