Marc T said:
These stereos are definitely nothing to brag about. I could not turn mine up to max volumne without distortion??:dontknow:
I have never owned one that I could!!
Good Luck!!
Just FYI, you're not supposed to be able to turn up ANY stereo to max volume without distortion. As a rule of thumb, your volume (including gain controls on amps, crossovers, processors, etc) should never be beyond about 3/4. The reason you have the additional travel in the potentiometers is to help you deal with sources that happen to have very low recording levels. On modern recordings which have very high recording levels, you will often exhaust the headroom of the head unit and/or amps at half volume. Once you pass that you hit distortion, and distortion destroys speakers fast, even at way below their rated power.
Why? Because when you hit the point of distortion, you're no longer getting a clean sine wave to your speakers. When the amps or head units run out of power, they basically just lop off the tops and bottoms of the signal. This turns your music into a square wave which is the electrical equivalent of hooking up a battery to your speakers. The voice coils just heat up and burn, resulting in no sound from the speaker. The other option is that you exceed the speaker's possible excursion (how far the cone can move toward or away from the basket structure), in which case you tear the cone or the surround and get fuzzy sound.
Listen to a 1970s CD and then put in a modern CD at the same volume and see if the newer one doesn't melt your ears relative to the old one. Studios have pushed the recording levels and dynamic ranges way up, and the result is systems that run out of headroom (reserve audio power) WAY earlier than they used to.
Your ears are pretty good at detecting distortion. If you hear it, turn it down. At best you'll damage your speakers, at worst you'll damage your hearing. Distorted sound, especially high frequencies, will accelerate your hearing loss.
And remember, power is not linear, it's logarithmic, so our 500 watt stereos are not 5 times louder than a 100 watt stereo. Doubling the perceived volume requires a 10X increase in power, so our 500-watt systems are only twice as loud as a 50-watt system. And I've never seen how Dodge rates their systems, so if our systems are rated at peak power (common in cheaper brands like Jensen,etc) then they're probably putting our more like 250-watts RMS.
I've also figured out that in my truck, the Dodge REC nav radio has an automatic loudness control that works until volume point 34. If you turn up the REC radio louder than 34, you'll actually hear LESS bass than before because the loudness circuit switches out. I hate these types of circuits. The old Eclipse head unit in my Corvette did that - made it impossible to use for competition.
More on the topic, I couldn't be happier with my Dodge dealer - Rick Hendrick's Dodge in Charleston, SC. All of the service writers there (Harry, Renee, Steve, Chris) have been fantastic to me over the last 8 years with my Durango and now the SRT10, and Kurt (their Viper tech) is top notch.
-- charles
-- audio engineer & ex-IASCA competitor
