Favourite headunit brand?

[MrBeef]

Just curious to know what brand headunit people prefer and why?

Me personally I like JVC, a good powerful amp in the unit, crisp sounding and easy to use! Made my standard speakers in my vectra sound mint!!

so whats yours

[Alex B]

What do you call a good powerful inbuilt amp??

Pioneer for sure. They cater for your joe avrage right up to very high end. Ease of use is quite good on them too.

[sergei]

Alpine - best sounding MP3 decoders and DACs... I've done my research and listend to a few other brands in upper quartile of the range.
Personally I don't care much for displays or UI (as long as it is not stupid), also I don't care if it has got heaps of surround/DSP effects, also I don't care if it plays movies or has cell phone attachments, I don't care how powerfull internal amp it is (I use external). For me the most important is SNR, lack of distortion, good DAC and MP3 decoder and good EQ curve.
BTW I have Alpine CDA-9831.

[Alex B]

Cant say ive ever seen a headunit with a powerful internal amp, 30x4 is about it.

[Steelo]

All the JVC head units that I have heard skipped really badly........

Pioneer for the win, no pissing around, bang it in your car and its awesome right out of the box

[sergei]

not even that, more like 25W per channel RMS..
What I hate about stereos theese days is that Watts are so big that I can't see that the wires powering the unit not melting under such high current...
say 50W per channel = 200W with ~60% efficency of a class AB amp that translates into ~330W power consumed by unit , 330W @ 14.4V = ~ 23A. At 23A 14guage wire will defenetly heat up big time (well first 15A fuse will blow). Also lots of head units have 7.5-15A fuses at the back which means with 15A fuse the unit would take at max 10A under normal operation, which translates to ~90W of total output power of head unit ~22.5W per channel.

[Alex B]

The pioneer DEH-P1Y is rated at 27x4RMS, most other pioneers are around the 20x4RMS mark. Looking at that tho it would have to be at 14.4V, how much current would the cd motor and screen use??

[Emperor]

My Kenwood MP3/WMA blah blah, duno the model, but it was the most expensive at Ripco (doesnt say much, but yaknow)

I like it

[Snoozin]

Foryou seem to make pretty sweet headunits.

[HELBND]

Alpine FTW

[Alex B]

Foryou seem to make pretty sweet headunits.

Then why dont you buy one

[Snoozin]

You think I'm made of money?

[BigDon]

Sony, well the old skool competition ones CDX-C90, no internal amp (they just mess with the SQ) 20 Bit Burr Brown DACs, Copper chassis and very anti bling, probably one of the top 5 in the world for SQ in its day, if not still so).

I’m very anti bling and its hard to find new H/U's that don't look like the "Bling Brigade" have gone to town on them nowadays and don’t have internal amps.

[Blackrazor]

its hard to find new H/U's that don't look like the "Bling Brigade" have gone to town on them nowadays and don’t have internal amps.

Kenwood KDC-X7533. Disable the onboard amps via menu, looks plain as a preachers daughter, and it runs twin Burr Brown 24bit DAC's Plus the price is right.

IMO, the best headunit depends on the user. The top end Pioneer, Alpine and Kenwood headunits are so close to each other sonically that i bet most of you couldnt pick which was which in a blind test. IMO, buy the one you like the usability of - spend $X on a headunit from the big three, and you'll get approximately equivalent performance.

This is my opinion of what you get for your money, from years of dealing with mid-high end car audio :

- Alpine - Wins on CD transport quality and MP3 processing. Fails miserably on usability.
- Pioneer - Wins on SQ processing ability and ease of use. Fails (mostly) on clean looks, except for the P80RS and P90RS which are both stunning.
- Kenwood - Wins on DAC quality and clean looks. Fails on processing and featureset.

I've sold Sony in the past and think that, for the money you pay, you get a load of features - its just a shame that one of those features wasnt 'lasting for more than a year on average'. JVC, i'm the wrong person to ask about - as a store, we had a 35% failure rate with JVC when we had it, and the SQ is just plain meh.

Of the big boys, that only leaves Panasonic, which i havent heard any horror stories on but havent heard any positive ones either, and they seem very bling focussed.

At the moment, i'm running a high end Kenwood, and love it. I've run Pioneer in the past, and liked that too. Alpine, i've run, probably wont again - the engineers were geniuses, but the UI design team were idiots - a blind, fingerless autistic Impressionist painter could come up with a better button layout than whichever tools Alpine hired to do the job.

[Jazza]

I love my panasonic H/U -Does everything i want it to and more. And not too bling...

[Brick]

pioneer why, cos i said

[flat_0ut]

sony. just because they're simplistic and looks awesome... feature wise i'd choose pioneer

[Snoozin]

My Clarion I have been impressed with SQ wise, however usability is utter arse.

I can handle that though.

[CaM]

^ agreed,
happy as with mine though.... now to just fit the front speakers.

[Blackrazor]

Ah yeh, forgot Clarion. Shame there isnt much in the way of a dealership in NZ anymore