WhiteRabbit

Alright, I first want to say that I make NO connections between the stock mustang deck and the stock civic deck. What i DO want to say is that this can be helpfull IN GENERAL about when a deck clips and what you might want to listen for in your own systems that are on teh stock CD-player.

out only problem was the deck did not play cdrw's and i did not feel like wasting a cdr on a tone disck. we therefore did all our tests playing hiphop, sticking to songs with HEAVILY eq'd bass playing a wide range of frequencies (in order to give the best margin of safety)

test #1: speaker out directly in line with the O-scope. there was heavy clipping, the deck did not have to have much turned up in order to hear any clipping, much less see it on the wave form. with the bass turned ALL the way down, we got zero clipping at respectable volume levels. we were bummed by this, but since we had a hell of a gain on teh amp, no worries

test #2. hooked up teh o-scope to teh amp to test and set teh gains. oddly enough, the clipping was more than nil! turning up the bass on teh deck, there was continuously no clipping! I have come to the conclusion that although the bass waveforms do not clip at high outputs (tho midbass and mid's obviously do) they do not at bass frequencies. we turned up the bass untill it was about 3/4 the way up, and the volume 3/4 the way up, and only then did the deck start to clip the bass.

I therefore have come to a couple conclusions:
1. playing midbass from a stock deck into say 6x9's is pointless, because the wave clips so early.
2. playing bass out of a 6x9 is useless, the speaker cant handle it and will make that farting noise we all recognize so well trying to play ultra bass songs on stock systems [IMG]i/expressions/face-icon-small-mad.gif[/IMG]
3. a stock deck is actually IDEAL for putting a sub on, because while the deck clips midbass, low bass stays clean.
4. for the FULL RANGE of frequencies, the highest quality deck is aftermarket. you cant put together a high quality system with zero distortion at all ranges with a stock deck. I'll argue that you can if you had a seperate source for mids, and just used the deck for subs and tweets (but i wont back up tweets just yet [IMG]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/IMG] ) but teh midbass capabilities of that stock deck was a joke.


anyone who would like to drive to my apt. in SLO to test their 2k1 stock civic deck (needs to be a cd-player capable of playing cd-R) we can set something up. I will remind you all that this is just a test of a 98 stock mustang deck, and that while results should not be identical, this thread was meant to be a guideline for tuning a stock deck, as well as giving options for system building.

FWIW