Alpine 9887: Imprint/Media Expender?

[Justin89T 10+ year member]

Is the Imprint piece the same as the Media Expander piece? If so great, if not, what's the difference?

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[frzninvt 10+ year member]

No it is not, it is vehicle interior tuning hardware/software with a microphone to measure the acoustics of the vehicle and then using a sophisticated equing/time alignment correction system with many bands to make it sound the best that it possibly can.

That said most systems like this rarely make things sound good to the human ear and are more for making a system look flat to an RTA.

 

[starkfu 10+ year member]

imprint is the new age revision of the pxa-h600 of old!!

 

[Justin89T 10+ year member]

great description...

any links, or an equal description, to the Media Expander? I can't find it on crutchfield or Alpines site. I'm really new to Alpine, and I don't know what it totally entails.

All I know about it, is that its needed to do bass and treble, but I'm sure it does a hell of alot more than that //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/biggrin.gif.d71a5d36fcbab170f2364c9f2e3946cb.gif

 

[frzninvt 10+ year member]

Not sure if a Media Expander is part of the total Imprint package. Info on it is still pretty vague, probably will not be released until later this fall or beyond. The 9887 was supposed to be a summer release but was just rolled out in the US in August.

I have the Media Expander on my Alpine 7998 but find with most redbook (store bought) CD's it make it sound boomy and uncoherent even at the Level 1 setting. It seems like it is boosting the bass at about 40Hz, mid to some extent, and maybe a db or two on the high end. The Alpine 7998 does not elaborate much on what frequencies that it affects or who manufactures the technology and supplies it to Alpine.

I had an older Kenwood DSP-110 equalizer/processor that had range expansion and compression ability and it was fun to mess with and some recordings really benefitted from it.

On my home brewed CD-R's is where it becomes beneficial boosting the lower quality 128kbps and up recordings to near full quality. I typically use the lowest setting and run all the equalizer settings "flat" and use the display "blackout" feature so that more power is available to the components that benefit from it most.

I ran a full blown DBX 3BX-DS 3-Band Dynamic Range Controller with Impact Restoration (home component) powered with a modified sine wave power inverter in my '94 Camaro that I competed in IASCA with. Talk about bringing music to life!