After some extensive internet research my understanding is that from Alpines side the sytem is meant to be used in non active or passive setups. There is a guy that is an Alpine employee posting in the german car audio forum "Klangfuzzi"that confirmed that the imprint sytem on the CDA 9887 is not meant to be used for active sytems. The reasons seems to be that in active mode one has no influence on crossover points and speakers could get damaged when the wrong frequencies are applied to the respective speakers.
No that is the theory in the real world there is another poster on the same forum (reputable audio shop owner) that claims that it is possible, if done carefully and if the active crossover is set up correctly, there are alos other posters that claim they are running fully active and from my understanding and seeing what the sytem does it should be no problem..
On my car the CDA 9887 is running with Imprint enabled on a passive or non active system. The system consists of an Arc 2100 amp for the front speajer system with Rainbow Germanium CS265.25. There is also a subwoofer with a mean machine 1000.1 amp driving an MTX 10 inch sub (will be swapped in the near future for a DD 9100 series sub).
One issue i have seen is that the suboutput is adjsuted pretty low by the Imprint system, and what i have done to over come this is set the gains and subwoofer level low so that afterwards when imprint is done you can cranck them up to adjust as needed.
The system is tuned for the driver position the overall position was not really to my taste (the stage was not perfect, in this mode it's a compromise for all seat locations in the car that makes it basically not an optimum for the driver seat).
When switching between manual mode an Imprint there is a significant difference in the sound, it sounds definitevely better with imprint. But in all honesty i also have to say thet i didn't spend much time to optimize the system up manually, besides the time correlation and playing around a little with the parametric eq.
The imprint system will set up the sytem pretty well in a very short time basically it takes an hour to set up and run the measurements and download 2 curves to the Hu.
What i still would suggest is listening to the syetm with and without Imprint in a demo car or at a dealer to decide if its to your likeing. If you want to spend the 250 USD fro the measurement kit, another option if buying from
Crutchfield is getting the kit and sending it back for a total cost i believe of 20 USD. That way you could load the imprint curves and have not to spend the money for the kit, since it really is only used for set up which in many cases might be only once.
Regards
Robert
