I was under the impression that any name brand head unit (Alpine, buapunk, Kenwood, clarion, Sony) with the features you wanted would work great as long as you are running your speakers off of an amp (which surely you would be for that price), so is there something to look out for in head units as far as quality? Any DACs to look for or stay away, and how would I know which DAC the head unit has?
usually SQ oriented head units will tout their build quality with burr brown 24 bit DAC and or their floating point processors. Let me just say, i had a decent head unit like a pioneer 4200ub, couldnt get the sound i wanted so I added a 7 band clarion EQ. Thought that helped a bit but it never satisfied me.
Went through loads of middle to mid-high end components. They all never sounded great at all. Keep in mind, I fully sound proofed the door, made proper baffles and acoustical treatments everywhere and played with the best speaker positioning. One day I just got soo fed up and said fk it and bought a used 80 prs from vertex audio. Popped it in and not even fully properly tuned (just used the auto EQ feature and thats it) Music sounded AMAZING for the first time ever. Later on when I fully know how to completely utilize the 80 prs, its even better. Sometimes i might want to upgrade since i've heard competition setups, but i'm way more than satisfied with the SQ to say fk it, i'm not touching anything anymore. Which is rare.
It literally solved every sound quality issue I had with my older average run of the mill head unit. I mean it sounded good and clean to everyone, but its never a wow factor to me personally for the amount of money i've spent on my components. A good head unit can turn your cheap speakers into sounding like good speakers and your good speakers sounding like amazing speakers.
You can go several ways about this man. Just get an average head unit or something with nice features, then get a soundstream harmony Digital Signal processor (200 on
ebay) and get all your tuneability options from that, keep in mind, its a bit more advanced than the average joe car audio guy can handle but can achieve amazing results. Or keep it simple and get a nice head unit like the 80 prs with 16 bands of EQ, quality DACs, Digital Time Alignment(very important to achieve proper staging and imaging), and 4 volt pre-out or higher. After you get a taste of the good stuff, you'll never EVER go back to cheap @ss to mediocre head units again. I guarantee it.
