please help me decide

[ccapital83 10+ year member]

so i am a huge kenwood excelon fan. i have the kdc-x993. its packed with features. it has time alignment sound retriever 4v preouts 7 band eq and 24 da converter. my question is this.

the pioneer deh-80prs specs look pretty nice. i wasnt even a pioneer fan. i have read tons of reviews on it and they loo very strong. my question can you if you have time compare models to one another and help me decide what to do. i dont mind spending the money but idk if the specs are good enough to top my excelon. idk about the 3 burr brown das in pioneer or the 28 bit floating one idk how much different from my kenwood that is. i know its got a bigger eq and a 5v preout. just curious if you think theres enough on this pioneer to make a audible sound improvement.

really appretiate it thanks //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

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[West]

Are you currently satisfied with the Kenwood?

 

[dragnix 5,000+ posts]

I wouldn't get the pioneer just because I don't like the fact that the pico fuse blows. IDC if it's user error or not, it's a crappy design

 

[audiobaun 5,000+ posts]

I wouldn't get the pioneer just because I don't like the fact that the pico fuse blows. IDC if it's user error or not, it's a crappy design

I thought they fixed that issue??I thought?:uhoh:Yet, A good friend of mine has the 80prs, and Its got a crap load of features to adjust the frequency /hz on whatever speaker/sub/time alignment ect/voltage meter on the face ect, and im impressed with it..was thinking about picking one up for myself.Great HU in my opinion,from hearing it.

 

[dragnix 5,000+ posts]

I thought they fixed that issue??I thought?:uhoh:Yet, A good friend of mine has the 80prs, and Its got a crap load of features to adjust the frequency /hz on whatever speaker/sub/time alignment ect/voltage meter on the face ect, and im impressed with it..was thinking about picking one up for myself.Great HU in my opinion,from hearing it.

stupid forum

 

[dragnix 5,000+ posts]

I thought they fixed that issue??I thought?:uhoh:Yet, A good friend of mine has the 80prs, and Its got a crap load of features to adjust the frequency /hz on whatever speaker/sub/time alignment ect/voltage meter on the face ect, and im impressed with it..was thinking about picking one up for myself.Great HU in my opinion,from hearing it.

haven't heard anything about it, maybe someone else can clarify. They do have good features on them. I don't have experience with the Kenwood though

 

[Flex68 10+ year member]

Just reading about all the features on the 80prs gives me a semi !

But if ur happy with the Excelon I wouldn't jump off that train

 

[ccapital83 10+ year member]

im sorry i should have included more details i have 6.5 in doors 6x9 in rear and on 12 in trunk all pioneers d series sub is pioneer chmpion series which as of now all sound amazing better than my mb quarts polk momo and focal access did. the kenwood has 4v pioneer is 5v the kenwood has 7 band eq pioneer 16. they both have the feature to shut off internal am. to me idk if thats enough to sound better. again unless not all radios have 3 da converters like the pioneer idk if my kenwood does. and as far as sound of kenwood to date its the best sounding reciever ive ever owned. thats y idk if making the switch will help. i guess it comes down to the converters idk what having 3 24 bit and one 28 floating bit does for the sound if thats better than kenwood or not.

 

[West]

My feeling would be that the 80prs would probably give you better SQ, it's newer and its Pioneers second tier SQ system. A lot of the specs that are given don't mean a whole lot and are there to sell the product. The specs I like to look at are in the back of the decks manual and are often not otherwise advertised. You can have a HU with a 16 bit processor whoop one with a 24 or 28 bit processor simply due to the 16 bit one being developed by a better engineer. In theory you should be able to get more detail out of a 28bit processor than a 24 bit one, how much you will actually notice this is questionable. It sometimes just comes down to personal preference.

I like to look at signal to noise and other factors 110dB kenwood vs 105 pioneer, if you care about SQ you will probably be using CD's or larger music files on USB/SD cards. Personally I have found that CD's usually give the best possible SQ on decks because of how the data is retrieved and processed. That Kenwood has a very nice CD player on it, possibly better than the Pioneer (but Pioneer did not go into detail about the CD player in the manual like Kenwood did).

Where the Pioneer will win definitely is on functionality and its user interface. I have been playing around with a bunch of different decks the last few months and I can tell a big difference in the SQ from different decks. Odds are if you had two identical decks 1 with 4v pre-outs and another with 5v pre-outs I doubt that anyone could really tell the difference unless you had a very noisy environment. How many bands an EQ has for me isn't that important, how the deck can auto-tune and do auto-time alignment however would be. The other really important stuff has to do with the audio processor, but you cant gauge it purely on bit count.

If you feel like your system needs a lift pop in the Pioneer, worst case you don't like it and have to pay a 15% restocking fee.

 

[ccapital83 10+ year member]

what a great answer thanks for that. yea idk i mean i love my excelon. alot of people hate on them but its really a great unit. id deffinantly make the switch even if it only gave me a 10 percent increase it would be worth it to me i am all about sq.

 

[chillin 10+ year member]

Does the 993 have time alignment?

 

[ccapital83 10+ year member]

yes time alignment, manual or auto and built in active crossovers with different slopes just like the pioneer does. the pioneer seems to have more ways to adjust the option but as far as options go they are very similar.

 

[West]

what a great answer thanks for that. yea idk i mean i love my excelon. alot of people hate on them but its really a great unit. id deffinantly make the switch even if it only gave me a 10 percent increase it would be worth it to me i am all about sq.

No problem.

I would wager that you could expect that... when you weigh everything. Not sure how you can quantify an exact percentage improvement tho lol.