Alpine Electronics Showcase 2007
Alpine Electronics are widely recognised as the finest manufacturer of front end automotive electronics and full system audio processors in the world. Always technology leaders, their 2007 kit is cleverer than ever
INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE: For information on the stuff they make and an overview of the whole range. Check out the main article. For showing off in public how much you know about the stuff and the brand. Read Instant Expertsection first. Otherwise skip straight to the ‘lowdown’ meat and potatoes.
INSTANT EXPERT
It was a gruelling trip for softy Gaijin (that’s us western journalists) what with the time zone change and the huge coach journey to Iwaki city from Tokyo. We had reached the centre of technical excellence that is the Alpine facility on a huge press event called ‘Discover the Future of Mobile Multimedia’ They gave us all lovely jackets so we all looked all of a piece as we trooped into the place.
(I wear it in my avatar shot) I had tried jelly fish, raw squid and eaten candied grasshoppers just to see what they were like and yet the experience of this facility was to be far more out-there than even sharing a spa with the marketing director the night before. (Japanese spas are the absolute best and most are based on real geothermal springs!) Some stuff is secret but I can tell you that Alpine have the world’s most amazing car electronics test facility. They have robots that eject and load CDs until something breaks so as to make stronger, better, longer lasting mechanisms. They have things that drop boxes on their corners or shake things all to hell. They have freezing chambers that turn into roasting ovens in seconds flat from minus 60 to plus 100 in centigrade. They have a room with a massive sun-alike lighting gantry to torture displays and even training rooms to teach staff literally how to listen critically. They have a test track with cobbles, ruts and bumps to imitate crap roads from all over Europe as Japanese roads are generally excellent.
But best of all they have a museum. At the very door with pride of place is the Cassette Deck With The Hole. It is a big round indented hole right through the unit, made terrifyingly enough, with a hand cannon firing a 0.45 inch slug in a car park of a dealership in Texas. The owner’s cassette deck had failed twice, been repaired in Japan twice and had broken again. The Alpine guys didn’t seem to worry too much about how the poor flaming dealer’s life would have flashed before his eyes. They just care desperately that someone, anyone could get so pissed off with a bit of their kit that they would want to shoot the f###er. Not that they put it that way. It just sits there and dares them not to make their kit the very best way they can. My trip turned me into a Nipponophile. I love Japan and reckon we Brits have far more in common with them than most will admit. Indomitable islanders with enormous drive, creativity and global influence? Only thing is, we Brits haven’t taken nearly every endeavour up to and including, making tea, arranging flowers, wrapping presents etc. to an actual art form.
THE LOWDOWN
World 1st in a Mass Movement
I can recall exactly where I was the very first time I heard one of Sony’s brand new Walkman cassette players. It was amazingly high quality for the time and it created a whole new world of portable music players. In its way, it was as revolutionary as the transistor device that enabled a whole load of folks to take radio with them. No longer gathered in the parlour around the wireless, you could listen to the sport while out fishing, or catch the charts on a Sunday night no matter where you were. These days of course, the spiritual home of the portable music player is the hard drive and most of all, the world is owned by
Apple’s iPod. Where before you would get perhaps an auxiliary input, maybe even a composite video input to your car audio system, these days, even Top Gear magazine carries a small logo in its tables of cars in the back as to whether they are iPod compatible. Of course we know that if it has any radio in it at all, we can add an iPod in some fashion but what is really wanted is to work your library of tunes with the same HMI or Human/Machine Interface (poncy way of saying ‘knobs and buttons’) as your ‘Pod. However, the deal with digital devices like computers is twofold. Capacity and speed. You refer to iPods in terms of their size of storage, be it a wee clip on thingy for a lapel-full of music or be it the video-equipped version or even their new and yet to really take off, iPhone. The speed of how quickly it finds things is what the device itself will achieve. You get used to how long it takes to access a ditty but if the thing you have to plug it into on the car won’t work as fast, it’ll irritate you. What Alpine have done proves some they have some corporate minerals and produced a car headunit with no mechanism at all. The £300 iDA-X001 as seen in Alpine’s advertising was designed with input from Apple and uses a full speed USB connection. There’s some seriously sexy 24 bit D/A conversion (changing the digits back to music the best way) and the MediaXpander processing is a well established technique used in recording studios and enhances dynamics of the digital file. This one machine has created a whole new category in mobile electronics. This is a slice of how things are going to be. One day, all discs of any kind will be completely obsolete. All movies and music will arrive via wireless phone lines and playback may not even need a storage drive in your own home.
70 Stair Climbs Eliminated
When you take pictures and furniture out of a room to decorate, sound echoes and reverberates when you sing. Which is why interior decorators warble all the time. Or ruddy whistle. Same thing happens in the bath. This is room acoustics. Unless you are outdoors, sound bounces, reflects and reverberates. It’s how you can tell with your eyes closed the flavour of your space. You are not a bat but you can tell cosy from cathedral. An anechoic test chamber for speakers is an upsettingly odd place. Feels likeyou died.
We know that a good EQ device can make a set of fine equipment sound a whole lot better by matching the higher energy frequencies with cuts in EQ and boosting those that are sucked out by room acoustics. However, this can take an RTA (real time analyser) and an expert some serious effort. What Audyssey have done, with the help of Professor Tomlinson Holman (he’s the TH of THX!) is to automate a powerful 500-band equaliser so as to do it for you. (Horribly over-simplified btw) In the days of tuning theatre sound systems, Tom would have to test seven speaker positions five times each and go up and down the stairs each time to trigger the equipment. Er seven times five plus up and down it was seventy times he’d see those stairs. Thus motivated, he worked with the academics until the system they devised could beat his sound engineering skills. Like a chess master playing against a computer. When it beat him, Audyssey was ready. The MultiEQ XT effect and I have heard the full on unit is bloody awesome. Served up under the IMPRINT banner, this is auto EQ that I will rest my reputation upon. It makes all that has gone before in automatic self-listening EQ look like finger-painting. The IMPRINT kit is the top end £400 CDA-9887R headunit, and the add-on unit PXE-H650 which can upgrade other systems, including OEM, for £400. The dealers use a laptop and dongles to set up the systems so some tuning costs for time spent are involved but more than worth it. Hardcore enthusiasts can even buy the set-up technology KTX-100EQ to own and play with for £200.
Blackbird Hello
I’m a bit of an ornithologist. I like birds. I feel that if I see a Kingfisher when I’m out fishing, I haven’t had a wasted day. We were on our honeymoon and I asked this woman who was tidying up what the birds hopping around the lawn were. The answer I was after was ‘Carib Grackle’. She looked at me in utter disgust having been asked some damn fool questions by red-burned tourists in her time, but this was clearly as stupid as it got. It was iridescent, dark and had a bright colourful eye.
She said, in a Bajan accent thick as molasses, ‘Blackbird.’ My wife nearly died laughing at me. The poor woman really was appalled at my stupidity. Barbados is lovely. Only country in the whole world with 100% literacy rate, too, but I digress.
The personal navigation device market has finally been attacked by Alpine but with their own slant and it’s called Blackbird. Sure, use it in another car on a sucker like any of the competition, or go on foot about that city, but best of all, fling it into a magic des. res. A docking unit for the £400 PMD-B100P connects to either your Alpine screen based unit or via an interface to your factory screen based system. This gives you less wobbles, more screen size and best of all, with the Alpine PulseTouch„¢ technology you get touch screen control that actually tickles your fingertip to let you know you have contacted the screen’s sensors. Like early calculators with buttons you pressed and got seven threes or whatever, most touch screens lack this. It’s called breakout force on buttons and it matters. One day all controls will be touch screens and all will have breakout out force like PulseTouch. It makes the Portable nav feel and work just like full-on pukka installed nav. A lovely extra is the SD card slot. It’ll store you a slew of tunes, too. All accessible to your main sound system once docked, which is nice.
F.I.T. Me Up
Cars cost plenty and if you can have your company provide a car it is one hell of a perquisite. Perk or vital necessity, lots of us drive cars we do not have the right to cut about. Furthermore, the whistles and bells added to so many cars are now deeply woven into the electronics, from music playback to ABS warning lights. You get steering wheel remote controls and displays that show both climate control and radio station.
You still get crap sound in nearly every case, though. With the Alpine Factory
Integration Technology equipment, (F.I.T.) you can snide on in there and the factory system will just love you up. Your dealer has a dedicated OEM-help website about ‘Perfect FIT’ so you can add iPod, navigation, DVD, even a Digital TV tuner and have it all interface with your factory stuff. The ORB controller of the Vehicle Hub Pro VPA-B222R system is posh but not too fussy or aftermarkety-looking and is used to boss all the bits you might add, as well as control the basic bones of what’s wanted. You can add into a factory system with the VPA-B211P, as well. They are priced at £450 or £300 respectively. That amazing PXE-H650 IMPRINT processor is also in this OEM integration bracket and so is listed in the same bit of the plot.
In The Zone
The FunZone equipment line up is used to describe all the hardware for the other occupants. Notably the roof mounted DVD player/screen flip-down, which is a large 10.2 inches on the diagonal. The PKG-2000P has 1.15 million pixels, which on a screen this size makes it the closest to high definition on the road. It has 3 A/V inputs including one called Gameport for adding consoles. There are 1000P and 850P flip down monitors. They too have huge 1.15m pixel counts and are 10.2 or 8.5 inches but without DVD players built in. PRICE RANGE £300 to £700. DVD players and stand alone screens are also in this bracket and range from the TME-M680 and 780 5.8 and 7.0 inch VGA products to the touch screen monitors TME-M770S and the PulseTouch TME-M860 eight incher, with a changer due in the autumn called DHA-S690 for DVD (and even those dodgy DivX ‘arthouse’ films) and the DVE-5207 DVD deck. PRICE RANGE FROM £150 TO £900.
Full Speed Ahead
The core business remains head units and this year’s line up is as good as ever. The £20 cable called KCE-422i is the key here and it allows Full Speed iPod control and power charging while connected. The entry to this hallowed turf is guarded by the CDE-9870R, which has 4x45w built in, plays MP3 files and has a pre-out. You can expect to pay around £130 for one. The CDE-9871R/RR decks gain an extra pre-out and will cost you £20 more. CDE-9873RB adds a front auxiliary audio input for another Score of notes and the CDE-9881R/RB decks get a bigger 4x50w inbuilt amplifier, can read WMA and AAC (Windows Media Audio and Advanced Audio Coding) files and get the ability to add a remote control if you want. They cost £200 apiece. CDA-9883R adds Bluetooth readiness and a built in adaptive steering wheel remote control facility for £250. The CDA-9885R has a cool Biolite (monochrome Organic Electro-Luminescent) display and its three pre-outs are at 4Volts and will set you back £300. The flagship CDA-9887R we have already heard about but it has its remote control included and has all those amazing IMPRINT features as well as getting a whacking 4x60w inbuilt amplifier. Certain top units from previous ranges are still in the price list, so it’s worth asking at the shop about the odd bargain, I’d imagine.
Future Now
The original Discover the Future of Mobile Multimedia event all those years back has absolutely been vindicated. Alpine showed us how the OEM side would advance and how Alpine would remain healthily ahead of it, so as to offer ever yet more than the usual factory system can manage. The epitome of this principle is the multimedia headunit equipment. We have the IVA prefix applied to decks costing between £700 and a thousand, with the D310R/RB motorised emerging-screen decks bringing in the range. They all have PulseTouch screens and three sets of pre-outs, except for the IVA-D105R with a 5.1 Dolby/dts processor instead of featuring 2ch down mixed surround. MP3 and WMA playback is covered, with the IVA-D105R getting AAC, DivX and WMA as well. You can hook one of the TV tuners up or add DVD navigation to the system for a full on install. At some point in the future, the 2 DIN IVA-W202R should be joined by the 205R which has a dock inside for a special model of Blackbird.
Not sure when they’ll be in the UK, or even if it’ll be in 2008, but you read it here first.
Muscle
The two main ranges of power amplifiers this year are the PDX and the V-Power. The PDX are all Class D with switch mode digital amplification principles going on inside. This means they can be better damped, take up 60% less space and deliver the same power into 4 or 2 ohm loads. There is one two channel model and two each of four channellers and monoblocks. The biggest is the PDX-1.1000 which costs £550 and will make you a kilowatt RMS. The smaller £350 PDX-1.600 will fling out, 600w RMS, while the 4.150 and 4.100 offer 4x150w and 4x100w for £500 or £350. The PDX-2.150 is a 2x150w RMS design and lists at £300. Very efficient and incredibly compact for their output they can even be stacked vertically by removing the one inch diameter trim caps from the top of the amps.
V-Power amps comprise ten models including the MRA-F355, which, for £400, will amplify a whole 5-speaker in car theatre system as well as featuring Dolby and dts decoders built in and a 4V pre-out for the sub woofer feed. The Monoblocks put out from 500w RMS to 200w RMS, depending upon model but all are Class D and cost between £150 and £300. Four 4-channel models cover from 90w RMS to 40w RMS and are all the more classic Class AB type. All the V-Powers feature speaker level inputs so you can add them in via OEM speaker feeds.
Vox
Speakers and subs from Alpine divide into four ‘Types’ X, R, S and E. They descend in price from the exotic and fabulously high
performance X series, with such beasts as the SWX-1243D twelve which will set you back a hefty £400, all they way down to the £70 SWE-1243E subwoofer in the same size in the E series. The X factor means subs with aerospace materials in the cones, monster magnets strengthened with Strontium and high amplitude roll surrounds for massive cone travel. The SPX-17PRO and 13PRO components will cost £500 a set but involve midbasses with sipes cross-cut into their cones and annular ring tweeters of the very most costly type as well as seriously posh passives. The REF versions are ‘only’ £300 a set and have just slightly less amazing technology in them. The Type-R panoply includes mighty fifteen inch woofers and they all have dual voice coils, just like the Type-X. Power handling is ‘only’ between 750w RMS and 500w RMS, instead of the round kilowatt the eXes can eat. Type-R will cost you between £150 and £300 for a subwoofer and between £100 and £150 for a set of coaxes or components. Shallow mounting depth is cited as a USP for the Type-S woofers, which go from £100 to £120 and all handle 300w RMS in ten and twelve inch sizes. They have stamped steel rather than cast chassis. Type-S full range speakers handle 50, 40 or 35w RMS and are by far the most sensitive and efficient speakers, so should work well on headunit-only power although pokey enough to use their small amplifiers. Even these lower-end products proudly show off their performance graphs in the dealers-only sales guide to explain that for the price, they tend to out-perform the competition although it’s not stated whose speakers they were spanking.
Prét A Thumper
Even for the Alpine buyer there is the ‘I want it right now!’ urge and you can get ready made and active bass boxes of varieties to thump, growl, drop or plain reinforce in a small space. The SBR-1242SB is a sealed box with a 12 inch Type-R 12 incher for £200, while the ported SBE-1243BR is a 12 inch Type-E woofer and will cost you around £100. The actives include five models. They go from £150 for the SWD-1600 under-seat thingummy to the £350 SWD-2030 which is a cunning dual driver eight inch device where one acts as a passive radiator. The best of both sealed and ported performance. The SWD-3000 has an amp bolted on to the outside and is instant Alpine bass attack for £250.
A serious line up with the ability to allow total brand-o-phillia. You can easily have an entire system by Alpine and you know what? No-one who knows their stuff will be anything but impressed.
World famous mobile electronics brand
Makers of the legendary F#1 Status products
Sound (& Vision) quality all the way up to awesome
Superb looks and user interface nice to use
Future-proofing involved in new products design
Only in car brand to license Audyssey
Very strong in OEM (factory system) integration
Customer Support telephone number 08703 333 826
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