Alpine Fiat 500

Talk Audio was recently sent the pie charts from the whole of the 2009 pan-European EMMA car audio competition scene covering who used what equipment in each type of contest. There’s stuff about headunits, amps, cables, batteries and speakers, both subs and full range.
Of course, Alpine feature heavily in the “who used which headunit?” pie-chart as well as Pioneer and Clarion and are shown on other charts as many competitors’ favoured brand of main speaker and subwoofer as well. However, one single car registered oddly for me, with it’s own tiny pie slice of the ‘processors’, for the box he used from the world of home HiFi.
For I also write about home audio at a high level (if you call £150,000 a pair high end) and have even interviewed the TH out of THX! And one of the things I spoke about with the Tomlinson Holman was automatic room correction.
Many years ago, he was the engineer with THX (now a separate company and these days Tom’s doing other stuff”>) and in order to ‘tune’ the multi band equalisers in a theatre to get it qualified as a THX approved site, he would have to run up or down the stairs to move the microphones around the auditorium no less than seventy times! He wanted to develop an auto-EQ that worked as well as he did as a room tuner. It took a university department and three years but they worked out a cunning algorithm and it is being licensed into many sorts of home HiFi under the Audyssey brand right now. However, there is a top end stand alone unit made by Lyngdorf which implements Audyssey MultEQ”> as it’s called and believe it or not, one of these many grand’s-worth devices was used in an EMMA car this year! Hence that tiny slice of pie.

But whoever used it would still have had to apply some time alignment unless he drove a McLaren F1 and that could confuse the living heck out of a domestic Audyssey unit. Alpine are the only in car electronics manufacturer to grasp this complex nettle and have the full Audyssey MultEQ process as part of their better line kit, from on board-lite-within-headunits to the full fat version in the PXA-H100 processor. (The latest in a line of brilliant PXA units that seemed to be just waiting for this awesome algorithm to come along!)
The really big difference is that Alpine’s Best In The Business grasp of time alignment has been woven into the mix under the brand name Alpine Imprint. It really is a most clever system and the difference between an Imprinted ‘good’ car system and an non-Imprinted ‘good’ sound system is incredible. With Imprint, whatever you have sound equipment-wise, will be made to sound as good as it can. In a deeply worrying way (for an ex professional live sound engineer) it genuinely does away with the need for an industry-served top end golden eared engineer to spend four hours tuning your car. Anybody who buys into Imprint gets this bonkers 500-band EQ system in the guts of the machine that will make their kit sing.
Of course, Alpine wanted to show this off and amongst other things (like the literally awesome Alpine RLS) there have been some fabby demo cars produced. You may have seen this one at a few UK shows (or read the quaintly continentally-worded press release) as she was over here all too briefly last Spring but Talk Audio magazine figured it was just too ruddy darn cutie pie to not properly feature the system itself properly. (With apologies for use of the same gallery of pictures…)
So say a detailed hello to the MS-Design creation that is the Alpine Fiat 500 Cup, the fifth of the 500 made.
The System
Headed up by a deeply desirable double DIN IVA-W505R, this mostly-screen front end does pretty much everything except personal massage and has a goodly collection of kit plugged into it. (Maybe it could be hooked to offer a switching voltage when demanded? It could be used to trigger this 12V accessory.) For one there’s the award-winning cleverness of the HCE-C200R adjustable-angle rear view camera that comes up on the screen when the reverse gear is selected so the wee car has eyes behind. This clever and award-winning camera lives in the back of the stumpy thing’s bum and is wired to the head unit up front. There’s also the KCE-300BT box for Bluetooth and a big capacity iPod just plugs in out-of sight and is fully controlled from the 505. There’s a TUE-T150DV digital TV receiver hooked up so you can watch Corrie or Eastenders on the way back from after work supermarket shopping and it’s feeding two extra screens. Visible to occupants only if you are in the back looking over your shoulder as they are found in the back of the car in the tailgate and so really only usable at shows, for the public. One’s a TME-M780 and the other a TME-M780EM. There’s a DVE-5207 separate component DVD deck in the system, too. Just because they can.
But the most crucial box is the PXA-H100 found en-route to the PDX-5 Power Density amplifier. This wee amp takes all the power amplification duties of the system, feeding 75 watts to each ‘corner’ and 300 watts (all RMS) into the SWS-1023D subwoofer. It’s in the PXA-H100 that all the clever Alpine Imprint stuff happened when it was installed. A microphone gets placed in the car and you press ‘go’. (pretty much…)
Front speakers live partly in the entirely reconstructed dash and partly custom built into the ‘A’ pillars with the fabby ring radial tweeters of the front SPX-17 Pro speaker components firing across the dash top custom locations of the 17cm (six inch) mids. Rear speakers are from the same Pro series but in the 13cm size. As you can see the whole car is heavily repanelled, with the processor on show under a plastic window in the middle of one of many swoopingly sexy glass fibre builds, the amplifier behind it and the subwoofer housing behind that. All very integrated and smoothly done yet totally custom-cool.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think I could get in at six feet two and twenty ahem stones, so I didn’t get to hear it for fear of trashing it. But I have heard the Audyssey system at the importers demo facility (same place I heard the £150,000 a pair speakers) and I have sat in the Alpine Imprint fully custom bodied Mercedes RLS.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=706742962343334070&hl=undefined
…even though it has motorised slide out sideways seats. So I have heard Imprint and know how clever it is.
The demo car is gorgeous and the sound is something you need to experience. If you have an Alpine dealer near you, see if you can get an on/off demo in a car as even stock systems can be vastly improved. You want to hear what a better sub and imprint does to a stock BMW system!
So a big “sorry” to Harman’s Logic Seven, that is discarded during this process of upgrade but Imprint whups your butt till it’s all pink and ouchy! And this wee spud is nearly cuter than kittens playing with balls of wool!