Aw, yeah!

So this past weekend I got a new car, which is awesome on it's own. It's a 2005 Honda CRV, for those curious. My mom likes it for it's excellent safety ratings; I like it because it gets me places (and is way easier to load my double bass into than a Corolla!). I got pretty lucky and the money from the insurance company for my last car is covering all of the costs, except for like half of the tax and licensing and so on and so forth. But here's my favorite part: I had planned installing the stereo from my old car into the CRV just like my old car, however I was always a little disappointed with how some of my music sounded in the car and I thought it would be cool if I had a graphic equalizer to fix that. About a week ago I remembered all of this (while sitting at home car-less) and went onto the 'bay and ended up scoring a cheap 10 band graphic eq. Flash forward to tonight, I just got done installing said eq in conjunction with my stereo. All I have to say is, wow, what a difference! I can finally tweak my music into sonic bliss! In short, Graphic EQ in car = epic win. And as per talkbass rules (no pics, no eq) :

i posted a pic of my new honda ... what?

arent you gonna show us yours?

i mean ... its not pink or something is it?

Haha, no it's silver. It was night when I took the picture of my stereo, so a shot of the outside of the car was kinda out of the question. I'll try to take a few pictures today though, since you're interested.

that's a familiar pyramid EQ YV, I have 2 of them, not new as mine were bought in the early 90's but look IDENTICAL, and still work !!!!

Now this is the sort of thing I love coming home to. Hearing a success story. Congrats Yvarg!

here's my 90's version of that pyramid not quite identical but close enough

Nice one, man!

amimbari wrote:

here's my 90's version of that pyramid not quite identical but close enough

[image]

Nice! Mine doesn't have any rca jacks on it though (wish it did though!), just a bunch of confusing wires coming out the back. The only problem I've been noticing over the past few days is that there is this odd whistling sound coming from my speakers when the equalizer is on. It seems that the pitch of the sound is relative to my speed, too (the faster I go, the higher it gets). It goes away as soon as I turn off the eq though. I tried speeding up and slowing down to "play along" with the music; but it's much harder than it sounds, so it's mostly just annoying. My best guess is that it's a shielding issue, and I need to ground the chassis to a physical part of the car rather than to the back of my stereo.

Also, no more pics yet, school started on Thursday and it's kept me busy since (excuses, excuses).

ya Varg it's called alternator whine from a cheap junk pyramid. The one I have is the preamp-only models so I could use any amp I wanted back then, but ya cheap = whine for sure.... or it was always there coming off the stereo and naturally the cheap pyramid made it worse so now you can hear it.

in my dailydriver, I run my factory stereo into the 6 factory speakers tapped off to 2 pyramid 100 watt amps into a 2x12 in the back.... nothing special but loud enough to drown out the 60mph wind noise when the window is down.

Back in the late 70's the Pioneer supertuner 5 watt per channel underdash with the huge analog radio dial and 8 track player was about the BEST you could get---don't complain

and for 300 bucks, you could get a car amp of about 50x2 watts total using 8 huge round transistors for output on the sides painted black to contrast the silver aluminum ( yep this was before Integrated Circuits ) and use 2 home stereo speakers in your trunk to rock your 70's music out of. --I know I did

either that or 2 6x9 KRACO speakers in homemade wood boxes you made sitting on the back deck, just waiting for you to hit the brakes and have them become projectiles in an accident

I agree that it's alternator noise, and even more expensive decks aren't totally immune to it. I think you have a good idea in trying to get a better connection to chassis ground Yvarg, and I believe they also make line filters to suppress alternator whine. Keep in mind that your EQ is there to amplify things, so it is natural that it will also amplify noises, but it is also something that can be remedied for just a few bucks more.

Thanks for the info! In the spirit of doing things myself cheaply, I found this webpage that looks like it will be helpful in curing my problem:

http://home.comcast.net/~jbperkins/alternator_whine_filter/

I'll see if I can get around to doing this later (and finally taking pictures of my car).

you could make one, it would probably be better than the one you can just buy from radioshack, which also will work, but it was not meant to absorb a lot of whine.

I have used a lot of coil+cap filters, and some work some dont...in FACT, I had one that attached to the output of the alternator right at the output terminal, and it made it worse.

for "cheap", sometimes the solution is to go expensive, but ya, give it a shot.

sorry about the tangent on OLD stereo's.......

No worries, Mike. I actually enjoyed your rap on older stereo systems, as it took me back to my younger days.

Yvarg, I think that design is brilliant! And the fact that a ham radio operator designed it makes it all the better! Heck, if the parts cost around $18, but the dude will build you one for $25, you could just have him do the work for you. Or, if you're a do-it-yourself kinda guy, it looks like an interesting and simple project.

Well I had a little spare time today, and most of the supplies for filter lying around anyhow. After a quick trip to radioshack for a few items I put together the filter and installed it in my car. After revving the engine in my driveway while listening to some Bach very briefly, I would say that the filter works. The real test will be when I drive on the freeway sometime. Also took a few pics of my car for you guys:






(lots of room for dragging my double bass to and from school )

And amimbari, I don't mind your radio rants. They're actually pretty interesting. I'm glad people on here know a fair amount about this stuff!

Eric, there's just something about doing things yourself that's satisfying. Plus, I just like building stuff!

Oh, I totally agree!

And that is one purty ride! I have a Suzuki XL7, so I have a love affair with the smaller SUV's.