Alpine Break in

The break in procedure i always use is 12 hours at maximum excursion using minimum response frequency, with the woofer in free air. (i.e. the most movement with minimum power).  I ran in my audiobahn 15"s for 12 hours at 20Hz. that was three years ago and they still give consistant 148dB readings.  The running in process softens up the woofers suspension allowing it to drop to lower frequencies without being over driven, and so gives a much smoother tone.

oonikfraleyoo, give it time, especially since its winter, unless its scorching hot outside, its going to take forever to free that thing up.  once you start getting it broken in, listen to some really low bass beats....i bet you will sh#t ur pants.2003 Chevy Avalanche,Eclipse CD7000,Morel Elate 5,Adire Extremis,Alpine PDX-4.150, 15" TC-3000, 2 Alpine PDX-1.1000, 470Amp HO Alt.

plug it in the wall if you wanna break it in quick , but I am not responsible for the results double-secret reverse-osmosis speaker-cone-induced high-level interference distortion, Its a killer

Ok I plugged it into the wall and it sounds great now!!! Just kiddin. I have no patience guys. That’s my biggest downfall. It is quite warm outside (Alabama) but regardless I wasn’t expecting much. I have messed with the amp and gotten a lot of results. The problem was obviously with me not the speaker. Too quick to point fingers at Alpine. It seems that this speaker likes low bass much better than higher bass but with some volume that might equal out some. I just wanna go outside and crank it soooo bad. Anyway thank you all, it’s great to have all of this knowledge in one place.

After two years of selling Alpine Digital woofer amps, I would almost bet money that your lack of SPL is due to faulty input settings. You said you had just begun to fool with the settings. The digital input section sometimes leaves the input sensetivity way low if not adjusted correctly. Pay a visit to your local independent ( not circut ) Alpine dealer and have them help set the amp up. Good Luck.

I wish there were a local Alpine dealer. And the manual is no help at all. Never having owned an amp like this before I understand some settings and am lost on others. What is the diff. between the 3 bass compensation modes? Is 0 a bad setting for the input level? What eq fequency would be best for most of my music? (I only listen to rap in the car and thats the only time I listen to rap. It helps with the road rage.) I had to go to Atlanta today to meet with a drug dealer (I work at a pharmacy) and that helped speed up my break-in as the speaker now has like 11 hours on it. I guess I'm gonna hold out and give it a few more days though.

ok, here is how I would recommend your amp input settings. input level 0db. Low pass btween 63hz and 80hz. subsonic filter @ 20hz. parametric eq @ 50hz/ Q factor @ 3 / gain @ +6db, bass comp on, time correction on and adjust 0.1ms steps until it sounds the best. and just try outphasing to 180 degrees once to see if there is a big differance. Good Luck

Thats not far from where I had it except the eq freq. and I haven't mess with TCR at all. I'll give it a shot. Thanks

Turn off all that crap. Adjust the gain and crossover right and you should be fine. Don't set the gain based on the voltage of the preamp outputs of your cd player. You might try setting the gain by ear but that isn't very easy usually, so you might want to try the tutorial on setting gain with a multimeter by JL. http://www.jlaudio.com/tutorials/index.html#

The gain doesn't quite work like that on this amp. It only has 3 settings either 0, +6 or +9. I'm wondering though why the level under the input menu is not called gain? Is this different? The "gain" is under the PEQ menu. Are Alpine and JL using diff. terms? It seems what Alpine calls gain JL calls bass boost. What JL calls Gain Alpine simply says input level. Am I correct?