alpine head units, blackout mode?

I'm reading that some Alpines have a Blackout Mode that turns off all the lights on the face five seconds after pushing a button. This is a compelling feature to me. I'm also reading that Blackout Mode bypasses all signal processing. The manual says nothing about this, accept to say that Blackout Mode "reduces power consumption", presumably to provide more power/clarity to the amp stage. There just ain't much info out there on what I consider a crucial feature. My last head unit had this light-defeating feature when we drove across the country, but it was called "A Carefully Positioned Box of Triscuits"...It was critical to the incident-free night drive across Texas, but made the controls greasy. I'd like to know: 1) Can I use a high-pass filter and EQ with Blackout Mode? 2) If so, which models have Blackout Mode?

Blackout only does what the name suggests.  It blacks out the display and all lighting.  I am pretty sure that the cda-117 has that feature, but I have no idea about the others.  To access blackout you have to press and hold a button for a couple seconds.  From what I remember they all have B.Out written next to the button.

You just hit 9000 on that post... If there's definitely no DSP interference, well, that's rad. I can't believe I've been unaware of this feature for so long.

It has been around for over 10 years.  I still have a couple people a month come in thinking they have broke their deck.  ISO9001 Certified

I see where you got the info about the blackout mode defeating the signal processing.  To access blackout, you have to hit the volume knob multiple times.  Right after blackout is the defeat function.  This function defeats all processing audio controls.  The way they have it mentioned in the manual is blackout/defeat, they are 2 separate portions of control that happen to fall one right behind the other.

That last post explains a fair bit. You can imagine some of the threads I read through to try and get clarification on some of these discrepancies. Most forums I've found that deal with car audio are filled with ham-fisted monkeys.