PIONEER DEQ-9200 USER EVALUATION:
by Erik Robsarve.
| PRO’S | CON’S |
| Inexpensive | Adds noise |
| Feature packed | Limited crossover |
| The display is hard to read in sunlight |
INSTALLATION:
The 9200 consist of two parts. There's the control panel, which has the same width and height as a DIN unit, but is less then 2" deep. The second part is the hide-away unit, which is about half DIN size.
Mounting the control panel should posses no big problem, if you have a vacant DIN slot it fits right in, if you don't a pretty good adjustable bracket comes with the unit.
As I like to be able to tow away the car in my products if necessary, I found the bracket to be a bit to flimsy for me; so I reinforced it with a piece of ABS plastic.
The hide-away unit is mounted with L-brackets, ugly but simple and effective. You must before mounting the unit choose if you are going to use it in Standard or Pro mode, since this is set by a dip switch on the underside. (More on the modes below.)
The connection between the control panel and the hide-away unit consists of a single cable that comes out of the control panel and is connected with a 13 pin DIN at the hide-away unit. This would be good, but Pioneer engineers in their infinitive wisdom choose to make the cable about 1.5 m... This means that the cable is to long for up front mounting and to short for trunk mounting. If you want to have the hide-away unit in the trunk (which would be logical to reduce the number of long signal cables trough the car) you must buy a Pioneer CD-changer cable, which cost an additional $50. If you are handy with a soldering iron you can always do what I did and prolong the cable with some shielded cable.
Electrical connection is very straightforward, the hide away unit has a molded insert on which the four wires are connected. The wires are +12 V, Ground, Remote and Illumination.
The unit has one pair of RCA inputs and 3 RCA outs, the microphone for the auto EQ feature is connected through a standard phono jack.
When setting up the gains you run into the worst design flaw of the 9200, the output voltage is only 0.5 V (hey, wake up! its the 90's !) and to make things worse the unit only accepts 0.5 V of input voltage, which means that you can't make use of the full capacity of the 2 V preamps that most modern CD head-units employ.
You are intended to have the volume of your head-unit set at a fixed level. The level is found by taking a disc that is recorded at a high volume level and turning the head-unit volume up to where the clip indicator on the 9200's control panel starts to flash and then you turn it down one click.
You now set the gains on the amps, turn the pots up to where you hear that the amp adds static and turn it back down a little.
SETUP AND TWEAKING:
The DEQ 9200 has two different modes, called Standard and Pro.
In Standard mode the unit works as a graphical equalizer, a sub and high pass crossover with front and rear outputs, and as soundfield processor.
Soundfields are fun - for about five minutes, then you want music to sound like music again.
The Pro mode is made to support a component set up front and a sub. You have time delay controls, crossover controls, a 3 band parametric eq and the 4 band Auto EQ.
Personally I use a mono track with a speakers voice on it to center the soundstage and I then check with the drum track on the IASCA disc.
The slopes for the midrange can be set to ether 0,6,12 or 18 dB/octave on both the high-pass and the low-pass.
This means that there is an option to run your front system from 0 Hz and up, which I don't see much of a use for, but it also means that if you have a pair of well aligned front speakers (like a coincident source coaxials) you could use the DEQ 9200 with a four channel amp with two channels powering the front speakers and the other two powering the sub(s)
The lowest frequency that you can crossover the midrange low-pass and the tweeter at is 2.5 kHz, which means that using the piece to power one set of door mounted midbasses in conjunction with the mid and high frequency driver in the kick-panels or dashboard is out of the question.
The phase of all outputs can be reversed independently, and you adjust levels between the speakers here too.
First you chose if you want it to try to equalize the system to have a flat, a sloping or a happy face frequency response. The unit then sends pink-noise trough the different speakers to set levels (I usually end up turning the bass back up afterwards ;-) and sets the EQ. This feature is absolutely great; it works wonders with most cars.
If you have severe problems this feature can compensate so much that the dynamics and overall tonality suffers, but the generated curve can be manually adjusted.
TOTAL IMPRESSION:
Overall this unit is very nice to work with especially if you consider its complexity much thanks to the big display, which unfortunately is totally unreadable in daylight. For those who like bells and whistles they will also like the spectrum display, personally I keep mine under a lid.
Sonically this unit is not transparent; it adds hiss and digital noise. If the volume of the piece is set to 21 (of 30) no noise is audible in my car, but then it plays quite quiet. Normally I keep the volume at around 27 and when driving not much noise is heard then either, just the hiss between songs.
I like the unit a lot, in fact my system is built around it and I can’t live without it.
But mine is for sale, since I'll be getting a P1R that incorporates an updated DEQ 9200 and a very fine CD-RDS tuner and gives 4 V out.
Manufacturer info: