In reply to:

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Regarding your point about bass and treble: You defininitely should notice a loss of very-high-frequency data in an MP3, but there shouldn't be any noticeable difference in the low-end stuff. The only difference there should be differences in the default EQ of the head unit's output. At least that's the way I understand MP3s to work, I don't know if that's really for sure the true case.

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The thing is though - ever since putting in the empeg, I've felt like I've had a single 8" in the back of my car, instead of the 2 10's that I have; i've had a hard time reproducing the bass quality playing mp3 files.. I'm not speaking of loud bass - i'm speaking of clear bass... When empeg introduced the advanced Eq, this got significantly better.. (it was almost like certain frequencies didn't make the cut for my crossover with the empeg, that did with my old head unit..) changing some of the values (sorry - an't remember which, and I don't have an empeg at the moment to find out (cry) ) did improve things, but I could never be satisfied with how it sounded, especially not accross 3000 tracks... One eq setting might sound perfect for one album, but would sound very poor on another..
In a sence, owning a collection that's been compressed using every which way possible, it was very difficult for me to eq my settings in a way to accomodate my entire collection... Yes, you can have different eq settings for different types of music, but it seemed as if the alpine's defaults were always good enough (I never changed them), were as I seemed to be constatly tweaking the empeg...

-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units