Hello. I finally installed my Rio in my car after having it inside having to much fun messing with it for over a year. The way I had to wire it up is probably a little unusual but I will take a few minutes to try my best to discride it....

I am running Eclispe's DDL (Direct Digital Link) setup. Its uses a DIN mounted controller and a rear mounted DSL unit. When plugged into my Eclipse CD player it fixes (volumes does not affect the outputs anymore) all the gains and one pair of RCAs get run to the DSP. All volumes, front, rear, L, R.........options are now handled by the DSP itself. Thinking about this I figured it would be quit cool to run those fixed outputs through the Rio and fix the volume on the Rio then out to the DSP. I did not see any problems with these and I would still be able to use all my features of the Eclipse DSP with no problems. Before adding the Rio my system sounded great. Without getting into all the details I compete in sound quality comps with it and do pretty well. After adding the Rio and using the Rio 99% of the time I figured I needed to get ready for my biggest show of the year, Spring Break Nationals. So being IASCA will not let you use anything other then there CDs I started to listen to the CD player again through the AUX inputs on the RIO. Come to find out the it is distorted using it like this. I even unfixed the volume and turned it down some but this did not help. It seems as if the output gain is too hot going into the Rio. I have looked to find if there is a way to adjust this but about the only thing I can find is something in the INI file for boosting or cutting gains for each input. Is this boost and cut before the DSP chip? Does this sound to you like I am overdriving the chip?

I know that buying the Toslink output mod. for the Rio would be the perfect fix as my DSP has Toslink digital inputs and I have two open at the moment but I am not sure I will have the time and/or money to do it before the comp. at the end of this month. I also have a Eclipse DDL CD changer I could throw in but just would really like to see if I could get this setup to work. Beside this small problem the setup works and looks great together.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for your input.

Rick

PS, yes i did check the FAQ, I think I ended you reading all of then just to make sure I was not missing anything plus wanted to know as much as I could. Even did a search on this BBS.

The aux input on the Rio expects 1v line-level, I'm guessing that the output from your other device is 4v or hotter, and that's the reason for the distortion.

Since audio quality is important to you, perhaps a different signal chain is in order?

OK, I thought about all those options. Because my Escipse setup only has one standard RCA input, which right now is being used for the CD player, and three digital, I cant run both the RIO and the CD player at the same time without the splitter you talked about. Eclipse did make a CD player with Toslink output for use with this setup but finding one is hard and affording it when you do is next it imposable, LOL. I am guessing that the best way out of this is to just spring for the digital out board for my Rio. Any input on how that things works and sounds??

OK, found a fix for this problem. I took one of those cheap line level convertors, you know the one that you can run speaker level outputs into and it converts it to RCAs, bypassed the converter part of it and took the speaker leads off and replaced then with some RCAs. I picked the unit I used because it has two pots on it to adjust the output and in a sence that is what I needed. Just got done putting it in and it works like a champ. I just plugged it in inbetween the CD player and the RIOs AUX input, played some music on both and adjusted the gian so that the volume was the same while switch between the RIO and the CD player. I verified things by using the info display for the AUX input on the RIO and it looks much better now. So far I can not tell if there is any loss in sound quality because I did not do a good listening test as it was getting late. The little bit I did listen it sounded pretty darn good. Not sure if this will be any use to anyone but just in case someone else runs into this problem the fix seems to be pretty easy.

In the future, I think you can go to someplace like:

http://www.partsexpress.com/

And do a search for "rca attenuator". Granted the cheaper ones are a bit pricy at $4.50 each.

-brendan

If being really serious about sound quality and wanting to "do it yourself", I can highly recommend the transformers from Lundahl .
I use them exclusively in the lineboxes I use for stagework, works great. One suggestion could be the LL1545a with lots of connection possibilities.
Their transformers aren't exactly cheap, but I figured somebody around here might be looking for high quality audio transformers sometime.

// Jonathan