I followed the post "Empeg on a HiFi stereo system" until I lost interest when people starting to talk about floating their speaker wires in mercury and rewiring the Empeg to support digital out.

Anyway I've wired up the Empeg using the 4V pre-outs available on the car dock, and the sound is AMAZING. The sound is crisper and the sound stage is much more prominent; the frequency range seems to be much better as well.

Am I correct in thinking that you've connected 4v outputs from the docking sled, to the inputs of your amp?

Typically audio seperates used to output 1v signals, therefore amps were designed to take 1v feed. Then in the last decade some manufacturers starting upping the output of their seperates to 1.2v, to give the impression that their products sounded better, when all it did was sound louder. At the time this practise was frowned upon by the audiophile community, but I can understand why you might get a better fequency range, as source signal to the amplifier has been magnified by 4 times.

Hmmm, is it better for the head unit to do this amplification or the amplifier. I suppose it depends on how the empeg unit was designed. Are the outputs on the empeg seperate? Is this handled by the DAC?

This is just hypothesis, but I'm extrapolating from this that when your empeg is set to 0db, the volume is a lot lower on the amplifier than you would have on a another source (e.g. cd player)?

Well since I got my empeg a couple of months ago I've always wanted to build a docking sled. Which indirectly has to use the pre-outs on the sled.

So what I've done to test this, is connect 1 empeg to each source on my stereo, set them to 0db (Why would I have anything else inside). And played the same song on each. I then switched the inputs on my stereo between the 2 to compare.

And all I have to say is, the quality is much better (Maybe just cause the volume is louder, but I don't think so). The empeg which was connected using the 1V home pre-outs sounded muddy at the same volume.

Now all this was tested using a Aiwa mini-theater system which has JBL pro studio speakers connected to it, I have yet to try it on my NAD component system.

What started this journey was the output of my SBLive connected to the same jacks was much louder then the empeg.

In the other thread I mentioned people were saying the output of the empeg didn’t sound as good as other components, now if you can use the docking sled with the 4V pre-outs and it doesn’t cause distortion I can’t see a problem. Now one thing I didn’t test yet, maybe they’ll be more static using 4V pre-outs

I dunno, but is using 4v input to your amp instead of the 1v it expects not rather eh...bad? (as in, couldn't the amp - or at least that input channel - go boom ?)

Hmm.. that's a good question. What have others done when they've made a home dock?

I saw some pictures on riocar.org and it appears he/she used the pre-outs on the dock.

Anyone know if the problem Archeon describes is in fact something to worry about? I'm now getting worried about building my home dock like I planned!

Here's the box I'm talking about:
http://www.riocar.org/modules.php?set_albumName=album40&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_album.php

I dunno, but is using 4v input to your amp instead of the 1v it expects not rather eh...bad?

Not according to the FAQ.

Ok, good to know! Now I might go about it and build a docking station myself too!

Really Tony, that Faq is pure gold.

Thanks.