I've been out of the car audio scene for quite some time, but I've always liked the cleanness of SoundStream. I checked out their site and it looks like they have a pretty cool looking neodyium(sp?) sub as well as an insane looking amp - called HumanReign (never put that in my car - too freaky)

Thanks for your thoughts...

http://www.soundstream.com/productindex.html

 

Here's a post from Steve Eddy on rec.audio.car


Ok, Peter, here's the poop on those primoridal Soundstream amps:

First, a correction on the failure rate. I'm told it was 90%, not 80%
(again, that was the failure rate off the assembly line).

The primary reasons are:

First, while typically you'll see a large, single, horizontally
mounted circuit board used on most amps, Nelson thought it would be
cheaper to use two narrow (about 1" wide) boards mounted vertically
along each side which necessitated a lot of complicated point-to-point
wiring to connect the two halves.

Second, compounding the problem of all the point-to-point wiring,
Soundstream opted to do it all with a single color wire in order to
keep costs down (I guess they figured it was cheaper to buy one big
spool of the same color versus half a dozen or so smaller spools of
different colors).

Last, but not least, the folks who were doing the actual assembly
didn't possess very good soldering technique (and apparently weren't
terribly skilled at assembly either) so there were many cold and
intermittent solder joints. This was also largely responsible for
their failure in the field and compounding that was the fact that the
circuit boards were all single-sided (again to shave costs) so the
pads tended to start peeling up when things got hot, etc.

So there you have it. The actual electronic design was sound (no pun
intended). It was Nelson's and Soundstream's penny-pinching that made
it such a disaster.

se




Percy

 

That is too bad. I liked the way the models sounded 5+ years ago.

 

wow that human reign amp is insane, i like it alot. but im not into that look, but still definitly cool. i would def buy it just to try it and for the look.

 

There's hardly any *real* specs, just typical marketing.

operation
• 10Hz – 40 kHz Frequency response
They don't list the dB points and at what level the frequency response is measured at. Lots of blindsiding going on here.

• >120dB S/N ratio
Ok...but at what power input level? It's easy to get a large number with a large input...it's much tougher when the input level is on the order of millivolts.

• >500 Damping
I have yet to hear an audible difference in damping factor, whether it be 20 or 2000. Loaded topic. McIntosh usually has low damping and they're usually "criticized" for this. But in reality they sound quite good.

• 0.15 – 12.0V Input sensitivity
This is the only good spec I saw.

• 0.02% THD
Here we go again...at what frequency did he measure this at? Also, what power level input? Most companies will measure at 1khz AT rated power, which will give them some nice marketing numbers. If an amp says "measured below rated power from 20-20khz from 250millivolts up to 4 volts" then you have something really good. Mc puts in this spec sidenote...not even Brax can do this.

In short, it's a unique looking amp but there's alot of marketspeak typical of Soundstream.

BrentX, Soundstream amps aren't the cleanest in the game. What are your system goals? If you're after SPL then the amp should do fine. Top end SQ...it won't cut the mustard.

Percy