bes51659

Sorry, can't help you there. I've not installed in car yet, so I still live in the pretens that gain is sufficient and that I won't need a preamp.

Sure a PC can sound good! About the board you've got I got a bit suspicious about "award winning new tech to restore lost info in mp3's" and "turn your hifi int xtreme-fi".. I like info like 24-bit DAC, 100dB S/N, etc. :-)

There is some interesting sw to measure your car coupe and compensate for timedelays, and digital filters that you run as batch jobs on your music and therefore has 0 phase error etc! Its a jungle, but its going to be fun to dig into that. Plenty of info on mp3car.

I saw that there are some carputer people have bought fosgate 360. Why in gods name when you got a PC at hand. Its only a bunch of filters at $1000. - At last a reason to motivate a PC heavy investment to the girlfriend :-)

z_lust

The loss of gain you are experiencing is because you are only using half of the balanced input to the amp. This translates to about a 6db loss. Your pre amp (Turbo1) can make up this gain, but because you are still only using half of the input signal you are overdriving the amp into distortion when you make up the gain you are loosing due to being unbalanced.
If you use balancing transformers (one for each powered speaker) you should get your gain back with clear sound.
Make sure your transformers are 0db gain or up to +12 db gain. Some transformers (like inexpensive Direct Boxes) will drop your gain up to 20db.

Using outboard DSP (like I'm doing here: http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/work...m-upgrade.html ) is far more affective than using the PC or even batch processing your media (that sounds like a nightmare).