Customer Ratings & Reviews

not sure if it is worth the money...

This is a central speaker that works in my car 5.1 system on alpine h701 surround processor. Doing surround in your car requires a decision whether make 4.1 system (mix central to L & P speakers) or make it full 5.1. Both approaches have advantages. mixing to 4.1 sounds good. Central channel does not get the distortion from poor central speaker... but you pay with surround feeling.
5.1 builds nicer soudscape (it its really easy to hear) but... you need one more channel on your amps (5ch amps are usually crap, so you need 4 channel + 2 channel and use only 5 of the sum) and you have to go for good central speaker.
Alpine SBS 05DC is far from being good. It limits the bandwidth, high freqs are just poor next to non-existant. If you crank up the volume the speaker box vibrates in the way you just can hear (50Watts amp distorts the speaker badly and the upper wattage range). The efficiency is also questionable. It is just silent compared to the rest of my system.
If you make the installation from the scratch - just ask the intaller to put any midrange speaker in the din formed box and this will probably sound better...
If you just don't care to much -> go for 4.1setup
If you are perfectionist -> do it right, make your custom central

The only way to go for 5.1 in the car!

I've had this centre speaker in my car for 6 months and am really happy with it although a little on the expensive side as all Alpine gear, but hey the quality is there!

Works perfectly and looks great with the IVA-D310 in dash DVD and MRA-F350 5.1 amp and makes good use of an otherwise totally useless 1 din space under the player that are usually filled up with those stupid plastic pockets, yuck!

I would deal with Sonic again without hesitation and have in fact just given their contact details to a mate of mine here in Australia so he can get one of these speakers for his Alpine system as well.

Best of the center channel solutions.

I'm using this as a center channel for my 2001 Maxima's 5.1 system. It sounds very good for vocals, but obviously lacks any bass so there is a bit of a hole between 80hz and 200hz. I'm using this with a Pioneer AVH-P7500DVD head unit, an Aduiobahn A6601T 6 channel amp, JL Audio components (front), Infinity Kappa Reference (rear), 2x 12" Infinity Kappa Perfects via a Hifonics Brutus 1608D. I bought another Alpine center channel for use in my truck.

Alpine center

had a clarion center but it blew out the tweeters after a few months. HTis Alpine center sounds great and is strong so far.