Don't drive him crazy :-) I think he has a hard enough time so far.

Seriously, I had an inside track into the development into the system for our car that most do not. Trust me when I say there is more in that silver box than an amplifier. While not as high tech as some of the newest Harman Infotainment systems of today, or the Range Rover systems of the time branded under the Harman Kardon brand, the Infinity system for the Crossfire and the Pacifica were the first to leverage the engineering teams work on the home side on drivers for the Prelide MTS, Intermezzo, Kappa, Alpha, Beta, and TSS speaker lines of the time. It was a huge leap in material engineering in the speaker biz. Meanwhile on the consumer aftermarket side we were tinkering with the 8 channel version of our amp that was used in the Range Rover as the basis for what is now part of the JBL MS8 processor. For nearly three years we used them (along with a custom interface for tuning) in some of our competitive vehicles (all 1st place winners in SQ nationally) in the U.S. as a "black box" between head units (oem, aftermarket, and even an mac mini) and aftermarket amplifiers all run high level before we announced the MS8.

Simply put, a large preamp voltage may drive the factory amp, but may not fully drive the input stage of the amp and in turn not allow the amp to deliver its full power capability. In doing so many of the limiters used to maintain sonics may not activate at higher volume settings which in turn will result in "better or cleaner" sound perception, but at reduced output from the amp ( audiophiles may see that as increased headroom/better dynamics). Those that change out the speakers to aftermarket brands are likely to use 4 ohm drivers which will cut the output of the amp in half as the 40 watt per channel output is based on a 2 ohm platform. The onboard EQ is used to tune the car which in our case was locked in by Chrysler (pretty typical for the OEMs to make slight acoustic changes to appeal to their target market).

The crossfire system by today's standard is very much an entry level system. The most advanced audio expereince for the car right now is being delivered in the Ferrari FF with Harman's Quantum Logic which can dig into the music and track the recording, then it slices up the data and essentially provides individual streams of the music to specific drivers in the car to locate the sound as it were live and you had a front row seat. Taking the technology to the extreme it is literally able to seperate out specific instruments out of a song and only play them and nothing else...it's over the top cool.