Exile MKII ZLD

[Woody929]

If it is in fact "Zoned" then I'm ok with the spelling. I've just always seen it referred to as "zone". I think the spelling is intentional since it shows the long ō. It was the "d" that threw me off.

[Cigars n scotch]

If it is in fact "Zoned" then I'm ok with the spelling. I've just always seen it referred to as "zone". I think the spelling is intentional since it shows the long ō. It was the "d" that threw me off.

You know you make a good point. I don't know whether it's Zone or Zoned, and maybe it's a marketing gimmick to use Zond, but I still stand by my thoughts on the email grammar. Maybe Brian will let us all know.

[KG's Supra24]

I made my original post kinda thinking along the same lines as C&S because I've seen their website and emails but I agree with Woody. I think it was intentional spelling because of the line over the o (however you make your keyboard do that). Perhaps zone level control is proprietary?

[bergermaister]

That's why they pay us marketing guys the big bucks. We normally just take 2 words and squish them together to be all fancy like, and keep the 2nd word capital. Or throw a small "i" on the front of it...

SunSport
PerfectPass
WetSounds

iAnything

[Woody929]

KG, you do it like this ō or Ō. Very similar to the way you would do ö

[mmandley]

On the original ZLD its also spelled ZOND in the Rev2 MKII they make it grammatically correct with the characters.

[trayson]

I really don't want to start a WetSounds vs Exile war, but I was on Mike's boat and played with his Exile zone controller a little and I have a WetSounds 420-SQ in my boat. I think that the pop up buttons on the exile are interesting and make for a sleek, sexy looking product, but I found that when two buttons are popped out at the same time, even my small fingers would have trouble adjusting the knobs are there's not as much space between the knobs are you'd really want. The wetsounds has the little knob with the bigger knob around it. because of their design, I find I can adjust the knobs from the top of the knob, so the spacing isn't as much of a problem on the WS.

Of course the WS has a built in PA system and while some might consider this frivolous, I have used it to bark directions to a surfer, or to yell at people going too fast in a no wake zone! haha!

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see any evidence that the Exile unit has an auxillary output on it like the WS unit does. This Aux out is designed so that you can take a long 3.5mm cord from my WS420SQ and plug it into the source of any other boat that has a 3.5mm input (which would be pretty much about anyone) and I could provide the source music to their system as well. So if two boats were rafted together, I could be playing music on my boat system and feeding music to the other boats system as well so we could both be providing the tunes. Necessary? No. But kind of a neat feature in my opinion for the few times I'd use it.

I'm sure that the sound quality of the Exile unit is top notch. Looking at it, I'm wondering about the EQ. It appears that there are 4 buttons to adjust your EQ:

• Bass
• Mid Bass
• Mid
• High

While that's great, it seems like those adjustments are going to tweak the levels to the entire system. On the WS420SQ, there are TWO knobs for each of the four EQ freqencies. You can adjust Cabin bass, and tower bass. Cabin mid bass seperately from tower mid bass.

This is a huge feature IMO. When I was on Mike's boat, we were CRANKING the music and we started hearing some popping and I could see the cabin speakers visibly suffering from over excursion. I told Steve to turn down the Bass on the boat speakers, but I believe what happened from the way the unit is designed is that both the cabin speakers AND the tower speakers had their bass turned down.

There's no way you can convince me that a 6.5" boat speaker can handle the same amount of low frequency as an XL9. It's just not possible. But yet, you're robbing the XL9 of bass or even mid bass by not having independent EQ's for the two different zones.

Now, like Mike said, if the Exile unit took away the white noise when the system is turned all the way down, that's fantastic. My WS suffers from white noise from the tower speakers when the volume's all the way down. Not a deal breaker for me, but a weakness of the WS and it sounds like the former XLD.

I do think that the phase control button on the Exile is a waste of space and a button. If someone can educate me why I would ever want or need to change the phase of my sub on the fly, let me know.

Also, the WS420-SQ has the choice of blue or red illumination. Not sure about the Exile.

All in all, the Exile MK2 is a good, solid unit in my opinion. But it costs the same amount as the WetSounds and the WS has a handful of extra features and I haven't yet found anything the Exile unit offers that the WS doesn't that I'd really care about. (i.e. I don't need to adjust my sub frequency or phase so that's wasted on me). Maybe I don't get the advantage of being able to configure the gains of each input on the Zone contoller as Exile offers... I have gains on each of my amps. So why do I need another set of gains to adjust on the zone controller? seems redundant.

Anyway, I know this forum has huge support of Exile and I think their products are fantastic. But as someone that's used the competing product and had a chance to play with the new Exile product, I figured that I could give some informed feedback of the strengths and weaknesses from a user perspective of the two units.

And to give a contrast of the controls.

Exile:


WetSounds:

[Woody929]

So how is everybody mounting these? I was under the helm yesterday, and the options are very limited. Best I can think of is to screw a small piece of 2X4 to the back of the dash, and screw into the bottom of that

[kaneboats]

I hung some L type brackets from the back of the studs used to mount the gauges. There are pics on here somewhere of the many different ways guys have installed these.

[Woody929]

I just used 2 small pieces of 2x4.