Equalizer

[trayson]

The wet Sounds is absolutely a marine built piece of equipment. EQ's and head-units tend to be more out in the open, so going with a marine unit with a conformal coated PCB has its advantages, but it goes far beyond that.

The WS-420SQ has chassis mounted RCA jacks on the back. the others have the RCA's soldered to the PCB and passing through the rear of the chassis.

The WS-420 has dual zone equalization, the others have single. So the 420 allows you to fine tune the in-boat and tower zones independently of each other. On the others, what ever adjustments you make to the front zone, effects the rear zone, or in-boat and tower zones if the fronts been relabeled.

The 420 has 3 independent volume zones. This is different from front/rear fade.

The 420 has 6 discrete outputs as opposed to dividing the front/rear level through the fade.

The 420's level adjustment are under the cover, so no holes in the top of the chassis where water can enter.

The 420 has true sub volume control and no adjustable low-pass filter, which is not needed with modern amps.

Exactly. The ws unit really offers more control than the exile. I was on a boat with the new exile and saw the cabin speakers being over driven by the bass of a particular song. I told the driver to turn down the bass on the cabin speakers. He was able to turn down the bass, but on the system as a whole. Lame. Obviously the sub and the xl9 towers could take more than a 6.5" speaker. But no independent eq by zone on the exile. The knob layout on the ws is better in my opinion. The pop out buttons on the exile were too close together since you could only turn them with the side of the buttons, where as my ws420 sq can adjust the buttons more from the top of the button.

There are wasteful buttons on the exile... Seriously, who needs to have a knob to change the phase of the sub on the eq???? Likewise, do I need to change the crossover frequency of my sub on the fly? Um, no.

The ws can do both red or blue illumination. I kinda like the built in P. A. System. I have used it to coach surfers.

Also, the ws has an aux output so I can feed my music to another boat... Like if we were rafted up and I wanted my music playing off both boats systems. (or many if you Daisy chained the ws420 's.)

The exile is a cool unit, but for the same $300 retail price, why wouldn't you want the one with eq controls for BOTH the cabin and tower zones, plus the other features it has?

Sorry, but the 420sq is the clear winner to me.