Well, basicaly, the "imprint" sound is set by engineers to a certain way. It'll probably try to go for a perfectly flat response from your speakers. But, that's probably not what you enjoy soundwise. Most people enjoy having a bit more bass in their sound. The end result shouldn't be what Alpine tells you to enjoy, but should be set to how you find it to sound best.

And, for the active setup, you basicaly have the right idea here. You'll probably need to set the crossover points yourself though. But, getting individual time alignement to each driver really helps. If you set your time alignement for a complete component set via passive crossover, what happens is you may have 2 speakers of those speakers setup properly (most likely the tweeters), but your mids won't have the right T/A since they aren't necessarily at the same spot as your tweeters. This will cause your sound to loose a bit of focus and precision.

Hope this helps.

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