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For all the car audiophiles

apachechef said:
How do you know which is the weak link?
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Because Grado headphones are better than my ears haha.

BTW, the speakers I built for my bedroom use an AudioNirvana 10" full range driver that just barely touches 20 kHz. So, I definitely put more emphasis on other qualities than treble.
 
Disco Inferno said:
Learning time!

Point A. They're bull****ting, 99.9% of the time. Ever notice how your tiny Logitech computer speakers are rated down to 20Hz? Cerwin Vega XLS-215s barely make a noise at 20Hz, let alone a lil 4" "woofer" made by a keyboard company.

Point 12. Frequency response ratings need an important piece of information present: the ol' (+/- xxdB). If they can miraculously reproduce 40-20,000Hz at +/-3dB, they are incredible speakers that don't exist for cars. If they can reproduce 600Hz-7000Hz at +/-48dB and are still marketed as "full range", they ****ing suck, and you'll know you were ripped off the moment you switch the system on.

Point G. There have been a few 'studies' of varying credibility and relevance into whether frequencies above or below what you can hear affect the character of the sounds you do hear. Maybe you care that things sound more "natural". Maybe you don't.

The most important factor is Point 12. The wider the range of all your equipment with the least dB variation and the lowest THD from your amps, the more awesomeness, and the more headroom you have to adjust equalisation to your preferences & the acoustics of the installed environment.

the_more_you_know.jpeg


*And before any audio nuts start berating my Massive Over-Simplifying of Things, I've intentionally only approached this from a Typical Consumer point-of-view based on thread content thus far. :pat:
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This. I've been in the car audio game for about 15 years. 99.99999999% of what they say is complete and utter bull****. 100% marketing, and they ALL rate their amps differently. The newer CES power ratings are interesting, but nobody that makes any real power with their amps uses that spec. Speakers are all over the place, especially subwoofers. Frquency response is 80% dependant on the enclosure (box, door, trunk, whatever), and the room (cabin of your car). The other 20% is the actual materials science of the driver. Magnet weight means absolutely nothing. NOTHING. But damn do they love to show off dem big ass magnets. I'll take tiny ass neo magnet drivers any day of the week. Power handling (usually thermal capacity) also bull****, and subjective to the parameters above. Overall quality of almost the entire industry has gone down the absolute ****ter in the past decade. SO many high end audio companies have eiher gone under, or left the US market. US Amps got bought, MB Quart has been bought a couple times. Eclipse and Panasonic left the US market. The US consumer demands cheap junk these days, brought on by the big box retails.


I've learned this hobby is not only incredibly subjective, but there's very, very little science applied to product selection or installation. It really, really makes me wish I would have taken a HS physics class, as I could've built **** that was SO much louder and better sounding when I was younger, rather than learning from experience and others who DID understand the physics of sound.
 
so when brahs turn up the heat for all the bitchez to hear, they are literally playing tunes for the bitches
i cant hear anything anymore after all these years with my routers. 12k to 20k in my ear is dead

so me assuming it was all the same shiz, was assuming right?
 
I lost it just before 17kHz. I still prefer my tweeters to go well above what I can hear, having a safety factor is quite nice. Usually a brand that can hit higher frequencies also has other things done right that you can hear.
 
kendogg said:
This. I've been in the car audio game for about 15 years. 99.99999999% of what they say is complete and utter bull****. 100% marketing, and they ALL rate their amps differently. The newer CES power ratings are interesting, but nobody that makes any real power with their amps uses that spec. Speakers are all over the place, especially subwoofers. Frquency response is 80% dependant on the enclosure (box, door, trunk, whatever), and the room (cabin of your car). The other 20% is the actual materials science of the driver. Magnet weight means absolutely nothing. NOTHING. But damn do they love to show off dem big ass magnets. I'll take tiny ass neo magnet drivers any day of the week. Power handling (usually thermal capacity) also bull****, and subjective to the parameters above. Overall quality of almost the entire industry has gone down the absolute ****ter in the past decade. SO many high end audio companies have eiher gone under, or left the US market. US Amps got bought, MB Quart has been bought a couple times. Eclipse and Panasonic left the US market. The US consumer demands cheap junk these days, brought on by the big box retails.


I've learned this hobby is not only incredibly subjective, but there's very, very little science applied to product selection or installation. It really, really makes me wish I would have taken a HS physics class, as I could've built **** that was SO much louder and better sounding when I was younger, rather than learning from experience and others who DID understand the physics of sound.
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All of these things are true. That's the reason I largely got fed up and stopped caring so much. The audio magazines make me want to rage so bad. I think I'm more than happy with the DIY speakers I built or some vintage McIntosh gear.
 
84 Blue 240 said:
All of these things are true. That's the reason I largely got fed up and stopped caring so much. The audio magazines make me want to rage so bad. I think I'm more than happy with the DIY speakers I built or some vintage McIntosh gear.
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Oh my My daily is my 328ti. Front components- Tang Band ceramic chambered tweeters I build fiberglass pods for in my A-pillars, $5/each Peerless 5" mids, overstock from parts Express, ran active off my Clarion HU (forget the model# right now). Total cost: $48. I could definitely use more volume from the mids, but I'm not too inclined to replace them. They're getting 75w/RMS each from a Cadence TXA-3002, and I really don't think they can take anymore. The tweeters can scream if I want them too, and they're ran off the HU crossed at I think 2200 Hz.
 
smokeyfan1000 said:
Take the test. see if you can even hear 20,000 hz. *YOU CAN'T*.........:rofl::nod::-P

Most males cannot hear past @ 15,000 Hz
Females to @ 17,000 Hz.

^^That is the point of this thread....................................why buy speakers that reproduce a range of sound on the high end of the Hz spectrum *THAT YOU CANNOT EVEN HEAR?

But your dog can hear past 20,000 Hz. maybe you bought those speakers for your dog?

My point is: buy speakers that reproduce say 30Hz to 17,500 Hz. It's all you can *HEAR*
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BS,

I can hear 18.000 Hz,

but anyways, it is better to have speakers that go above that, because some audiofile will have that kind of range, if they send it to your 17kHz speakers, they will distort it
 
84 Blue 240 said:
All of these things are true. That's the reason I largely got fed up and stopped caring so much. The audio magazines make me want to rage so bad. I think I'm more than happy with the DIY speakers I built or some vintage McIntosh gear.
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Selling car audio when you actually know about physics was just awful.
Oh this amp has a bass boost knob? I'll put two of them on my amp and DOUBLE THE POWER! (true story)
My geo metro keeps dying from a dead battery after I installed 3 15s. Do you think if I add another cap that it will fix it? (true story).
Yo my buddy has a set of ____ that **** hits way harder than anything else.
Back in the day it was all about ____ that was the best stuff you could buy. Are they still good?
 
CAPT_BLOTTO said:
Selling car audio when you actually know about physics was just awful.
Oh this amp has a bass boost knob? I'll put two of them on my amp and DOUBLE THE POWER! (true story)
My geo metro keeps dying from a dead battery after I installed 3 15s. Do you think if I add another cap that it will fix it? (true story).
Yo my buddy has a set of ____ that **** hits way harder than anything else.
Back in the day it was all about ____ that was the best stuff you could buy. Are they still good?
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Oh dear god, you've lived a day or 2 in my life, haven't you?
 
84 Blue 240 said:
facepalm... It's amazing how bad it has gotten. That said, there is still some great stuff out there, you just have to know where to look.
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Exactly. Lots of great stuff from some of the online-only brands that have sprung up too.

CAPT_BLOTTO said:
3 and a half years of selling car audio. There's a lot of stories I have.
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Oh god, I'm sorry. I worked in car audio at Best Buy when I was 18 for about 7 months. Then worked for BSW (www.bavsound.com) for about 8 months. BSW wasn't so bad, it's just crazy how turned-off a majority of BMW people are by stuff thats NOT plug-n-play. And thats anything - speakers, ECU's, HID kits....
 
Therein lies the problem. In order to make it sound good, you can't expect to just drop it in. For the wussies who don't want to get their hands dirty, they expect a full drop in engineered replacement system. Most of the time, simple treatments (deadening, processing, tuning, aiming) will make a bigger impact than replacing components left and right.
 
stylngle2003 said:
Therein lies the problem. In order to make it sound good, you can't expect to just drop it in. For the wussies who don't want to get their hands dirty, they expect a full drop in engineered replacement system. Most of the time, simple treatments (deadening, processing, tuning, aiming) will make a bigger impact than replacing components left and right.
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Yup. I'll take a couple pictures of my A-pillars tonight. Spent a week with the tweeters and velcro moving them around to see where they sounded best. WAY better than the worthless mid-door locations they put them in from the factory.
 
Im in the process of mocking pillars for my Tahoe. Lots of time with wadded up towels and tshirts lol.

"Sounds like the sound is coming from my feet" because it is. Polk ISTS tweeters will go off axis facing each other in the upper pillars, playing from 8K up, and Tang Band bamboo midrangers will play from the midbass transition (800, though they could play higher) and will roll off naturally around 8-10k on axis. If I were made of money, HAT L3SEs would play the part of both drivers that make up the top end, but alas... :)
 
I went through all this back before I was worried about converting my music collection to MP3. The human hearing spectrum is up to 20khz but the disclaimer is that less than 5% of humans can hear it. All I know is that I could clearly hear the 16khz flyback transformers in CRT televisions before they went obsolete.

So then I learned that high bitrate MP3 files are relatively faithful up to about 18khz, so I recorded some samples back to back with the samples direct from CD, and that's when I learned that even in a super quiet room with decent quality (consumer grade) stereo equipment I can't tell the difference, so my threshold must be below 18khz. And I'm perfectly happy with the sound quality out of my average stuff, so I converted everything over. I still get complements on how good my car stereos sound, so yeah I'm not missing those last 2khz, and I must be dialing it in right.
 
LloydDobler said:
I went through all this back before I was worried about converting my music collection to MP3. The human hearing spectrum is up to 20khz but the disclaimer is that less than 5% of humans can hear it. All I know is that I could clearly hear the 16khz flyback transformers in CRT televisions before they went obsolete.

So then I learned that high bitrate MP3 files are relatively faithful up to about 18khz, so I recorded some samples back to back with the samples direct from CD, and that's when I learned that even in a super quiet room with decent quality (consumer grade) stereo equipment I can't tell the difference, so my threshold must be below 18khz. And I'm perfectly happy with the sound quality out of my average stuff, so I converted everything over. I still get complements on how good my car stereos sound, so yeah I'm not missing those last 2khz, and I must be dialing it in right.
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For me, the biggst MP3 issues have always been a lower overall 'volume' - ALL of my lossless stuff, at max volume, is significantly louder. I'm a guy that listens to a 140+ db stereo daily, and has for a decade or more. The other issue has always been the total dynamic transients - MP3's ahve always sounded 'flatter', because they are. Part of the compression strategy is reducing the overal sine wave peaks. Unfortunately, I can tell. It's not an issue of total frequency range.
 
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