Re: What kind of system do you have? (archive)

Depends on what you want. If you are looking for sound quality, I see a couple of things as key. Those would be stereo imaging and keeping the vibrations down. First the vibrations. I don't plan on putting a stereo in my 02, but in my commuter box, I have the car almost completely covered in damping and noise reduction sheets. This includes the trunk lid since my sub is in the trunk. Now unwanted buzzing is minimized and the noise reduction stuff keeps out a lot of road noise.

The other part is imaging. You could spends tens of thousands of dollars on stereo equipment and still have a system that can't 'image'. For different people this may mean different things. But for me this means, the music performers sound like they are on a stage in your car (get it right and you could have a singer out on your hood and a guitar player in your passenger side mirror:) The 'stage' should be high, wide, deep and centered. A lot of stuff plays into creating the illusion, but by far the most important is speaker placement and aiming.

First a prelude: High frequencies are directional, or you can tell where they come from. So you wan't to limit the high frequencies that are eminating behind you. Ideally, your sub would have a filter on its input cutting out the high frequencies and personally I don't use rear speakers since this muddies the image.

So that brings us back to the front speakers. Getting the speakers as far away from you as possible will help equalize the path distance between you and any two speakers. Imagine if you will having you speakers up high in the doors. Your left speaker is an 2 feet away and the right is 5. Now if you put those same speakers down in the kick panels, the left is now 5 feet away from the center of you forehead and the right is maybe 7.5 From this rough illustration you can see that further you get the speakers away, the more even the distance from you head becomes. It takes longer for the right speakers sound to arrive than the left. Do whatever you can to minimize the difference.
Aiming is last thing I'll rant on about. If you go through all that trouble to get the speakers further away from you and then aim them under your seat, your missing gonna wonder why your 'stage' is so low. I aimed at the roof between the two headrests (you will have to play around and test out different aiming). The tweeter is the most directional speaker. So spend the most time equalizing the distances for the tweeters and their aiming. In my commuter car, I have the tweeters in the kick panels but the mids are in the doors. This is not ideal, but the sound is good.

So to summize what I am trying to get across - buzzing is annoying, enough that it is degrades the sound and expensive stereo equipment isn't as important as planning and execution for a good setup.

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