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In Reply to: Premium sound system posted by nathan on September 01, 1999 at 17:01:35:
: For all you out there looking for an awesome sound system in your car, the premium stereo option is great.
I'd agree with good. But certainly not great!
For those who are looking for the studio perfect sound, stay at home, because there is one thing that the car stereo will always find itself short in, low distortion. This fact is true,
Not in your wildest dreams, bucko.
and being a fine audiophile, I find that car audio will never sound as good as the stereo at home, and updating your stereo for thousands of dollars for your car is only worth it to you if you practically live in your car.
An interesting "fact" is that, in a consumer survey done a few years ago, the vast majority of people (somewhere around 87%) admitted that they spent, on average, three times as many hours listening to music in the car vs. in the home. I for one, commute on the average 2-1/2 hours per day, and the stereo is on every second. I certainly do not spend 2-1/2 hours a day at home using my FAR more expensive home theater/audio system. I'd say that the enjoyment received vs. expense is hands down in favor of the car system. Besides, its the only chance I get to listen to what I want, as loud as I want, and without interruption. (I keep the Cell phone OFF - this is MY time!) Those 6-hour trips to visit my Mom in NJ sure would seem long without the system too. And sure, my Apogee ribbons at home sound better than the stuff in the car, but that doesn't mean the car system shouldn't sound as good as is practical. I'm not advocating the science-project installations like you see at sound-offs, but a bit og rational upgrading can add a lot of enjoyment to the driving experience.
For those who would like to fight about this issue, please consider the voltage drop in the car with a car battery, while at home, which you probably use a receiver or separate amps for a total voltage drop of nearly 120V. This difference gives a greater potential for distortion, meaning the distortion you find in your car will always be higher.
You know, my Circuits 1 professor always used to chastise his students when they made inaccurate statements with "It's Ohm's LAW, Not Ohm's OPINION, Dammit!" I think that is appropriate here. The 120V vs 12V argument holds no merit whatsoever. The actual circuitry doing the signal amplification runs on neither. In fact, an audio engineer's wet dream would be to be able to convince people to use batteries in their home systems since this would eliminate Hum problems. The circuits in any high power amp, whether it be car or home, run on a power supply appropriate for the power the am is designed to deliver. Typically this internal supply will have no relationship to a particular value of input voltage. In home equipment, a step-down transformer is used to drop the voltage to a useful level. For example, a typical 50 watt power amp will have internal voltages of (approx) + and - 30V. (Thats right, two mirror imaged supply voltages) In a car amp these same voltages must be present also. The only difference is that the car amp uses a DC-to-DC switch-mode power supply to increase the voltage from the 12V. The difference is that in the home amp you start with lots of voltage, but very little current wheras in the car amp you have less voltage, but it draws a lot more current to deliver the same power. Now this only affects how the circuit is powered and wired and has absolutely NOTHING to do with any audio characteristics whatsoever.
The fact that everybody in this newsgroup is discussing the stereo being sucky, please consider buying a home stereo and listening to that at home.
Well, yeah. Do that too! ;-)
As far as the bass with all those bass nuts out there, your car is the worst place to hear bass. Because of the small enclosure of the car body, wavelengths of truer bass models are in the double digit hertz, or even the teens, which take 50 to 60 feet to actually get a high amplitude in the wave.
You're right about wave propigation theory, I'm afraid I must differ with the conclusion however. In a small space, where the wavelength exceeds the largest room dimension, the bass transmitted through compression and rarefaction _of the entire volume of that space_, not wave propigation. It is almost as if you are inside a cylinder with the woofer acting as the piston. In fact, at low frequencies, the coupling of the woofer to the car becomes VERY efficient, and you actually get an increase in bass response with decreasing frequency. The resulting transfer function results in a rise in response which approaches 12dB per octave below 50 Hz. Knowledgeable music loving car audio folks use this fact to help them reduce subwoofer enclosure size yet retain good bass response. Bassheads use this to get more bass (whether it's musical or not).
For the BMW 5 series, the stereo is superb for being stock and will probably deliver comparable sound to that compared to a Sony receiver you can buy at Best Buy attached to a set of normal polks, which is not bad.
You won't get an argument from me on that! But there is a lot of equipment out there which sounds far better than either of the two options you mentioned.
The fact that there are practically 14 speakers also brings the point that some people don't understand, the most speakers, the larger potential for range.
Oh no! Here we go again. "It ain't the meat, it's the motion". All that having the "most" speakers guarantee you is that you have used the "most" speaker wire and have the most holes. The theoretical ideal is a single infinitely small full range speaker. Anything beyond this opens up all sorts of problems with destructive phase interference and the search for the non-existent perfect crossover network. Fewer loudspeakers, of higher quality is the way to go. Would you prefer one BMW or 4,000 Yugo's?
In this case, the 5 inch bass drivers are plenty. Hope those who are considerring buying an upgrade, the BMW is for driving and not listening.
So this means you'll let me take your radio fuse out and you promise you'll keep it that way until you get rid of the car? I think NOT. Driving and listening are not mutually exclusive! I'll step down off my soapbox now. Sorry for the WOB, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but innacurate statements of "fact" without apparent knowledge of the subject push my buttons.
Best regards,
Bob Hazelwood
Product Manager, Cambridge SoundWorks
'93 525i 5-sp. Sharked, BL/ss'd, H&R + Bilsteins
BMW CCA (Boston)
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