The stereo in my REd car is awful. Thanks, i feel better.

Its just amazing how vastly superior the system in my blue "S" is - its a NAK/ADS (I think) system using OEM wiring that Bruce put in many moons ago. As i always find, going *to* a good system is not the test. Its whether, after living with it, you can go *back*. I can't.

Aside from obvious distortion, there's no bass, a lack of clarity, and when competing with road and wind noise its sorta like layering noise on top of noise. Not really enjoyable. With the "good" system one can drown out the noise with music.

I do have an amp in the front trunk, and it was a factory upgrade over the base model, but it is not the BOSE system. Its a CDR-23 with an amp and some apparently crummy speakers.

regrettably i dont have the time to deal with this, but over time the switcharoo will likely occur.

Grant

Grant

gee-lenahan-at-gee-mail-dot-com

I have spoken to many high-end audio retailers and the all pretty much concur that young people just don't care about high fidelity. I find this terribly sad as high fidelity can add so much enjoyment to your life and more life to the music you already listen to. How do you compete with an iPod or the Walmartification of technology? Good brands are out of business. There are no upgrade paths for average consumers. Compare this to cars: upgrading to something better is just an incremental cost away. Not so anymore with audio.

iPod: One simple, small, cool device with a gigajillion songs and really not that expensive.
Walmartification: The mass production and retailing of electronics where complex circuits can be burned into a single, terribly sounding chip for pennies, drives costs way way down. How do you convince someone to pay 5 times more for the "same thing"?

I think there is some hope in Grant's comment. Said another way, now that he experienced something better, the old good-enough-for-me, Bose-is-a-great-brand, just won't do.

The question then, is how do we spread the love? How do we get folks to hear what a really good system sounds like?

Peace
Bruce in Philly



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2013 10:34AM by Bruce In Philly (2000 S Boxster, now '09 C2S). (view changes)

The problem in truly good fidelity, whcih may not be high end, is that it is subtle. You can spend a boat-load and get low fidelity, btu very impressive sound ( at first). Turn up the mid-bass. Extend the treble. Make it louder.

One study demonstrated that in back to back comparisons people picked the louder system a huge % of the time. It sounded more dynamic. For 15 seonds.

There's the rub. You need to live with good stuff to appreciate it. When i desigend high end stuff, i encouraged, and help make it feasible, for my dealers to just send stuff home with prospective customers. Many times they never came back.

One quibble. The BOSE system in my Audi S6 is quite acceptable. Even for me. So they can be OK. I can't speak for the one in your C2.

Grant

Grant

gee-lenahan-at-gee-mail-dot-com

Yeah, the shop I used to go to, about 50 miles away, is out of business. I used to go there and get educated, both verbally and by listening to individual set-ups each in their own rooms and at different price points. One of the partners used to play violin in some Boston conservatory ensemble. They opened up on a Sunday just so I could bring a friend out who then spent about $15,000. Once, only one proprietor was there and he had to run an errand, so he left the shop to me for about an hour. Speaking of auditioning, they gave me thousands of dollars worth of speaker cable* to compare in my system at home.**
When originally setting up my present system, I listened to two "high end" power amps. (Actually one stereo, and two monoblocks.) One brand made great, and I mean great hi-fi, but the other sounded like music.
* Whether one believes the wiring to be integral to a system, the monetary value was for real.
** Yes, there was a difference. A biiig difference. (Probably attributable to the high sensitivity of the rest of the system. Otherwise much of the differences would be lost.)

I don't get the obsession with loudness either. Here, you have guys putting on aftermarket exhaust or punching holes in the muffler not for the extra HP but to make it louder. Some manufacturers are actually piping engine sound into the passenger compartment. Then you have guys here who are working on ultra gonzo LOUD stereos, not ultra hi-fi stereos. Presumably they are trying to overcome the LOUD exhaust. Not only do I not get it, it's going to have consequences later on. Hearing loss is cumulative and you don't get it back. In 20 years these people are going to be stone deaf. I never abused my ears much in my younger days and still have slight hearing loss. I soundproofed my car so I could enjoy both the engine and the stereo and still talk to my wife without further ruining my ears.

Even with soundproofing to the point of causing significant degradation of the auditory connectedness to the vehicle and road, the noise floor would likely still be high enough to warrant "upward" compression of the musical signal. This one factor alone is reason enough to know "high-fidelity" in a car can never get close to that of a home system. Especially in a moving vehicle, let alone a Porsche flat six merely idling, one will never be able to hear the proper dynamic range of, for example, Tchaikovsky's Sixth as intended by the composer.

Then there's sound stage depth; imaging...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/15/2013 01:54AM by Laz. (view changes)

There is a psycho-acoustic phenomenon associated with brief listening periods that makes it almost impossible, even for the most golden eared among us, to overcome the lure of slightly higher volume, especially when its small enough that we can't identify it overtly. Dynamics appear greater. The signal-to-background noise level is, in fact, legitimately higher. Bass has more impact. Its well documented that highs and lows are detected less at low volumes - this was the original reason for the "loudness" button - to perceptively flatten response at background levels. Subsequently abused. Those with gray hair may recall Yamaha's loudness control, which was an infinite (or seemingly) set of curves and you turned down the volume, using this knob, and got a different eq at each level. Kinda cool.

Only with extended listening can you reset your immediate perceptions and listen to the music.

So, my point is that its not a senseless, ill-informed per-occupation with volume. Its bio-chemistry, acoustics, real acrostics (background noise etc) that make this so. Its still invalid and trickery, but we can all fall for it.

Cars are a unique environment for this very reason. They are noisy. They have very non-linear EQ curves. And due to spacing and physical layout, the distance from your ear to the tweeter, mid and sub must be different - and thus ill-phased. The BOSE idea is right, whether its implemented with quality or not is another issue.

Juts for fun i audited Dr. Bose' class when i was at MIT.

Grant

Grant

gee-lenahan-at-gee-mail-dot-com

It was "off" all the way clockwise.


And here's a Fletcher-Munson graph:


Never bought into Bose's original multi-transducer speaker idea: seemed like an imaging/soundstage/phase nightmare to me.

its basically a reverse eq and time-domain graph of the car's interior acoustics.

Yea, the 901 and x01 were pretty lame speakers.

Grant

Grant

gee-lenahan-at-gee-mail-dot-com

Quote
paulwdenton
Presumably they are trying to overcome the LOUD exhaust. Not only do I not get it, it's going to have consequences later on. Hearing loss is cumulative and you don't get it back. In 20 years these people are going to be stone deaf. I never abused my ears much in my younger days and still have slight hearing loss. I soundproofed my car so I could enjoy both the engine and the stereo and still talk to my wife without further ruining my ears.

No problem - Uncle Sam's Air Force and jet engines already destroyed my hearing many years ago.

Compressed dynamics so everything is "loud" all the time. So much for that quality of music, let alone "microdynamics," the subtle change from one level to slightly more or less. Now, instead of there being a readily available range of reproduction equipment from terrible to transcendently faithful, everyone can achieve, in the literal sense, mediocrity. Hey, it don't matter!

Unfortunalely, that seems to be the value system these days. Quantity is more important than quality. Make it cheap, but give me lots of it.