So what we have here is the electrical representation of the curve that comes from Ford and Sony on the factory radio.
I had a guy send me a PM to ask me something and it sparked a moment that I thought I would share.
There are two ways to obtain a curve from your system. One is moderately more expensive than the other.
The electrical way and the microphone way.
The electrical way is picking up the signal from the signal line and taking a measurement. Using the microphone actually picks up what is being heard and taking into account the acoustics of the vehicle.
It has been said many times here that someone bought a replacement set of speakers installed them and suddenly they had better sound.
That is a perceptual problem. As I have said many times, sound is a very personal thing and more so an emotional thing and it affects each person differently and then some are more qualified to hear than others.
If you are one of those people who bought aftermarket speakers and installed in place of your factory speakers and turned it on and said, WOW, I have better sound. You got dooped.
In addition, after you listen to something for about 20 minutes your brain takes over and does a lot of correction for you internally. That is a much longer conversation.
As I said in my PM, I would take a factory tuned system with factory speakers over a factory tuned system with speakers added after the fact every day of the week and twice on Sunday. All you got by replacing your factory speakers without a retune was more volume and now a system more out of tune than the factory system. Period.
THE PROBLEM:
When speakers are made even though they are made in the same factory, under the same conditions did you realize that the electrical parameters of each driver is different from one to the next? I'm talking about the Thiele/Small Parameters.
Yep, that means the Focal speakers you paid 800-1000 for, 99% of the time, they are not a matched set out of the box. BELIEVE IT.
If you know someone, or are competing in sound quality events for the company, you can ask for a matched set and even then they are only getting it really close. You will never ever get a 100% matched set. The way more expensive sets like $1500-$3500 most of the time are matched sets. This is not the case with high end home audio. You will never get a 100% matched set, but with home audio it is more important because most people don't tune their home stuff.
Why do we care? its a thing called balancing (Left and Right) and imaging (Placement on the sound stage) and staging (Position of the sound stage) and spectral balance(How all of the frequencies are balanced independently and with each other).
The closer the speakers are to each other electrically the easier it is and less tuning required to get the car to sound right.
Now, take what you were given from Ford and Sony. The speakers as we know are crap, but the crap speakers had over a million dollars of equipment and time spent tuning them for your environment. That means, those tweeters in the doors, why if unblocked sound like they are playing from the dash and the vocals coming from the lower part of the door sound like they are coming from the top of the dash. (HELPFUL HINT), Play something with a lot of detail. Turn the volume down, lay the seat back to where the headrest is in alignment with the b pillar and listen. Keep your legs in the center not laying on the door and don't block the tweeter. Everything will appear to be coming from the dash. Everything I mentioned above balancing (Left and Right) and imaging (Placement on the sound stage) and staging (Position of the sound stage) and spectral balance plays a role in getting it to do that in addition to tuning the system.
TOO MUCH TUNING CAN BE BAD:
The more tuning you have to do, the more you move away from the best sound possible. You want the speakers to match electrically as close as possible. There is software and hardware out there to test it, you can buy it a Madisound.com.
If you over tune you could be adding information there that was not in the original recording, which is what were trying to do here. You want to reproduce the original recording as close as possible.
CAN VOLUME AFFECT TUNING:
Yes, as volume goes up and down the tuning changes. This is what Linear equality is. If tuned correctly and this part is more corrected by properly matching the amp and head unit signal wise, your system will stay with the same tune regardless of volume. For example have you ever noticed in some systems that the more volume you get the more bass you get out of proportion to everything else? Or more midrange or more highs? Remember balance is key. Everything needs to be balanced with everything else as the volume moves up and down.
The more the speakers electrically match each other the easier it is to get it to do that.
THE CURVE:
When you look at that curve in the above attachment, Ford and Sony said, we need lots of low end, (because it is those frequencies that excite us the most) and we need lots of midrange, and some upper end highs to improve the ambiance (Make the environment sound larger).
That curve represents the acoustical curve of the vehicle picked up through the signal not played through the factory speakers. The curve played through the factory speakers would look a little different.
The electrical parameters of the factory speakers are no where near what the aftermarket speakers are.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
It means if you just replace the factory speakers and don't retune to compensate for the electrical values of the speakers and the acoustics of the environment you have made the sound worse not better. All you get with replacing the factory speakers on a factory tune is more volume and an unturned system. Your not listening to the music as it was recorded. There is nothing wrong with taking an original recording and playing it louder. But regardless if you are listening to a recording from an album (Which are making a comeback, go figure), or CD, or Cassette, or DAT, you can get to the original recording thought with the cassette you have to take into account the azimuth (probably a mute point at this time), but Nakamichi thought it was important enough to make all of their cassette decks with an azimuth adjustment, that allowed the user with a knob to change the alignment of the playback head to improve the quality. NOT A GIMMIC.
WHAT ABOUT THE SUBWOODER YOU ADDED?
You took the factory signal and made it much louder in a specific frequency range. THATS IT.
Yes you have more bass than the factory system, but you added it now to an untuned environment and just made a bad thing worse.
Your actually better off adding an amp to the front and back, and letting the amp get its signal from the head unit. Your still not right, but in theory all you did was add volume to the factory signal but the tune will be more correct for the speakers than if you add aftermarket speakers. You will have some linear drift because the amp doesn't really match the head unit but you can get it close.
TUNING:
When tuning, and thinking about speakers that don't match electrically, you need a left and right 31 band EQ. When you take a microphone (THE BEST WAY TO TUNE) because the mic takes into account the environment (reflections, sound absorbing materials, etc) fading to left and right and doing a pink noise test, your left curve and right curve will almost all the time be different because the electrical values of the drivers are different.
This is not an elitist snob attitude thing. This is scientific fact.
I said to the guy in my PM, most people don't know what good sound is. How can I say that? Well.....having had two successful audio shops and judged audio sound quality competitions for over 12 years, allowed me to meet and listen to a lot of stuff. Its like buying Palmer chocolate at Easter, and thinking this is the best chocolate ever, you have never had any other chocolate. Then one day, someone gives you Hersheys chocolate and you think man what have I been missing, then later someone gives you Godiva chocolate, and then later you get Ghirardelli, you eat that for a while and think there is nothing better, then comes along someone with Lindt and your world has been turned upside down. There can not possibly be anything better, you go out of your living area to another part of the world, and someone gives you Ferrero Rocher. You could go ahead and die.
Obviously everyone's taste buds are different, and so are your ears, but one thing I learned through judging audio competitions with other judges. When you are listen to the mediocre stuff, there is a wide range of opinions. So in my example somewhere between Hershey's and Godiva, lots of opinions, meaning multiple scores from multiple judges on the same vehicle would vary about 15-20% but when you listen to something exceptional, you could take the score sheets of all the judges that listened to the exceptional cars, and the scores were within 1% of each other. I have judged over 1000 sound systems in cars and of those 1000 or so, I can tell you there were 25 that I listed at one point that I considered to be great, and of those 25 there were 5 that I considered to be exceptional and 2 that I considered to be better than anything else available at the time. Those 25, 5, show up on everyone's list. which means the other 975 or so, needed help.
What that means is what is really good is really good to everyone who hears it whether your trained or not. Until you have been exposed to what sounds good, you really don't know. And I believe there is still yet stuff that is better than what I have heard to be found.
In conclusion, replacing the factory speakers without retuning the system makes your Fiesta ST sound better.....FICTION.
I just dropped 8K moving from Raleigh to Spokane WA. My install is on hold until November or middle of December. I am still doing the Morel thing and the Alpine thing and I will help anyone at no charge to tune their system and can do it without ever listening to the vehicle and get it to within 95% of where it needs to be.
I had a guy send me a PM to ask me something and it sparked a moment that I thought I would share.
There are two ways to obtain a curve from your system. One is moderately more expensive than the other.
The electrical way and the microphone way.
The electrical way is picking up the signal from the signal line and taking a measurement. Using the microphone actually picks up what is being heard and taking into account the acoustics of the vehicle.
It has been said many times here that someone bought a replacement set of speakers installed them and suddenly they had better sound.
That is a perceptual problem. As I have said many times, sound is a very personal thing and more so an emotional thing and it affects each person differently and then some are more qualified to hear than others.
If you are one of those people who bought aftermarket speakers and installed in place of your factory speakers and turned it on and said, WOW, I have better sound. You got dooped.
In addition, after you listen to something for about 20 minutes your brain takes over and does a lot of correction for you internally. That is a much longer conversation.
As I said in my PM, I would take a factory tuned system with factory speakers over a factory tuned system with speakers added after the fact every day of the week and twice on Sunday. All you got by replacing your factory speakers without a retune was more volume and now a system more out of tune than the factory system. Period.
THE PROBLEM:
When speakers are made even though they are made in the same factory, under the same conditions did you realize that the electrical parameters of each driver is different from one to the next? I'm talking about the Thiele/Small Parameters.
Yep, that means the Focal speakers you paid 800-1000 for, 99% of the time, they are not a matched set out of the box. BELIEVE IT.
If you know someone, or are competing in sound quality events for the company, you can ask for a matched set and even then they are only getting it really close. You will never ever get a 100% matched set. The way more expensive sets like $1500-$3500 most of the time are matched sets. This is not the case with high end home audio. You will never get a 100% matched set, but with home audio it is more important because most people don't tune their home stuff.
Why do we care? its a thing called balancing (Left and Right) and imaging (Placement on the sound stage) and staging (Position of the sound stage) and spectral balance(How all of the frequencies are balanced independently and with each other).
The closer the speakers are to each other electrically the easier it is and less tuning required to get the car to sound right.
Now, take what you were given from Ford and Sony. The speakers as we know are crap, but the crap speakers had over a million dollars of equipment and time spent tuning them for your environment. That means, those tweeters in the doors, why if unblocked sound like they are playing from the dash and the vocals coming from the lower part of the door sound like they are coming from the top of the dash. (HELPFUL HINT), Play something with a lot of detail. Turn the volume down, lay the seat back to where the headrest is in alignment with the b pillar and listen. Keep your legs in the center not laying on the door and don't block the tweeter. Everything will appear to be coming from the dash. Everything I mentioned above balancing (Left and Right) and imaging (Placement on the sound stage) and staging (Position of the sound stage) and spectral balance plays a role in getting it to do that in addition to tuning the system.
TOO MUCH TUNING CAN BE BAD:
The more tuning you have to do, the more you move away from the best sound possible. You want the speakers to match electrically as close as possible. There is software and hardware out there to test it, you can buy it a Madisound.com.
If you over tune you could be adding information there that was not in the original recording, which is what were trying to do here. You want to reproduce the original recording as close as possible.
CAN VOLUME AFFECT TUNING:
Yes, as volume goes up and down the tuning changes. This is what Linear equality is. If tuned correctly and this part is more corrected by properly matching the amp and head unit signal wise, your system will stay with the same tune regardless of volume. For example have you ever noticed in some systems that the more volume you get the more bass you get out of proportion to everything else? Or more midrange or more highs? Remember balance is key. Everything needs to be balanced with everything else as the volume moves up and down.
The more the speakers electrically match each other the easier it is to get it to do that.
THE CURVE:
When you look at that curve in the above attachment, Ford and Sony said, we need lots of low end, (because it is those frequencies that excite us the most) and we need lots of midrange, and some upper end highs to improve the ambiance (Make the environment sound larger).
That curve represents the acoustical curve of the vehicle picked up through the signal not played through the factory speakers. The curve played through the factory speakers would look a little different.
The electrical parameters of the factory speakers are no where near what the aftermarket speakers are.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
It means if you just replace the factory speakers and don't retune to compensate for the electrical values of the speakers and the acoustics of the environment you have made the sound worse not better. All you get with replacing the factory speakers on a factory tune is more volume and an unturned system. Your not listening to the music as it was recorded. There is nothing wrong with taking an original recording and playing it louder. But regardless if you are listening to a recording from an album (Which are making a comeback, go figure), or CD, or Cassette, or DAT, you can get to the original recording thought with the cassette you have to take into account the azimuth (probably a mute point at this time), but Nakamichi thought it was important enough to make all of their cassette decks with an azimuth adjustment, that allowed the user with a knob to change the alignment of the playback head to improve the quality. NOT A GIMMIC.
WHAT ABOUT THE SUBWOODER YOU ADDED?
You took the factory signal and made it much louder in a specific frequency range. THATS IT.
Yes you have more bass than the factory system, but you added it now to an untuned environment and just made a bad thing worse.
Your actually better off adding an amp to the front and back, and letting the amp get its signal from the head unit. Your still not right, but in theory all you did was add volume to the factory signal but the tune will be more correct for the speakers than if you add aftermarket speakers. You will have some linear drift because the amp doesn't really match the head unit but you can get it close.
TUNING:
When tuning, and thinking about speakers that don't match electrically, you need a left and right 31 band EQ. When you take a microphone (THE BEST WAY TO TUNE) because the mic takes into account the environment (reflections, sound absorbing materials, etc) fading to left and right and doing a pink noise test, your left curve and right curve will almost all the time be different because the electrical values of the drivers are different.
This is not an elitist snob attitude thing. This is scientific fact.
I said to the guy in my PM, most people don't know what good sound is. How can I say that? Well.....having had two successful audio shops and judged audio sound quality competitions for over 12 years, allowed me to meet and listen to a lot of stuff. Its like buying Palmer chocolate at Easter, and thinking this is the best chocolate ever, you have never had any other chocolate. Then one day, someone gives you Hersheys chocolate and you think man what have I been missing, then later someone gives you Godiva chocolate, and then later you get Ghirardelli, you eat that for a while and think there is nothing better, then comes along someone with Lindt and your world has been turned upside down. There can not possibly be anything better, you go out of your living area to another part of the world, and someone gives you Ferrero Rocher. You could go ahead and die.
Obviously everyone's taste buds are different, and so are your ears, but one thing I learned through judging audio competitions with other judges. When you are listen to the mediocre stuff, there is a wide range of opinions. So in my example somewhere between Hershey's and Godiva, lots of opinions, meaning multiple scores from multiple judges on the same vehicle would vary about 15-20% but when you listen to something exceptional, you could take the score sheets of all the judges that listened to the exceptional cars, and the scores were within 1% of each other. I have judged over 1000 sound systems in cars and of those 1000 or so, I can tell you there were 25 that I listed at one point that I considered to be great, and of those 25 there were 5 that I considered to be exceptional and 2 that I considered to be better than anything else available at the time. Those 25, 5, show up on everyone's list. which means the other 975 or so, needed help.
What that means is what is really good is really good to everyone who hears it whether your trained or not. Until you have been exposed to what sounds good, you really don't know. And I believe there is still yet stuff that is better than what I have heard to be found.
In conclusion, replacing the factory speakers without retuning the system makes your Fiesta ST sound better.....FICTION.
I just dropped 8K moving from Raleigh to Spokane WA. My install is on hold until November or middle of December. I am still doing the Morel thing and the Alpine thing and I will help anyone at no charge to tune their system and can do it without ever listening to the vehicle and get it to within 95% of where it needs to be.