View attachment 14047
This chart shows why a "tuned" system will still sound like garbage to many........why they go straight to the equalizer and why we even have them. The answer is so after you spends the thousands to "fix" your system you can make it sound good to you. I have had my hearing tested and it differs from the chart shown due to way too many VERY loud concerts. Question, do you listen to your music with your ears or someone else's. I use my own and could care less how it sounds to others ears. For example....I am 65 years old and have NORMAL hearing for my age. Which means a system "tuned" flat will sound dead and lifeless to me. Just to get close to normal levels for the high frequencies to sound good to me my equalizer will be highly boasted on the high end.
The only changes I will be making in the long run is more efficient speakers and metal dome tweeters. Why more efficient speakers over more power? Money! Buy an amp and have it installed? Not me. I looked at some of the available common 6 1/2" coax speakers and saw that two different brands showed widely differing efficiency numbers as expected. Same price but one has an SPL output of 88dB for 1 Watt in and the other has an 94 dB rating for 1 Watt in. This is 6 dB, what does that mean? Each 3 dB increase in sound requires a doubling of power. Our 88dB speaker will take 2 watts to reach 91dB and 4 Watts to reach 94 dB. In this case the 88dB speaker will take FOUR times the power to sound as loud as the 94dB speakers. So, new amp or more efficient speakers for a louder volume? Better speakers for me. I have no clue what any specs are on the factory speakers are, but my experience is that most quality 6 1/2 cones are similar in response enough that the difference would not be so drastic it would make for a bad sound. You do have some adjustments to compensate.
In short the answer is yes you can improve your factory system without spending more than $200. If you need more bass then put the $200 towards an under seat powered sub. $400 maybe both. Will it be perfect? No, but then I did not buy my ST for a listening room, I have that at home. And at home all the equipment was built and tested to have a reasonably flat response.....but I can assure you it is not "tuned" to flat. The bass is boosted slightly because my music sounds better with a little drive in the bass. And the highs are boosted in both the preamp and the speaker system to compensate for my hearing losses. And that will also apply to my car. The ultimate judge for what sounds good to you is YOU! However if you have the $$ to spend thousands go for it! Lots of good advise of how to go about it on the Forum along with sound deadening.
You know, I dont know you personally, but I always appreciate others opinions. It makes things educational for their to be debate. I want to take a minute and respond to some things you have said here from someone else who has experience. Now to be fair, I have said what that was in the past, and I want to clarify not so much to toot my own horn but for those who are listening to understand why I say what I say and how I am backing that up and not knowing you, it is possible that you have similar experience, and if you do, it makes this conversation all the more interesting. If you dont, then it helps so that others fully understand what your saying and why it is not so. I have been involved in high end audio for over 25 years. That includes, Competing with a $100,000 sound system in a car, Judging Sound Quality for over 15 years, Owning not 1 but 2 audio stores, one was dedicated to car, the other car and high end home theater with average installs over $50,000 and being written up in both domestic and international audio magazines and tuned more than 10 cars that have taken 1st place on a national level in sound quality. So not as much experience as some but more than others.
So a little out of order, but first, Who wants a flat curved system? Why does everyone keep bringing that up? And while this may not be directed at anything I have said personally, not one time have I said you need to make your system flat as the end result. Every car is different and in fact what the factory is doing when they tune a car for a factory system, is tuning the car for the acoustics of the cavity aka the interior of the vehicle. The Fiesta like any other car has its own acoustic signature which is affected by the car, and the components that make up the interior of the car, aka the seats, carpet, dash, glass, headliner, everything. This acoustic signature also changes when there is one body in the car and then again when a second body is in the car, and so on. The factory system is tuned with a set of speakers that have their own properties. They are called Theil Small Parameters. I am not going to get into all of the specifics, but if you are interested you can purchase a book called the Loudspeaker Cookbook. You can buy it on Amazon. If you take the factory speakers out of the car, and replace them with anything other than the factory speakers, the new speakers will have a different set of parameters. These parameters, will cause the speaker to behave differently than the factory speakers, and thus the tuning done by the factory will be applied differently thus affecting the sound curve correction for the acoustics in the Fiesta. AKA OUT OF TUNE.
If you want to keep the factory system, and replace the speakers, 100% of the time the speakers you replace the factory speakers with will be more efficient and thus for every watt played out of the amp, the new speakers will play louder, and thus sound perceptively better. Loud is not better. Loud is louder. If you are deaf, then I guess louder would be better. Now lets go to your graph. The human ear, with all things considered equal, most people can hear with perfect hearing up to about 15K some even can perceive up to 17K. The audio spectrum that we consider to be the cats meow, is between 20 hertz and 20K hertz. Sub level to highs. 99% of what we are listening to is what is considered to be useable music is between hertz and about 5K. Everything above 5K is really staring to be perceived as ambiance. If your curious, Its the difference between what it sounds like in a quiet closet about 3 ft by 3 ft square (everything between 6K and 8K and a 40 x 40 ft living room which would be 10K to 20K). Look a the graph. Every line drops off at about 2K and the older you get the more that drops off. So that means that everything from 20 Hertz up to 2K other than overall volume levels is good to go even as you age. So that means you are capable, considering all things equal, of deciphering the difference between what does and what does not sound good. Everything I have said all along is if you dont know what sounds good, then any improvement to you(not your personally) would sound better than what you had. But that better does not mean it is the best you can have. Now if your deaf or have hearing problems of course, you may not like the sound the way I like it, and I want to clarify, it is not about what I like, or what others like, it is about listening to the music the way the artist intended for it to be heard when it is reproduced. From an acoustical engineering perspective, if what you were saying were true and for that fact this nonsense about just taking more efficient speakers and putting them in your car, makes it better, then you could buy any speaker and just sit it on the rear desk and hook it and put power it in any car, and it would sound great as long as they were more efficient. That is the most out of the this world statement I have ever heard. And in fact NO TRUE.
Yes, you add more bass to your car, buy adding a subwoofer. Yes you can make your system play louder buy buying more efficient speakers. And if that is all you are trying to accomplish, that is very easy to do. But in my opinion, it is a waste of time and energy. You might as well just get you a boom box as they were and put it in the back seat. It is the same thing. I am trying to help those who want to be educated and have the opportunity to hear something they have never experienced. Those that would say, they can just upgrade the speakers and it sounds better are the same people who could but a bicycle and put a motor on it and call it a performance bike. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in a dedicated home listening room and never get the experience possible in a vehicle for the simple fact that the vehicle can be the perfect listening room because it is small and confined. It is personal and when added to a car with a performance engine, you now get the best of both worlds. Until you have had a system like that in your car, I don't believe you can make those kind of comments. It is life changing experience. And I can tell you after selling, installing, judging, these kinds of systems, once you have heard one, you cant ever do without it. I have a very modest sound system in my home. Paid of Klipsch towers, pair of 12" Klipsch powered subs. The system as you will see shortly in the Fiesta is 100 times more advanced than what I have in the home. Why, in my lifetime I will spend more than 1/2 of my life in a car, than I will in the home and When on a road trip I cant take the home system with me.
Now lastly. The whole flat thing. If you are going to keep the factory system and you want to upgrade the factory speakers, you have to retune the system. When you replace the speakers the tune made by Sony is still intact. I know because I replaced the factory radio, and left the factory speakers as the first step of my upgrade and the system should have gone flat but it didnt. That means there is an external box outside of the radio that the tune is coming from and I suspect it is behind the glove box. My system got louder with the factory speakers, why, the amp in the radio is more powerful than the amp in the factory radio. The system still images just like it did, it is just louder. That is not the same as swapping out the speakers and keeping the factory radio. I did not change the acoustic properties of the speakers and they way they perform, I just gave the more juice.
Moving on......So, If you replace the speakers thus changing the acoustic properties of what the tune is based off of, you have to put the system back to flat first. You do that with the Fix 82 if you are keeping the factory system. If you start tuning without putting the factory system back to flat first, your tune will be hosed royally because you will be adding additional information not in the original recording twice over. The factory is bad because, they didnt put the speakers in the optimal location to start with, and they used the least expensive option they had. Then they over tunes the piss out of it, just to get it to image correctly, but using a lot of EQ and a lot of time alignment corrections. The audio guys at the factory are the last people to get the design to figure out where they can put the speakers. When you do stuff like leave the factory tune and then move the tweeter, you just make it worse, because now the time alignment adjustments that were set for the factory tweeter in the factory location, are now way out of wack because you changed speakers and changed location. VERY VERY BAD. But if you dont know any better, to you, your excited because it sounds louder, because you think louder is better. Loud is what causes the issues shown in the graph over time. Its like people listen to their system with music from their IPOD, and they say, man I cant tell any difference between the CD and IPOD. Yeah ok. Whatever. Again, not knowing ever being exposed to the better system will do that. By they way, notice in Barnes and Noble music section whats showing up again? Yep Records. Why? Needles do a better job of reproducing the music than CD's. It has nothing to do with being a purist. A record will reproduce 20htz to 20K hertz, without the jitter created by a Digital to Analog DAC. Lots of reading on the web if anyone cares.
Where was I, oh year, flat. The Fix 82, reads the signal coming out of the factory head unit and makes EQ corrections to get it back to a flat signal. Then you use a processor and an RTA to retune the system to get it back to where it should be for the acoustic signature in the car. Once that is done, you arrive a musical bliss, and the speakers you just invested in will be worth 10x's what you paid for them.
If you just want your car to sound better, and dont want to spend any money. Your better off, just buying an amp, and tying it into the system. At least that way, the acoustics of the car that Sony spent millions on figuring out wont be a waste you get the same effect but dont have to retune. If your going to spend more than $250.00 on speakers, your wasting your money. Oh yeah buy a powered bazooka tube with your amp. No re tuning required.
Im not attacking you, I just want to make sure everyone has a clear understanding.
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