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April 22, 2009 - 7:54pm
#1
car audio counterpart of Stereophile magazine?
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Unfortionately most (but not all) car audio is marketed to the 16-20 year old kid that has a summer's worth of money burning a hole in his pocket. So that's also the target market for many of the magazines as well.
How ever I'll be glad share some brands that were making good products a couple of years ago and probably are still worth checking out:
-Focal makes component speaker sets that are awesome
-JL amps and subs that not only sound good but are well designed so they rarely self destruct.
-Alpine head units have a minimum of flashing lights and gimmicks and tend to sound good.
Watch out for power ratings on car audio. It's a wild west free for all.
lol, these are exactly my impressions :-)
thanks for the tips!
oh yes. Class D amp designs for SUBS ONLY.
Use A/B 'old school' designs for main signals.
The Crutchfield catalog has a comprehensive listing of car audio components at many price levels. You can get them cheaper, but no one offers the advice, service, installation instructions and lifetime tech support that Crutchfield gives their customers.
Cha-ching, send the check to the usual place, guys!
Here's a primer I wrote for car audio salesman 20 years ago (at www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/489):
"To make the grade as a car-amplifier salesman, you need first to understand how an RMS power rating is arrived at. (Know your enemy!) Running from, say, a 14V car supply, a typical single-ended amplifier can swing around 12V peak-peak into a 4-ohm loudspeaker. This voltage is equivalent to an RMS voltage of 12 / (2 x root 2) = 4.24V RMS. This is the DC voltage equivalent to that peak-peak AC voltage when considered as a source for resistive heating. By Ohm's Law, into a 4-ohm load, that 4.24 RMS voltage will raise 4.24 x 4.24 / 4W, ie, just 4.5W!
"I know, I know, you're not going to sell many 4.5W amplifiers come crank-it-up season, so let's use the power that would be generated if that peak-peak voltage were, instead, an RMS figure. (Your customers are hardly likely to be triple-E graduates.) That gives, let's think up a fancy label, a 'Maximum Peak Burst Power' rating, for example
Thanks - very useful, as is the article itself, which I'm going to file away for the next time I need a receiver.
As it happens, I'm already sold on Crutchfield (does that mean you won't get your bribe? ;^) via my brother who does professional audio.
Still, the skeptic in me questions the reliability and objectivity of online customer reviews. But on first glance the speaker reviews at Crutchfield seem reasonable. I figure the more bad reviews, the more believable the site (within reason), since it means people are being critical ( - I hope - it's possible they're just clueless about installing and listening) and less likely to be shills.
So maybe Crutchfield's the only good alternative to pimp-your-ride magazines for teenagers.