Showcasing the Best in the Mobile Enhancement Industry
I’ve been a magazine guy for more than 35 years. I used to read four car audio and six car magazines every month. Sometimes there would be a few RC car or bicycling mags thrown in, depending on the season and my mood. All of this was even before I got into the magazine industry as a writer and started my career in car audio marketing. Being overly technical in my approach to Read more
If you’re into the SPL (sound pressure level) side of the car audio industry, you should be acutely aware of the need to deliver every amp of current and the most possible voltage to your amplifiers. The more power you can feed an amp, the more power it’s likely to be able to send to your subwoofers. We also know that every connection to a battery should have a protection Read more
Car audio enthusiasts will run across the term Q, Q factor or Quality factor when discussing car audio speakers, subwoofer enclosures or parametric equalizer configuration. The Q factor describes the damping characteristics of a resonant system. For speakers, proper cone control requires carefully calculated damping. When talking about equalizers, the Q of a filter describes Read more
Subwoofers. Yay for subwoofers! No upgrade to a car audio system will deliver a more noticeable improvement in performance and realism. Adding a properly designed subwoofer system to your car stereo is often one of the first upgrades we recommend. The challenge is finding a solution that will look and sound great while you make sense of myriad specifications that might not be Read more
If you were into car audio in the ’90s, you’ve likely heard of amplifiers having mixed-mode or tri-mode capability. The implication was that these amps could power a pair of coaxial speakers and a subwoofer at the same time from a cost-effective and straightforward two-channel design. If you dig down into the nitty-gritty of how this works, you’ll see it’s pretty simple. With Read more
Many years ago, I read an article that said the difference between a tube amp and a solid-state one was primarily in their distortion characteristics. Even though I thought about the statement repeatedly, I was mistakenly correlating the presence of distortion with what happens when we try to over-drive the output of a source unit or amplifier. As with any complex topic, it Read more
Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, having an amplifier or a radio with a built-in high- or low-pass crossover was rare. To filter the audio signals going to our speakers, installers and technicians would use inductors and capacitors on the speaker wires. We recently took a look at how capacitors work, so let’s dive into inductors to understand their function and application Read more
A while back, we looked at how some car audio speakers and subwoofers change in performance after they’ve been broken in. We analyzed how the Thiele/Small parameters of a sample subwoofer changed after being played for many hours. What we didn’t clarify adequately in that article was whether or not speakers had to be broken in before use. Parts of a Speaker or Subwoofer Let’s Read more
For decades, car audio installers have used capacitors to reduce the bass that small speakers would reproduce. I vividly remember installing 47-microfarad capacitors inline with a set of 3.5-inch speakers in the dashes of Fox-body Mustangs back in the ’80s and ’90s. Passive crossover components like these are still an essential part of the car audio industry, even with the Read more
