Showcasing the Best in the Mobile Enhancement Industry
Though best known for their amplifiers and signal processors, the transducer design team at ARC Audio in Modesto, California, doesn’t slouch. A few weeks back, they sent me one of their new X2 10D4v2 10-inch subwoofers to put through its paces in the BestCarAudio.com lab. So let’s see what this affordable 200-watt subwoofer can deliver! ARC Audio X2 10D4v2 Features The X2 Read more
Soon after I entered the car audio industry in 1988, the shop I worked for purchased the Term-CAD enclosure design software for our DOS-based computer. I used to spend hours entering specs from the Rockford Fosgate, Kicker, MTX, Pioneer and Alpine subs we carried and would simulate hundreds of vented, bandpass and isobaric designs to learn how enclosure volume and tuning Read more
A short while back, we published an article headlined “What Does it Mean When a Subwoofer Claims to Work in a Small Enclosure?” One of our readers, Eric T., asked some great questions on our Facebook page, and we told him we’d be happy to answer them.The original article explained the physics of what happens when you try to stuff a subwoofer in an enclosure that’s too Read more
There are two schools of thought when designing a custom car audio installation: The solutions can be designed to stand out and highlight the upgrades, or they can be designed to blend with the rest of the vehicle. While I appreciate both styles, installations that blend with the cosmetic cues already in the vehicle are my preference. It’s challenging to make something Read more
As much fun as it is to test premium amplifiers and subwoofers every month, savvy car audio enthusiasts know there’s big business in high-performance solutions at more affordable price points. Our friends in Tempe, Arizona, have divided their products into good, better and best offerings to deliver solutions everyone can afford. In this Test Drive Review, we’ll check out the Read more
I recently had a discussion with several industry peers on Facebook about the correlation between audio component measurements and how that translates into subjective listening evaluations. Respectfully, I’m always astonished by the number of people who think distortion measurements don’t directly correlate to perceived product quality. The Science of Car Audio Component Read more
A while back, we took a close look at the harmonic distortion performance of a 6.5-inch door speaker from a Honda Civic. We measured the Theile/Small parameters and the driver’s impedance curve. Next, we looked at how much distortion the speaker created at different drive levels. If you haven’t read that article, it’s a bit of a prerequisite for this one. You can find it here: Read more
Somewhere around ninth grade, most high school students in North America learn about Ohm’s law in science class. Despite repeated efforts and claims to debunk the laws of physics, Ohm’s law remains a constant that car audio enthusiasts and professionals deal with every day. On a related subject, I see questions about speaker and amplifier wire sizing all the time. To help Read more
We’ve had some excellent car audio products like amplifiers, source units and subwoofers visit the BestCarAudio.com Test Drive Review bench over the last few years. For this review, the new Momento M7 dash camera from Firstech is the subject of our analysis. The newly released M7 is a three-channel dashcam that features a QHD 2K image sensor for the forward-facing camera, a Read more
