Showcasing the Best in the Mobile Enhancement Industry
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen car audio speakers installed improperly in the doors, dash or rear deck of a car or truck. Many amateur car audio enthusiasts don’t understand that unlike home audio and Bluetooth speakers that come in an enclosure, the way that raw speakers are mounted in your vehicle plays a huge role in what they’ll sound like. Let’s 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
Picking new speakers for your home, a new set of headphones or upgrades for your car audio system should all involve the same auditioning process. Take two or three of your favorite songs on a memory stick to a local mobile enhancement retailer and audition the speakers under controlled conditions. We can’t count the number of times people have purchased speakers based on a Read more
I should stop looking at posts in car audio groups on social media. I’m not opposed to answering a few questions to help enthusiasts, but the constant barrage of untrue statements and misunderstandings about what matters in choosing a product like speakers is overwhelming. Let’s look at some typical speaker specifications made by companies that don’t understand speaker Read more
Whether you’re waterskiing, wakeboarding or towing friends on a tube, having great music to accompany your time on the water makes a day of fun even better. When it comes to wakeboard tower speakers, the powersports audio fanatics at Rockford Fosgate have the perfect solution to ensure that everyone on the boat and at the end of the rope can hear your favorite jams. Let’s look Read more
I consider myself extremely fortunate to have one of the most amazing jobs in the car audio industry. One aspect of being the editor in chief of BestCarAudio.com that I am particularly fond of is researching and performing experiments to create the content we publish. Unlike most of the hard-working folks who develop products, drive all over the countryside visiting retailers Read more
While browsing car audio groups on Facebook or Reddit, I see the comment that “distortion damages speakers” at least once, if not 10 times, a day. There can’t be many statements that equal this one to demonstrate an incomplete understanding of how speakers, amplifiers and distortion work. If you’ve been told this by professionals, don’t fret. Most of them don’t understand Read more
Several car audio amplifiers on the market only have three terminals to which four speaker wires need to be connected. Typically, we are used to seeing a single terminal for each speaker’s positive and negative terminal – four in total. So, how do these three-terminal solutions work? The answer is simple if you know how the signal in the amp works. So, let’s take a Read more
It’s time we start putting together the information from a selection of the articles I’ve created to help sound quality enthusiasts get the most from their car audio systems. In this article, we will discuss why it might be best to choose a low-power, high-quality Class AB amplifier to power your tweeters. We’ll look at this from both a noise and distortion perspective, as well Read more
A while back we published an article that looked at the issue of intermodulation distortion from coincident coaxial speakers. As the woofer cone moves forward and rearward from its rest position, it acts as moving waveguide for the tweeter. While the phenomenon is measurable, there are other considerations in a coincident speaker design that offer dramatic performance benefits Read more
A while back we published an article that discussed why aiming speakers in a properly designed car audio system was futile. As usual, we received a good deal of feedback about the piece. The comments ranged from the typical “that’s not how it works” to more scientific discussions about how even minor changes in placement had significant effects on imaging and soundstage Read more
Whether you’re ripping across a lake or skiing at the end of the tow rope, having great music on your boat makes your time on the water much more enjoyable. The audio fanatics at Rockford Fosgate have stepped up to the plate to ensure that boaters can enjoy the same sound quality and volume levels that have made this brand one of the most recognized in the car audio industry. Read more
