audiophile headunits???? where did they all go???

[ALPINE408]

I am 35 years old

so at 16 when i started car audio you were 3 bumbin and sounds like you think we did not have electronic cross overs (not digital mind you) i have never built a crossover in my life

but an external crossovers were a must back then most amps had nothing but a gain knob straight unadulterated class A/B raw full range power so xover points were set an EQ up front for changes on the fly and for T/A i would do that with each channel gain and thee deck balance to give the illusion of a center. that's a whole lot cheaper then a 400+ DSP

since i grew up in the age and i was current on technology (WITH OUT THE INTER NET) i had to use magazines and past down knowledge from Friends i know about this stuff but trust me i have only been in SQ for the past 4 years maybe at 16 till 30 i was a bass head no doubt so i am by no means an authority on this subject i just happen to know a lot about the older shit well cause im old lol

Skulls don't forget the WORST part of them all

How much music is made by instruments at all now and days? how much is it digitized sampled manipulated sounds?

Bumbin in SQ we listen and can hear when an artist fingers is running across the strings of his guitar or we hear the artist taking a breath before he belts some notes out of his sax

even in some cases (grandmas hands) the singer tapping his foot lightly to the beat

[Broke_Audio_Addict]

I've heard some hifi home systems and a couple Sq car setups and I really love the sq.

for me though I've always just went for sounds good to me because I'm pretty sure if I attempted a true sq setup I'd make a huge mess of things so I'll leave the real sq to you knowledgeable guys.

I am learning a lot though so maybe one day.

Where do I get one of those in dash record players?

[Krakin]

I can relate to the age line of what is expected of sound quality. I'm currently only 19, which would make me non-existent or less than one when Alpine started his first car. I too find the ambient noises from vinyl too distracting. However, I am also a supper objective when it comes to audio. I will not believe something "sounds better" without being shown proof of said output and other acoustical/electrical properties.

My father, who has waived away from serious sound quality and moved on to just convenience. However, when he was still into it he preferred the analog sound over his digital components.

However, when I look at things such as the variance in decibel levels that can be recorded on different formats analog comes at the bottom of the chat at roughly 96 dB and 24bit digit can deal with up to 140 dB. This also means that the source that is being recorded must also meet the required dB levels.

[aculous]

I''ve been tempted to run a home audio receiver for my mids, but they're kind of big lol. Pro Audio receivers get real expensive for SQ capabilities.. Can get some decent custom built equipment (headphone DAC's for example) for decent price if you poke around.

yes you can, not custom but good equipment. Look a companies like Fiio and iBasso, but most of all look at the technology they are using. The ESS sabre DAC looks like it could be good but I don't have a ton of experience with it. Heard yamaha was going to be using it in their recievers.

Pro sound you are looking at a Behringer setup but I hate behringer, they use lower quality components so the sound usually sounds good. ART or Ashley or Dbx have better reputation but less offerings or less dynamic (ability to change not talking musical dynamics in this case) offerings.

Car Pcs are also another option but you add a who other level of complexity that takes away from just listening and enjoying music.

[aculous]

I've heard some hifi home systems and a couple Sq car setups and I really love the sq.

for me though I've always just went for sounds good to me because I'm pretty sure if I attempted a true sq setup I'd make a huge mess of things so I'll leave the real sq to you knowledgeable guys.

I am learning a lot though so maybe one day.

Where do I get one of those in dash record players?

lol there was actually a guy selling one on ebay awhile back. I was looking for a Thorens TT and ran across it. I mean you sneeze next to a record player and it will skip I would be terrified to have one in a car.

[aculous]

So I'm 30. My parents were both classically trained musicans and I was involved in playing and recording music up until college really. Dad has a Doctorate in music theory so he was always a good resource to bounce questions off of.

The digital or analogue debate I think is silly. You can have really good audio from both. And most of the time it comes down to the recording. Equipment limits performance yes, transients and dynamic range as well as frequency range. Most of this is because a electrical engineer/programmer is no neccisarily a musician.

engineer: "the human ear can only hear 20hz-20khz so we will limit all of our equipment to that range because thats all anyone NEEDS"

Well we should all know that we can feel sub-bass and that when you start to cut the signal or limit it, you actually lose a lot of information. So NEED is subjective. A engineer telling me what I can and can't hear based upon a study that says humans can only hear xyz...I mean some people can hear a little more or a little less I think its wrong to limit the selection.

So while I applaud Neil Young for trying to get some awareness and to get a new product offering to the masses that has lossless audio there are a ton of formats already that are lossless. WAV is a good format that no one seems to like anymore...dunno why.

The better the equipment the less it will "color" the sound. What I mean by the is add electrical interference, distortion, artifacts, processing. Thats my view at least.

And as far as DSP vs Passive vs Active vs whatever...I do believe that DSP make tunning more precise and a little easier for a generation of people that are used to using computers but they have their own sets of issues that I am not sure makes the process plug and play. It makes people artificially sound better which is funny because they will setup the mic and run their script or whatever and do their T/A but have no idea what its doing so if the DSP isn't good they will have no idea that its not supposed to sound like that.

I love measurement tools. I am totally ignorant at the moment on using them effectively but you HAVE to have them and learn to use them. They are more important then your DSP. If you can measure what your system is doing you can tune it to sound good or at least know what you need to change. Measurement tools take out the fact that some people have good ears and the ability to pick up idiosyncrsies that are usually problems with the setup and some people can't so using M tools takes that variable out for the most part.

And if I am going to expand the conversation. 99% of people have NO CLUE what music sounds like...they listen to crap all day long and want it louder and louder and think that hacks that have no musical talent are great. They are used to mediocrity, and thats all they know. I can tell if a singer is flat or sharp, I can tell when a instrument plays out of tune because I have heard what something in tune sounds like. I know what distortion in a guitar and rock music sounds like compared to distortion thats not intentional.

So while I think the audiophile analogue everything is stupid I appreciate things about both. In a car you are going to have to run a digital source which means a D/A converter unless you have optial or coax audio. And if MECA or IASCA had different rules I would think about running a pro audio 3 or 4-way crossover. For right now though it looks like I will be using a headunit and imprint system. High dollar DSP to come later.

[Krakin]

I agree with what you have said, just that some of it seems to be lacking in some knowledge (not saying I know it all either lol). Which is fine you get the conceptual aspects of it.

I feel you would really benefit and like reading some on physcoacoustics. As you said we can only put into -for lack of better terms- sound images from roughly 20Hz-20kHz and as you said we perceive information from above and specifically below 20Hz into the infrasonic region. There is a large practice with cinema audio to use large amounts of infrasonic sounds to engage the viewers even more into the experience. For example, just watch your speakers when you watch star wars. With my set of speakers there is no electrical filters or acoustically related mechanical dampeners, this causes my speakers to bottom out on level 55/100 of my receiver when watching star wars. However, if I switch to netflix I can watch at THX reference level (I believe it is -15dB) and be completely fine as from the compression of the audio files you have lost the infrasonic notes.

[aculous]

I agree with what you have said, just that some of it seems to be lacking in some knowledge (not saying I know it all either lol). Which is fine you get the conceptual aspects of it.

I feel you would really benefit and like reading some on physcoacoustics. As you said we can only put into -for lack of better terms- sound images from roughly 20Hz-20kHz and as you said we perceive information from above and specifically below 20Hz into the infrasonic region. There is a large practice with cinema audio to use large amounts of infrasonic sounds to engage the viewers even more into the experience. For example, just watch your speakers when you watch star wars. With my set of speakers there is no electrical filters or acoustically related mechanical dampeners, this causes my speakers to bottom out on level 55/100 of my receiver when watching star wars. However, if I switch to netflix I can watch at THX reference level (I believe it is -15dB) and be completely fine as from the compression of the audio files you have lost the infrasonic notes.

I am always learning. Especially since I am a novice. So no ego here actually I just got access to some great textbooks on acoustics. But unfortunately some of it I am going to have to relearn physics for...soo its been a slow process

[Krakin]

I would also suggest electrical engineering books.

EE is basically acoustics. The doctor I will be doing research under in the summer has been trying to see if he can get any acoustical engineers here for me to work with or at the least something for me to play with, when I'm not being told by the graduate students what to go pick up from the storage room.

[aculous]

I would also suggest electrical engineering books.

EE is basically acoustics. The doctor I will be doing research under in the summer has been trying to see if he can get any acoustical engineers here for me to work with or at the least something for me to play with, when I'm not being told by the graduate students what to go pick up from the storage room.

I think they have a lot in common but I wouldn't say they are basically the same.

My experience with grad students was in a computer science lab...they're awful and 99% of them were entitled douchebags, have no idea why signing up for grad school turned normal human beings into egotistical messes.