Car Sound Part 1

What’s in a car sound system anyway?

These days there is quite a bit actually. Digital Sound Processing (DSP) has changed everything. From the days when digital was limited to CD and sound processing was THX certified Dolby in your home theatre installations we have progressed to streaming, on demand audio and lossless digital is now de facto across almost any music service you care to think of.

The hobby of car sound has taken these new tech platforms to heart and nowhere in the wacky wild of hi-fi is DSP quite so challenged as in the environment of a car. Acoustically it is hard to think of a more aggressive and challenging environment within which to locate reference quality music.

I use those words advisedly because I now need to take a few steps back here and start to define what is meant by these words. ‘Reference’ and ‘quality’ imply a base standard and the great difficulty with music is which base one is referencing.

For example. It is often argued that the only true base reference is live music. If we accept this as true then we must ask which live music? A classical concert in a large auditorium? A rock concert? A pop music concert? A piano recital at home?

There are as many reference points with live music as there are genres of music to begin with.

It gets worse. A rock concert will have different sound depending on venue. It will have different sound depending on the mixing engineer. A classical performance can be equally different purely from the acoustics of the venue and the differing instruments used – piano’s are said to have their own voice because they can produce quite different variations across the piano spectrum.

Then we get to recordings. Which can be equally diverse and most of which are also engineered by artists when laying down the recording.

Heavens!

And then we get to music that simply cannot be recorded ‘naturally’ – music that is engineered in a studio that sounds like it was recorded somewhere live but in fact wasn’t… It was created by laying tracks on top of each other and then engineered / arted into existence.

Y’all feel me?

So what makes one system sound somewhat more pleasant to our ears over another?

It comes down a couple of things. Of course what it is that we are used to will always have a certain influence in our listened experience. If all we hear is distorted sound waves courtesy of a crummy system incapable of anything less when we hear something that isn’t we’ll experience as different.

But we don’t experience our audio life as such continuously. Every second of every day our ears are processing perfectly defined and framed sound, even in what we think of as silence. Your ears and brain process sound constantly. Even when you are asleep. Sounds often wake you when they are abnormal – because your brain is continually monitoring them and can recognise a potential threat.

It is why we already have a framed reference of sound. It is just not necessarily framed as music. Thus when we hear an instrument or vocal in any of these multitude of almost infinite variations we do have an internal reference point against which to infer an authenticity.

The fun part is that we can also be duped.