Best Car Stereo

I am in the procees of putting together a new system for my car. Some of the best headunits out are by Eclipse(fujitsu ten). I will be using a pair of Rockford Fosgate amps, somehow they are in with Hafler. Other good brands are PPI(Precision Power Inc), Zapco, Arc Audio, Soundstream,and a/d/s. For mids and tweets I'm using a/d/s. If you want to spend big bucks you can get components from Dynaudio and Focal. Other great component sets are available from Crystal Mobilesound, CDT, Diamond, JL Audio, and Boston Acoustics. For subwoofers with incredible sound quality and high output capabity it seems that Crystal Mobilesound or Audiomobile are the way to go. For car audio forums you can check out the following sites: elitecaraudio.com, carstereos.org, sounddomain.com, and termpro.com. Brent

Check out www.theautophile.com They specialize in exactly what you are looking for. There is also a lot to be gained by researching www.caraudioforum.com and sounddomain.com in terms of industry news, trends,classifieds and opinions. There seems to be two different camps for car stereo gear, the gear made for headbanging teenagers (this is where the money is) and the camp for sound quality guys. Hey this sounds familiar !!!! You can even buy tube amps for your car. (Milbert amps) P.s. Mcintosh does indeed make very good car stereo gear but it is pricey (surprised ?). Good luck and enjoy!

buy an alfa, & yule be happy w/the music eminating from the engine bay... ;~)

regards, doug

I have also heard good things about MB Quart speaker components. Also, don't know if you can get them "post-factory", but Mark Levinson (the company) has started putting together systems for Lexus. Maybe you can buy a Lexus, take the stereo, and then resell the Lexus with another "after market" stereo.

I'd have to agree with the MB Quart Speakers, they have a package specifically for the 911...matched up with Mcintosh power amps...sweet.

I used to be heavily into car stereo. The MB Quarts are very hard to beat unless you go esoteric (horns under dash, etc.), and are pretty reasonably priced. They can have a tendancy to be bright in car at around 8kHz if you mount the tweeters high. If you don't have alot of dough for separates, Quart's coaxials are excellent and easy to install. This was a few years ago (around the first year Eclipse came on the scene), but I went through numerous amps while listening to the Quarts, and at the time, the Nakamichi completely blew the Soundstreams, Precision Power, etc. away in terms of being a good match up for the Quarts for transparancy, imaging, etc.. Experiment with phasing. I found the sound improved tremendously when I reversed the phasing on the tweeters. Then reversing the phasing on one side of the car, post crossover! Electrically, the two sides were out of phase, but acoustically, it compensated for sitting off-center and the imaging went from fuzzy to spectacular. Without going overboard, a nice EQ with separate right and left channel controls can really help balance the frequency irregularities that are huge in a car between the right and left. Audio Control makes a nice unit...I think mine was the EQX...it has 13 bands for both and left channels. It fits under a seat nice, and makes a good line driver to an amp in the back, as the voltage (both input and output) is variable. I had connections that I could disconnect, then put longer power supply, ground, and RCAs to so I could set the unit on my lap and tune it.

I've also heard good things about Focal Utopia line of drivers. They frequently go on sale on Ebay.

A little nastalga (is that spelt correctly?) for you motor heads. Did you know that Michael Kelly, owner and designer for Aerial Accoustics (10t) worked for ADS in the late 80's and was the chief designer for the great sounding 320i and 300i speaker. He left ADS around 90ish with another higher up (i think market director, correct me anyone) and formed Aerial and produced and marketed the Aerial 10t and received speaker of the year award in 96. BTW Eclipse has been around for at least 13yrs that i remember. Most of the manuf mentioned have been sold and continue by different companys that keep the same name. I heard that Boston is no longer making car audio products. Fun Hobby and also expensive, i miss it.

That's cool, I love Porsches, Alfas too. I recently bought a new car stereo and was really into car audio before home audio took my money away. I listened to a lot of speakers, seperates and coaxial, and found dynaudio to be the best, but it is pretty expensive. Your gonna need your money for spare parts!. For a little half the cost of dyn, boston's pro series are the best, and they are still doing car audio. I found quarts to be too bright, especially thier coaxials which use those terrible inverted dome tweeters. Their Premium Reference's are pretty good though, but don't let those sneaky dealers trick you into the Q series if you go that route. They're practically the same speaker, and very few can tell the difference in sound between them. McIntosh makes really nice amps, but the difference between amps in car audio is pretty small. Get a head unit that looks good, get it installed by the best person you can find, and you'll be ready to pick up some hotties.

I enjoy my car stereo a great deal and have spent considerable amount of money over 4 years( appx $9000 plus).A well set-up sytem consisting of 'high-end' components can deliver really great(but never close to the home rig in terms of sound stage and openness) sound.The tonal balance can come very close to the home stereo with an EQ. I have pioneer premier(similar to elite) head CD unit, Pioneer preimer EQ and DSP sound processor( that has studio,club,jazz club DSP set-up and also sound positioning feature that put driver in to a sweet spot with a delay built in. Front speakers are now JL audio 3 way component system, mounted in the door firing up and center, with 8 " mid bass JL audio woofer(all bass in Front), Rear fil are the infinity coaxials( my front infinity kappa componets blew up a year ago, I am glad i replaced them with JL components, very natural non-fatiguing sound) Trunk contain front firing 2-10" Cerwin vega Acurate image sub-woofers in a sealed box and a bazzooka 10" amplified tube subwoofer firing back in right corner increasing a bass-feel.A passive cross over control 100-200 hz bass in 8" mid basses in the front door, two giant capacitors provide reserve power for 3 PPI art series amplifires( heart of the system in my opinion). One A-600 for subwoofer, A-400 for front and rear, A-200 for mid basses. Optima battery aided by high power alternator powers the whole system. Oh yes the JL tweeter are molded on the lower region of A-pillers, at about 45 degrees. I have two additional MB-quart tweeter installed in the rear view mirror bring the soundstage at the eye sight. A multi-cd changer in the trunk also provide tunes a addition to the head unit. The sound in the driver seat is tailered to match the home rig curve. In summary sound is very transperent, dynamic, sound stage starting at about dash land going deeper in the wind shield( at times with good material)without being boomy at all(set-up with restraint)Doors and trunk has been deadened with dynamat. So for you car stereo buffs, I would highly recommend the PPI amplifiers and the JL components. MB-quart and Infinity tend to be very bright. The Cerwin vega accurate image sub-woofers also does a great job.WAIT! I forgot to mention two mid cabin mounted 4 " JL coaxial mid ranges run by a PPI A-100!! Cables: Did not spend much on them but they are adequately sized.

i tink canton makes about the best car speakers around - i have a set in my daily-driver alfa gtv6. but, i must confess that the alpine cd-player/head-amp has been sittin' on a shelf in the laundry room for ~5 years, and my ~90-mile daily commute is done w/a big hole in the dash where the radio is supposed to go! ;~)

doug *i "drive" when i drive* sedon

In Dash TV’s, Home/Car Theater – Sony, Alpine, Eclipse, Panasonic Head units new- Nakamichi in dash 6-disc changer (Single din head unit), great dac. Old Audiophile Head units Alpine 7909, Sony RMS2001 Amps - Adcom, Alpine, Phoenix Gold, ADS, Milbert Tubes, PPI. Speakers ADS, MB Quart, Boston Acoustic Pro series, Focal, Speaker Craft Subs- JL Audio, Velodyne, Boston Acoustic Pro Series.

I love to listen to the standard Bose equipment on my Mercedes 4x4 to remind myself of the crap that most people are listening to courtesy of lies and advertising and reinforce my unwavering commitment to achieve better sound. Just kidding (partly). I hope to pull that crap out of an otherwise excellent car and replace it with something reasonable. I am tired of the bloated midbass and compressed highs of the Bose.

Precision Power in Pheonix is regarded as one of the best. They produce an automotive tube amp. Their speaker line is built for them in Germany.

Check out some of the HCCA stuff by Orion, WOW!

So much good quality car audio gear out there. I have used JL Audio for sub amplifier duties, and Audison (of Italy) for the front splits.
Not mentioned is in car DSP, I have owned the Audison and JBL-MS8, there are newer ones out now that I would guess are better yet again?

JL Audio make time alignment amplifiers as do others.
https://www.crutchfield.com/shopsearch/dsp_for_car_audio.html?&pg=2

The older MS8 for example will integrate with even factory head units on newer cars and can be used to do time alignment and full active crossover duties.
They are supplied with stereo microphones, that measure in milliseconds the time for white noise to travel from each drivers programmed to each ear of the person who's wearing the microphone head set. This is done to setup the car in less than thirty minutes. It measures frequency response in the vehicle and EQ's to that specific profile. You can select for different listening positions in the car even, and there's also manual equalization as well.

I have a pair of Vifa soft dome tweeters (off Ebay and branded with Aston Martin), Dynaudio (mids) and Tymphany LAT-500 (sub). There's 8 discreet channels on the MS8 all entirely configurable, low pass, high pass and band pass.

Instead of mounting everything in the bottom of the trunk (boot) I had a light square tube steel rack welded up with tabs to bolt the amps, capacitors, fuses, and DSP and used rubber mounts to secure it under the rear parcel shelf above the trunk area. Kept everything cool, safe and the trunk (boot) completely usable still.