It's true that road noise, engine noise and speaker placement will never allow a car stereo to sound as good as your home setup. However, these days i really have to find time to enjoy music on my home system, whereas i find myself stuck in my car up to two hours a day!
I have more than $10,000 into my home system, yet I now probably spend more time listening to music in my car. To this end, i have put about $2000 into my car stereo to bring it up to tolerable standards. I really enjoy mt car system now. It is not at all "boom" car. I have spent hours, days and weeks tweaking it to sound balanced.
At home i'm a bit of a purist. i adjust sound with speaker placement, careful matching of equipment cables etc and room treatments. I have no tone controls. Most preamps I've owned have not even had balance controls. In my car setup, however, I have 30 band 1/3 octave digital equalizer in my trunk it it works wonders! A car is a far from ideal place for high end sound. The car's irregular interior space with a combination of highly reflective (the windows) and highly absorbtive (the uphostery) surfaces combined with very poor speaker locations create wildly non linear frequency distribution that is best cured with an equalizer. I have a fairly modest subwoofer in the trunk to fill out the low end and give the sound some depth.
I have more than $10,000 into my home system, yet I now probably spend more time listening to music in my car. To this end, i have put about $2000 into my car stereo to bring it up to tolerable standards. I really enjoy mt car system now. It is not at all "boom" car. I have spent hours, days and weeks tweaking it to sound balanced.
At home i'm a bit of a purist. i adjust sound with speaker placement, careful matching of equipment cables etc and room treatments. I have no tone controls. Most preamps I've owned have not even had balance controls. In my car setup, however, I have 30 band 1/3 octave digital equalizer in my trunk it it works wonders! A car is a far from ideal place for high end sound. The car's irregular interior space with a combination of highly reflective (the windows) and highly absorbtive (the uphostery) surfaces combined with very poor speaker locations create wildly non linear frequency distribution that is best cured with an equalizer. I have a fairly modest subwoofer in the trunk to fill out the low end and give the sound some depth.