Do you want to bring the sound quality in your car close to the highest studio standards? No problem. Just decide the amount of changes you can live with and the amount of money you'd be willing to spend. Than double the former and the latter, and go to professionals.
Suppose you concluded that for some reason or other, the way your factory-installed car audio system sounds is no longer satisfactory. There are two ways to proceed from there: change the sound system or get a new car with a more advanced stereo. It's hard to say which option will eventually turn out to be more expensive, but if you're leaning towards the first one you might want to consider employing professional services.
Your car can sound like a good concert hall or a recording studio. Another matter is whether you would be able to appreciate the clean sound and the nuances of music. Statistics accumulated by car audio professionals during the long years are rather disappointing: just about 5% of clients who install expensive sound systems can perceive the music adequately. For the remaining 95% the important things are how loud and how dense the sound is. Quite often clients evaluated their new car audio systems by opening the windows, playing a track at full blast and listening to it from about 15 metres away from the car.
Still, there are a few things equally important to the true connoisseurs of sound quality and fans of loud music, and one should keep them in mind during a musical upgrade of their car.
First of all decide where you'd like to install the components of your future sound system. Default places don't always allow to install speakers with required properties, and that means you'd have to either modify the default pockets or get a custom-made podium. The latter is not as scary as it sounds: such a podium can even liven up the old interior, but one should realise that will be a full-fledge restyling of the passenger compartment, with all the consequences.
Secondly, to ensure a truly high-quality sound you'll need to shield the passenger compartment from unwanted noises and vibration, i.e. get decent soundproofing. But that increases the car's weight and, accordingly, affects the dynamics. This is a problem often encountered by owners of "hot" hatchbacks and sport cars, who value every fraction of the acceleration seconds. In that case you'll have to make a compromise between hypothetically perfect sound and dynamics.
Finally, you should be really careful about selecting components for your future sound system. Actually, the chain "main device - amplifier - acoustics" is a closed one, so it doesn't really matter where do you start building the system. What matters is to remember that the sound quality ultimately depends on how compatible the components are, and how they match each other in terms of their parameters.
The main parameters to keep in mind when choosing the acoustic system is the speakers' maximum rated sound-power level, RMS and sensitivity (usually measured in dB/W per metre). Don't forget about one rather important thing: a low-power, high-sensitivity loudspeaker can create the same sound pressure as a more powerful one, only in that case you'll need a less powerful amplifier. And if two speakers provide the same sound quality, why pay extra for the amplifier's power?
As to the amplifier, its sound-power level should exceed that of the speakers by about 40-50%. If the amplifier is less powerful than the acoustic system it may suffer overloads which might damage the loudspeakers.
To get optimal sound quality you might consider installing a three-component frontal acoustic system: tweeter, mid-range and mid-bass speakers.
High-range loudspeakers - tweeters - play the major role in localising musical images, so to get the right sound scene they must be positioned extremely carefully. To ensure the best localisation of sound images tweeters should be installed on special podiums mounted on windshield pillars. Also, the exact way the tweeters will sound largely depends on the material their domes are made of. For example, a silk tweeter will play high frequencies in a very soft and airy way, while a tweeter with a titan dome will play the top range of the scale more brightly and sharply.
Mid-range speakers can be dome or cone. When you make your choice consider their future position in the car and the distance to the tweeters and mid-bass speakers. Dome mid-range speakers are normally made of silk and provide higher resonance frequency than the cone ones. Accordingly, dome mid-range speakers should be installed closer to the tweeters. They don't need extra space to be installed.
Cone mid-range speakers have lower resonance frequency compare to the dome ones, so installing them involves creating a space between 0.4 and 2.5 litres. The cone can be made of paper, polypropylene, Kevlar or many other materials used for making acoustic systems.
The important parameter of mid-bass speakers is the type of basket: cast basket is preferable to a stamped one because they are tougher and allow to reduce the harmonic distortion factor.
One way to fully realise the potential of a three-component frontal system is through per-channel amplification. In the end you get a very high-quality sound, with flexible settings.
If the frontal system is responsible for the upper section of the sound range, low frequencies are played through subwoofers. Subwoofer speakers may have different parameters which, just like the type of your car's body, affect the choice of acoustic system and subwoofer installation spots. The main thing to keep in mind though is that expensive powerful subwoofers are designed to create sound pressure. So power, resistance and the number of coils don't have a lot to do with the way the speaker will actually play music: a low-power but correctly designed and installed subwoofer will sound better than a speaker intended for SPL competitions.
And the last thing to note: your audio system will sound perfectly only in a stationary car. However good the soundproofing, in a moving car the acoustic picture will be changing. Accordingly, to estimate the changes in the sound quality try listening to your new system on the move. Then you'll be guaranteed to enjoy your favourite music played on the newly installed acoustics in any road situation.
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