Great Car Audio Advice – Often when someone doesn’t like the sound of their standard system, they can often blame their speakers and ask us what would be good to replace them. Now our answer depends really on the car that you have but, if you have modern car chances are it’s what’s driving the speakers that’s the limiting factor over the speakers. Most Ford, Volkswagen, Audi and Mercedes have standard speakers which are being under driven by the factory head unit. When you introduce an amplifier not only does everything get louder and clearer, but it also becomes more dynamic, with no distortion and better sound quality.
Amplifiers – A good place to start is always with a 4-channel amplifier, this will give you the ability to run front speakers, rear speakers and a subwoofer. Great Car Audio Advice We believe this is the best value for money amplifier you can have with minimal drawbacks, pretty much whichever car you have if you amplify your front and rear speakers and add a subwoofer the difference will be unbelievable. However, it does have its drawbacks such as you lose the fade front to rear function and often the standard rear speakers will limit what you’re able to get out of the front as they are connected together. This is where a multi-channel amplifier such as the Audison Prima may come in handy as it has multiple of channels which can be used to drive speakers independently.
However, if you’re like us here at K&M and want to have huge volume 2 amps is always better than 1! What you can do is use your 4-channel amp to drive your front and rear speakers independently and get the most out of them, this also gives you your fader function back. Then what we can introduce is a bass amplifier such as one of our Incriminator Audio Monoblock’s that only has one job which is to play earth shattering bass as deep and as loud as you want Great Car Audio Advice.
Speakers – No matter how much money you spend on your music speakers generally they don’t like to play deep bass that’s a job for a subwoofer. As soon as we introduce an Amplifier with a high pass filter (All K&M amps have a high pass filter) your music speakers will be able to go louder and clearer. The next stage from your standard door speakers with an amplifier would be to upgrade your door speakers. In most modern cars this is with a set of Component Speakers which often are 6.5inch door speakers with a tweeter.
Subwoofers – The bit everyone loves, loud, deep, awesome bass is what 90% of our customers are after and we know how to do it properly. We have no limit to how many Subwoofers you would like or how crazy some of our subwoofers our such as the Incriminator Audio Judge. However, this is the bit where we can save you money as most companies these days heavily advertise ‘Watts’ and something that’s ‘1000watts’ is better than something that’s ‘500watts’. The fact remains that ‘Watts’ is not a measure of loudness that as always remains to be measured in DB (decibels). This is where an efficient subwoofer and bass box design comes into play and will get the most out of your system, please give us a call for further details. Great Car Audio Advice!
Standard Head Units – Today in a lot of cars to replace the standard head unit/infotainment system is nearly impossible plus a lot of cars have all the features you would expect, the sound however leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the time we hear people complain of lack of bass from a standard system which is down to the fact realistically most standard head units give you about 6 watts RMS x 4 which means proper bass is impossible to reproduce. As per our Amplifier section we 9 times out of 10 always recommend an amplifier which drastically changes the whole dynamics of a system. Great Car Audio Advice!
But, adding an amplifier to a standard system can be done a wrong and this is the best advice that we can give you. We hear a lot of people mention the term ‘tap into the rear speakers’ which we believe is the worst thing that you can do. Customers who do this are getting a weaker from their factory unit as manufacturers set their rear speaker output, so they play little bass as they are often cheap speakers.
At this point when this customer gets no bass output, they turn up the gain on the amplifier and the distorted factory signal going into the amp gets amplified and we end up with a distorted output that won’t do any of your equipment any good, nor your ears. The front output from your factory radio is always the best, cleanest and most undistorted output you will ever get from your factory radio. However, this signal is still what’s known as a high-level signal and can carry noise and distortion in it when connected directly to an amplifier this can lead to ‘cracks and pops’ from noise in the system which when amplified only gets worse.
Therefore, what we always recommend would be a specially designed processor such as the AudioControl LC2i which will greatly improve the output from your factory radio Great Car Audio Advice. The LC2i Pro gives us 2 channels input and then a music output and a separate bass output with level control to maximize our signal to the amplifier. If for example you have a Volkswagen or BMW which have their parking sensors on the rear output channels, then you may need an LC7i Pro to make sure these work with your new system.
K&M Acoustics has been giving Great Car Audio Advice for over 30 years and we still are as committed as ever to making cars sound awesome. We don’t have a configurator or a system 1, system 2, we listen to every customer and recommend what will work best in your vehicle Great Car Audio Advice. We can also let you listen to various different speakers and amplifiers at our shop in Wigan. We also have several demo cars that are available to book for listening sessions!
Great Car Audio Advice !
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