Car speakers - which brand to buy/avoid
Car speakers - which brand to buy/avoid
I'm looking for a couple of car speakers and am wondering which brands are good and which to avoid. Any suggestions relevant to buying them in Cambodia?
- vladimir
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Kenwood are pretty good, Sony reasonable.
You could just order from Amazon and give them to the installers.
Check out the places in Toul Kork near the roundabout.
You could just order from Amazon and give them to the installers.
Check out the places in Toul Kork near the roundabout.
ירי ילדים והפצצת אזרחים דורש אומץ, כמו גם הטרדה מינית של עובדי ההוראה.
You don't mention your budget, and I'm not sure what brands are available in Cambodia, so let me just list a few that are generally good for their price range, and some that are pretty much always bad:
Good:
Focal
Infinity
Rockford Fosgate
JBL
Polk
JL Audio
Alpine
Blaupunkt
Kenwood
Pioneer
Sony
So-so:
MTX
Kicker
JVC
Crap:
Dual
Boss
These are more or less ordered best to worst, although different people will have different ideas of the exact ranking. Price matters also. For instance, the best JVC's will probably sound better than the cheapest Alpines, but no Dual will sound as good as even the bottom of the line Focal or Infinity. I'm also assuming you are going for sound quality, not booming bass.
Good:
Focal
Infinity
Rockford Fosgate
JBL
Polk
JL Audio
Alpine
Blaupunkt
Kenwood
Pioneer
Sony
So-so:
MTX
Kicker
JVC
Crap:
Dual
Boss
These are more or less ordered best to worst, although different people will have different ideas of the exact ranking. Price matters also. For instance, the best JVC's will probably sound better than the cheapest Alpines, but no Dual will sound as good as even the bottom of the line Focal or Infinity. I'm also assuming you are going for sound quality, not booming bass.
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I'm surprised Bose didn't make the list. They come in a lot of new cars, and a lot of people say they're crap. They sound okay to me, had 'em in my Nissan original equipment. The CD player sucked though.
Someone came up with a good idea about using speakers from old mercedes, They're Bose and probably of good quality.
That is a good idea. Mercs have great sound. A lot of it may be the combination of 8 or so speakers scattered around though. If you got just the big ones without the tweeters, the sound might be a bit bottom heavy.dv8inpp wrote:Someone came up with a good idea about using speakers from old mercedes, They're Bose and probably of good quality.
Maybe the older Mercs had fewer speakers though?
- vladimir
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Now you know why they didn't make the list.zerotwosixty wrote:I'm surprised Bose didn't make the list. They come in a lot of new cars, and a lot of people say they're crap. They sound okay to me, had 'em in my Nissan original equipment. The CD player sucked though.
ירי ילדים והפצצת אזרחים דורש אומץ, כמו גם הטרדה מינית של עובדי ההוראה.
Bose car speakers ARE absolute crap. They are literally the quality of $3 Chinese speakers, and their electronics are of only average quality. However, the Bose systems in many cars, especially the more expensive ones like Mercedes, sound very good. The reason for this is that they do extensive evaluations of the response curve in the car, and then use the results to build a system with the proper EQ, active crossovers, and time alignment tailored for that specific vehicle. Some of their more expensive systems even have listening position selections that will optimize the sound even further depending on whether you only want it to be good for the driver, the driver and another front seat passenger, or all seats. That is done mostly through changes in the the time alignment. The end result usually sounds very good, although not always as good as a really good installer could do using similar priced aftermarket gear. For this reason, you should never use Bose car audio in any car other than the exact model it was designed for, and even then only if you are using the entire system (although you can sometimes get away with upgrading the head unit, depending on whether that particular system put all the sound shaping in an outboard module or built it into the head unit.)
You can get amazing sound quality in car audio for a very reasonable price these days. When I was in the USA a couple of years ago and using my mom's 12 year old Camry daily, I got sick of the sound and spent less than $450 on a Pioneer head unit, Focal component speakers that were on closeout pricing, some wiring and tools, and a second-hand iPod off eBay with a non-working display. If I had paid an installer it would have cost another $300-$400 due to the amount of disassembly and fabrication involved, but labor is dirt cheap here in Cambodia. The result was a system that had 80% of the sound quality of the $6,000+ car stereo I painstakingly put together back in the late 90's, for a fraction of the cost--and if I had been willing to spend the same amount of effort tuning and installing it that I did in my younger days, it probably would have been more like 90%.
DV8, i completely forgot about this thread, or I would have discussed it with you at lunch today. Sorry about that.
You can get amazing sound quality in car audio for a very reasonable price these days. When I was in the USA a couple of years ago and using my mom's 12 year old Camry daily, I got sick of the sound and spent less than $450 on a Pioneer head unit, Focal component speakers that were on closeout pricing, some wiring and tools, and a second-hand iPod off eBay with a non-working display. If I had paid an installer it would have cost another $300-$400 due to the amount of disassembly and fabrication involved, but labor is dirt cheap here in Cambodia. The result was a system that had 80% of the sound quality of the $6,000+ car stereo I painstakingly put together back in the late 90's, for a fraction of the cost--and if I had been willing to spend the same amount of effort tuning and installing it that I did in my younger days, it probably would have been more like 90%.
DV8, i completely forgot about this thread, or I would have discussed it with you at lunch today. Sorry about that.
^ Extraordinary answer. I wish I knew that much about anything
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I actually expected to see them at the bottom of the list, but still on the list nonetheless.
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