It isnt necessary to aim the speakers at the listener. Because you are not equidistant to the speakers anyway.

So reflected sound can actually be your friend- you will never have perfect direct sound- you can have perfect indirect diffused sound.

In other words, you cant get stereo sitting on one side- you can get surround sound.

You dont have enough space in the door.
Their definition of a subwoofer is a driver that can take lot more power. Thus it can make more bass.

You will never fix the stereo in an XK with different drivers- you will only make it different. And the drivers you have now are better suited than the drivers you will get.

 

Thank you Q&C

 

Ask away if you have subsequent questions.

I hope everyone realizes that changing drivers has always been the best way improving sound. Until the car makers got in the game and effectively ensured they cut out the aftermarket stuff. Its just like a head unit, it simply cant be changed, or tapped.

Hannity is a eunuch- deserves the Nobel prize.

 

Now everybody wants blue teeth. Weird.

 

FWIW
The reason they are aiming the drivers is because off-axis, most drivers are uneven.
But keep in mind you dont have to change the orientation of the driver to direct the sound more towards you. You can use an acoustic lens, similar to cupping your ears to hear better.

This is an acoustic lens. Note how the tweeter is being fired up into top saucer, and the midrange below it is doing the same. That is one of the principal flaws in our cars, you have direct sound from the tweeter- i.e high efficiency, and the midrange is indirect. And guess what's missing- yup the midrange.

 

So,
they have compensated for the disparity in the DSP (electronic crossover)
Another reason you are stuck with the driver you have.

 

BTW
HARMOND is now using the acoustic lens too in cars.

 

High frequencies are also reflected by glass, whereas base and mids can pass through, compounding any sound stage equalization.

 

I would suspect 'under' that.
I needed a new 'winter' car, so I acquired a 'new to me' 2014 Lexus IS350 AWD, and started to look around to see if there were any options/mods/upgrades available for it. Pretty sure I was on a Lexus accessories page (but I can't find that original page again) that took me to a 3rd party vendor that is making an audio upgrade for this model, because Lexus 'got it wrong'. Says they are currently in the pre-order stage ($1200) for a DIY kit, that includes 'plug-and-play' filters for the door speakers, a drop-in replacement subwoofer and enclosure, and a dedicated amp for the sub, along with all associated wiring.
Appear to have kits for some other brand vehicles (Toyota, Subaru, Scion, hmmm... all Japanese).

 

Well here's to hoping. To your point, all Japanese and all high production cars too. Jaguar X150's are a bit more niche. I hope it's solved for guys who want it solved. I just want "better" than what I have now which I'll have soon enough. Just waiting on a few more parts and 3 months of winter to pass:-)

 

Try using the analogy of a pinball machine to understand how sound bounces off of surfaces and I think you'll understand things better. The interior surfaces can be used to help guide and 'tune' the received sound. I'm pretty sure all Alpine did was tweak the finer frequency details for each speaker to match the interior to get what they wanted.

After giving this some thought and playing with what I have on my '07 with the Alpine system I've found that leaving the basic settings mid range and tweaking the surround up three notches gives a pretty good sound. There's still a huge gap of missing mid range. Even backing the bass and treble off a couple notches doesn't help. JLR isn't overdriving the extremes, but forgot the mid range. I still think when it's all said and done a good mid range door speaker will improve the system a lot.

Cambo, did you ever find time to measure the door speaker mount? Pretty please.

 

I am sure it doesn't actually make any difference but while scanning the car configuration file on my new '10 XKR I noticed that the setting for audio was set to Premium sound with 12 speakers.

Maybe the mid range frequencies on my car are trying to play on the 4 missing speakers

 

I'm out of town again so I haven't had a chance to do anything more with this. I'll be home again on the weekend.

The setting in the CCF where it has the speaker count isn't really relevant. Only the Base, Midline or Premium part matters.

 

It sure would have been nice to have Audyssey like my HiFi system has in the Xk. Yeah, it would be over kill but what a neat tool for really serious listeners.

 

I believe the XK has Audyssey

 

Get your arms around this if you can.
The good folks who made your "shitty stereo with compressed mp3"
Made a film on how "shitty mp3 is" and they won an award for the film!!
Distortion of Sound

It explains beautifully whats wrong with your stereo.

 

Ha. Well yeah, I'm not arguing the fact that compression degrades the original audio but they are using the most extreme case of compression for comparison, probably 16kbps or 24kbps to make a point, which is unfair. I listen to mp3s almost exclusively (thru computer at work, thru phone in car, etc. and I've done a lot of comparison between bit rates using ear tests and null tests and decided that for me, 192kbps bitrate is the point that I can not hear a difference from the original .wav file without EXTREME concentration and discretion. For some recordings, I've even gotten down to 128k. So, again, for me, I rip everything at 192k. To be safer, you can rip at 320Kbps and there will be virtually no audible difference noticeable to the above average music listener. Also, if you buy mp3s from iTunes or Amazon, they usually come compressed at a variable bit rate, which is a better algorithm that compresses less (up to 320kbps) during higher frequency sections, so it sounds even better...

Now translate my "mediocre" 192k compressed files played under not so ideal circumstances, ie: in a car, and it's even harder to tell the difference.

Of course, YMMV, and I have a slight hearing loss above 16k (as I would guess most of us here do as well ) but I think using a crappy source file is probably not even part of the issue at hand here. I would agree that the internal DSP and possibly even how the EQ is processed internally would be something to look at....

 

The ulterior motive for Harman making this expensive film, was not to tell you that their previous technology was "shitty". It was to pave the way for their new technology...

But why a 'new' technology called 'clarify'?- because they are about to have their **** handed to them. There is a VHS vs Betamax war and Harman is about 2 years too late to the party. Major record labels and top manufacturers have signed on with the technology that I am involved in....

So the comparison isnt between MP3 and WAV, the comparison is between MP3 and Clarify- and yes the results are shocking. Even to the uninitiated and particularly in compromised environments such as a car or low fidelity applications.

We knew all this 4 years ago, when we could take a inexpensive DAC and turn it into something that sounded fabulous by simply using the DSD format. Sony stopped pushing CD players after that- instead started making DSD players that sounded better $20k cd players. Lynn too came out against CDs.

Bottomline is, you can make less than average electronics, speakers and space, sound fantastic, better than even the good stuff, with high resolution content.

I fell asleep in my sauna yesterday, when I was doing some testing and listening to high resolution through horrible built-in speakers which I normally cant stand. Yes its that good.

 

ahh. Interesting. So the answer to too much processing is more processing. .
You are right, there has been "dynamics plugins" on the market for a while now in the digital mastering world.

This won't be much benefit to those of us who don't use totally decimated mp3 files but it still may improve (or at least change) the sound of the system as a whole with good source files, just like the "Loudness" button did on the old home stereos.....

All of this reminds me of a comic I saw in a recording studio a while back. It was a kid with an electric guitar and a huge rack full of digital processing equipment telling his grandfather that he can get his electric guitar to sound just like an acoustic.....

 

None of the old tricks to make music 'appear' better, ie. some dynamic manipulation. Nothing of the sort.

Preventing loses on the recording end.

Basically there is so much information previously missing that even losses of low fidelity electronics are not only sustained but the net quality vastly improved.

The actual analogy is a live electric guitar being played through a distortion pedal, soundboard, being amplified by low fidelity Crown (Harman)amps, out through crappy carpeted speakers, and the bloody thing sounds better than the best hifi,- the difference is tons of information on the front end, enough to spare for losses on the back.