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Or rather why spending more than $1000 on an In Car Entertainment system is a waste of money.
McIntosh Loudspeaker Division Part 2
The owner of this blog was one of the chief sound engineers at McIntosh (a very well known American Audio company now owned by Clarion in Japan).
He was tasked by Clarion to design a sound system for the Nissan Q45 back in 1991. This is a the problems he faced.
"The initial Q45 design was based on our measurement of the drivers and crossovers in the reverberant room. This indicated the total energy of the system regardless of the directional properties of the drivers. When this was mentioned in a progress report to Clarion, response was very negative and we were directed to work only in the car. There was no one who I could explain the need for correlation. They were in Japan and a one-to-one dialog was not possible.
As we worked on the car system, I again concluded that this was a step backwards from creating accurate sound. Pleasing sound, of course, is very subjective and I found the sound that the Japanese Clarion people liked was not what I liked and visa-versa. Although they indicated they were pleased with the results of our first car system, the story changed later. Response measurements were not very useful in this very close and reflecting environment. Moving the microphone from left to right by the distance between the ears changed the response drastically at the mid and higher frequencies. Use of a dummy head could show similar results. It would seem that neither measurement nor listening would be the answer to pleasing a foreign market.
The next best approximation was to use electronic equalization for one arbitrary microphone location at a point in space between where the ears would be. Of course this was also arbitrary as the ear height would vary from person to person. In addition, equalization had to be used not only for low frequencies but also above 1 kHz, which is very position sensitive. At least we had maintained a controlled bass response that was not like the boomy one-note bass found in some car systems,
Although Carl and I had what we thought was pleasing sound, when the car was actually driven on the road, almost everything was lost in the road noise, despite the fact that the Infiniti had relatively low road noise. The best sound was when the car was not being driven. In the final analysis, the best solution was to have adequate tone control adjustments for the customers so they can adjust the sound to suit their individual preferences. Apparently, exaggerated, boomy bass is one of them."
McIntosh Loudspeaker Division Part 2
The owner of this blog was one of the chief sound engineers at McIntosh (a very well known American Audio company now owned by Clarion in Japan).
He was tasked by Clarion to design a sound system for the Nissan Q45 back in 1991. This is a the problems he faced.
"The initial Q45 design was based on our measurement of the drivers and crossovers in the reverberant room. This indicated the total energy of the system regardless of the directional properties of the drivers. When this was mentioned in a progress report to Clarion, response was very negative and we were directed to work only in the car. There was no one who I could explain the need for correlation. They were in Japan and a one-to-one dialog was not possible.
As we worked on the car system, I again concluded that this was a step backwards from creating accurate sound. Pleasing sound, of course, is very subjective and I found the sound that the Japanese Clarion people liked was not what I liked and visa-versa. Although they indicated they were pleased with the results of our first car system, the story changed later. Response measurements were not very useful in this very close and reflecting environment. Moving the microphone from left to right by the distance between the ears changed the response drastically at the mid and higher frequencies. Use of a dummy head could show similar results. It would seem that neither measurement nor listening would be the answer to pleasing a foreign market.
The next best approximation was to use electronic equalization for one arbitrary microphone location at a point in space between where the ears would be. Of course this was also arbitrary as the ear height would vary from person to person. In addition, equalization had to be used not only for low frequencies but also above 1 kHz, which is very position sensitive. At least we had maintained a controlled bass response that was not like the boomy one-note bass found in some car systems,
Although Carl and I had what we thought was pleasing sound, when the car was actually driven on the road, almost everything was lost in the road noise, despite the fact that the Infiniti had relatively low road noise. The best sound was when the car was not being driven. In the final analysis, the best solution was to have adequate tone control adjustments for the customers so they can adjust the sound to suit their individual preferences. Apparently, exaggerated, boomy bass is one of them."
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