Well in case you didn't know, I'm speaking of a cadillac with scanspeak drivers with DLS amps and a pretty high end alpine HU that I heard. The dude was playing jazz on it and frankly, I nearly laughed out at how bad it sounded. Seemingly all that equipment costed close to 6000$. A pair of nice bookshelves like Quad 12 would just eat it alive.
The biggest issue with these is that though the drivers might be good, as I said, the acoustics of a car is not. Considering that the car was a Cadillac CTS which is probably as heavy and damped as possible, I think its as good as it gets in terms of acoustics. However thats not the only problem, the bigger issue is that even though the drivers in themselves are fantastic, there is no baffle to put the drivers on. In home audio terms, its like a speaker with no cabinet. This is incredibly hard if not impossible to do properly as the ideal speaker is one that has an infinite baffle.
The only commercial speaker I know of that pulls this off well is the Jamo R909... which to say the least is not cheap at 17500$ per pair
. Everyone knows that dipole designs are the hardest to make for accurate reproduction. Just check out linkwitzlabs.com and you'll know. No one actually does all that math to put car drivers, do they? So there's no way that haphazardly placed drivers in a car can produce audio that is transparent. I mean come on... there is defiinite reason than a pair of 5000$ floorstanders have such a big cabinet with drivers placed in a particular configuration. Can one achieve that in a car? Yes but you'd need to put a 30 kilo baffle, which needless to say will break a car's door if done :rofl:.
The other reason why car audio will never come close to decent home audio is amplification. Car audio amps are small multichannel tripath (class T) or class AB amps since they need high efficiency. If one were to put a Class A amp or an AB with class A biasing, well the car's battery would be dead in 5 minutes
. Yes there are good class AB and T designs, but definitely not the ones found in a car. In case you didn't know, even an entry lvl stereo amp weighs close to 10 kilos, with the power supply contributing most to it. All car amps run straightaway from the battery with no signal filtering before being amplified. The other thing you'll note is the massive distortion present in most car amps... if you check up figures, you'll find their power being rated at 0.1-1% distortion depending on the make. Thats a humongous amount of distortion! Look at home audio amps and you'll find their nominal power is rated at 0.02% distortion at max. These car amps can't hold up to even an entry level NAD C320, forget a high end amp like mark levinson or krell or bryston or a nice tube amp like McIntosh.
Loud yes, probably nice sounding depending on ears yes, better than consumer brands like sony yes, accurate - a big big NO!!!! Anyway I won't post anymore on this as its going completely off topic.
