...but with speakers in the door panels it's way off.

Not necessarily.

Being basically selfish (and since most of my passengers could care less about staging and imaging) I shift the left-right balance one notch towards the passenger side -- i.e, the right side of the car gets a little more volume than the left side. This has the effect of exactly centering the image for the driver, at the expense of the passenger -- but it is a small change, and unless the passenger heard it both ways, he would never know.

In competition judging, one of the tracks is a series of seven snare drum beats that travel left to right across the sound stage. Ideally, they would be positioned for both driver and passenger like this:

x........x........x........x........x........x........x

And there are some cars that compete that do, indeed, achieve this, albeit expensively.

Most cars come out like this:

x....x....x....x.................x....x....x....... for the driver and the mirror image for the passenger.

According to the judging sheets, my car comes out more like this:

..x......x......x..........x..........x....x....x..... for the driver, and
........x....x....x........x........x......x......x.. for the passenger.

In other words, the stage is a bit narrower than optimal, and the separation gets compressed on the left and right sides, and compressed a little more on the side opposite the listener. (When in championship judging mode with two judges, one in each front seat, I don't shift the left-right balance, but leave it centered.) Because of the acoustics of my car (a fairly large station wagon) my staging and imaging is better than most, due more to blind luck than any cleverness on my part.

Finally, my car is quieter than most -- no audible engine noise, lots of sound deadening, aerodynamically shaped enough that wind noise is pretty minimal, so even at highway speeds I keep most subtle nuances of the music. rjlov's "normalizer" program will make it even better, but I have to actually have an empeg first, I guess... :-(

I guess the above rambling discourse is all just to say that a car can be a better listening environment than most people give credit, if you have the proper car and the proper equipment and tuning. I think the fact that the car is such a controlled environment helps: you don't have to deal with asymmetrical rooms or rooms with some walls close by and other walls effectively not there at all as in an open living room environment.

tanstaafl.


"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"