HI all,

I saw someone asked in post somewhere about the future of car audio, and just wanted to add my thoughts. Its late over here in the UK so please excuse me if I ramble, but having been involved in audio for some time I'm interested to know what you all think ?

There is something very evocative about driving and there can be something almost primeval in the way sometimes the right music on in the right environment can elevate the enjoyment of driving to a higher level.
Its very easy to get so caught up therefore in the technology used to reproduce the music and exactly what is configured on this unit or set on that crossover that some forget to enjoy the experience itself.
As long as the quality is generally sufficient most people will forgive any minor niggles hence the wide acceptance of mp3 players in car without gapless playback or transparent OEM like integration with the dash styling of the car.
No one wants to hear a great song in AM mono on a crackly radio as it defiantly detracts from the enjoyment potential and for a long time the quality of the inbuilt audio in cars compared to what has been possible from the aftermarket has been a massive gulf.
I doubt all of us Empeggers have upgraded all our amps and speakers ( though I hope most have or intend to) but in answer to the question by Yorn I believe about where In car Hi fi is going, It is highly likely there will be a massive improvement in built in quality coming soon.
Two problems have plagued car audio for some time one is electronic interference ie hum, whine crosstalk etc and the other is efficiency, Great sound needs good dynamic range across the whole audio frequency and to reproduce sound like this needs high power and has always needed lots of watts which almost always has generated lots of heat, the back of the stereo behind the dash is not usually an ideal place to dissipate this heat from and therefore the external amp route is usually taken for anyone serious on quality, this increases complexity, cost and heat again and along with the space requirement is prohibitive for the manufacturer on all but the most bespoke of specialist cars... New Aston with Linn anyone ...Lexus Aristo with macintosh..F1 and kenwood..etc.

Whats likely to change all this are the new digital amps becoming available, incredibly efficient, v high quality and tremendously compact, its unlikely much general use consumer equipment coming out in the future years will use anything else. Once the incar stereo manufacturers start including class D amps in the head units the quality will increase significantly and if a aftermarket manufacturer or switched on OEM took this further they could produce a revolution in incar sound.
Imagine an active speaker system connected for input by a digital bus (resistant to most interference running small digital amps at high power efficiency as part of each drive unit. The driver units and the amps ( which usually have some kind of Dsp internally anyway) could be programmable with the appropriate characteristics for the drive units physical parameters the amps limitations and even In the OEM case pre-programmed with the cars environmental acoustic properties. The quality available for a cheap price ( these amps will literally become as cheap as chips ) will be phenomenal.
In terms of what is currently the most important part of the chain ( the source in conventional thinking ) will become much less of an issue .... In reality when the speakers are each creating the actual music from digital data where does the souce end ??
I would hope we can get beyond the “digital information sounds different depending on its transport” brigades meagre whining ( yes yes jitter does exist but so does reclocking )
And at the end of the day Mp3,ogg wma,atrac etc are all just pale imitations of the real source.
Before anyone flames me, I fully support that in a moving car or a current reciprocating engine powered one, no one could probably hear the difference, but that does not mean there is no difference, perhaps the cars of the future with triple glazing, electromagnetic linear maglev propulsion ( I went on the new train with this in shanghai) , and all will be quiet enough to appreciate the difference... and anyway Flac monkeys and all will compress enough music to keep most of us happy with the current 2x 60gig setup let alone what will be out in the future.
When you have enough space you have to ask yourself why fu** about with the audio ?? just store it ..... Ok

Someone’s going to argue that the psycho acoustic compression artefacts actually increase listener enjoyment over the original and it may even be true occasionally, ( boy bands at 8kps do sound better but only cos you cant hear them -grin- ) but that’s not really relevant.
Audio resolution will increase. 24bit 96k is here already and if the manufactures will let us ( and possibly even if they wont) get it off the discs, hopefully we will be able to pack and store them in a HDD type system
This leaves the source to be just that... a source, with no effect on quality or fidelity
Interfacing as long as DRM doesn’t get involved will be simple with a single digital signal connected to the cars bus and there would be opportunities to link through various surround sound or other “controllers” that affect / ? enhance ? the sound
Speakers and amps could be tweaked, replaced enhanced or reprogrammed as required and intelligence could be used to set up the vehicle actively miles better than tweaking a few Q’s or gain controls to line up a few dots on a RTA.

Where does this leave the Actual “car stereo” The source will just be a repository and selection device for the play lists with the music produced by the car or the speaker system when we decide what we want to hear and then you are looking at what the Empeg team are so good at features and UI... Add GPS, wifi, Bluetooth song uploading etc, and any other frills, all you want but at the end of the day a car stereo converged with a pc/pda/3g/whatever may do loads of other good stuff for you, but lets not forget what its there for.
It should be all about the music .....................and a long open road ................with no cameras !

The source will just be a repository and selection device for the play lists with the music produced by the car or the speaker system when we decide what we want to hear and then you are looking at what the Empeg team are so good at features and UI...

That is a reasonable summary of where we are now, actually. Whether you have a CD player or an empeg, the source unit actually contributes little to the betterment (or detraction) of the sound quality.

But I am not as optimistic as you about the future. Aftermarket stereo shops that see the writing on the wall are branching out into other areas as quickly as they can as car audio becomes more and more integrated with the vehicle itself, causing changes/enhancements to the stock system to become more and more difficult and expensive.

This means that in the not too distant future, we may well be confined to whatever the manufacturers of the cars deem to be appropriate -- and those manufacturers are not driven by sound quality concerns, they are driven by bean counters.

When 90% or more of the new car buyers do not care in the least whether their car stereo is flat to 15,000 Hz, or that the bass and sub-bass are truly linear with volume changes, do you think that they're going to spend and extra $100 per car to put in top quality speakers? Not when you consider that that $100 times 50,000 cars amounts to millions of dollars in lost profits.

I think that right now we are living in the golden age of car audio. Enjoy it while it lasts.

tanstaafl.

When 90% or more of the new car buyers do not care in the least whether their car stereo is flat to 15,000 Hz, or that the bass and sub-bass are truly linear with volume changes, do you think that they're going to spend and extra $100 per car to put in top quality speakers? Not when you consider that that $100 times 50,000 cars amounts to millions of dollars in lost profits.

I think that right now we are living in the golden age of car audio. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I think that's a bit pessimistic. Sure, the local installers may have issues, but I think the overall market is bigger now than ever before, and the supply chain has changed dramatically over the last ten years. It is no longer necessary to buy only the amps or speakers that are within a reasonable drive from you - the internet has changed that significantly. Ok, so mail order was possible before, but web transactions are so much easier. Ebay has exploded the second hand market, and information about brands and models (and how well they work in you car) is easier to obtain. Granted, you have to learn how to filter out the noise but...
There is a big issue with integration of the HU with newer cars. But ultimately the big OEMs will work around that one. Standards for integration with other car systems will evolve, and life will go on. Sure the paradigm is shifting, and companies will need to change. I fully expect that includes car companies. Already, the stock or factory systems in many cars is far superior to those of a few years back. But you are right when you say they will have financial limitations on their quality. However we will eventually see competition. At the moment we are seeing strategic partnerships, which are part of the transitional stage. When potential Lexus customers decide that they'd rather own an MP3 capable car stereo than one with the Mark Levison brand name, Lexus will start to consider an open architecture again. When VW start losing sales to Ford purely because the Phatbox is crap, and the Visteon rocks, they will start thinking the same way.
I don't think that the car manufacturers have lost the plot on this issue. I do think that they're having a difficult time coming to grips with the whole integration thing, but they'll get over it.

When VW start losing sales to Ford purely because the Phatbox is crap, and the Visteon rocks, they will start thinking the same way.

Are you refering to Visteon's Mach MP3 Jukebox player?

Nah. The empeg guys developed a prototype for Visteon that was presented at CES this year. Search the board for Visteon and you'll find it, along with some pictures.

Ahh.. I guess I was confused as Visteon is a company, and not a product..