Deal of the Day!!!

MacLeod

Eh, youd be surprised how much you can do simply by measuring. If youre one of those lucky enough to have one of those $1500 Audiocontrol RTA's you can get your system 85% of the way there from OUTSIDE the car.

You can correct all kinds of response humps and dips and you can level match left and right pretty damn close. You cant do everything with the RTA though, youll have to get in there and see how it sounds in real time.

So I wouldnt be surprised if the MS-8 can get you sounding pretty solid by itself. The time alignment Im kinda skeptical of but overall tonality shouldnt be that big of a problem.

You gotta remember that the EQ isnt there to necessarily shape the sound but rather correct for all the interference you get from the inside of a car. Thats why home audio rigs dont have EQ's - they dont have glass, hard plastic and skewed speaker angles to contend with. So all youre really doing is getting the car's interference out of the way to bring out the true sound of your particular speakers.

arun1963

Yeah, but 99.999% of people don't have RTA's. I'm getting on in years and hence have less and less to splurge on this hobby. Plus, I'm not competing. I'd rather drop money on a processor that is fully 'manual'.

The only thing I used for measuring was the spl meter. Did it like a maniac for a couple of months, got a big jump and then got confused as hell. Set a base and forgot about it for a while. Went back to it after a while.

The spl meter told me that 800hz was hotter from the far side by about 4 db's. So I set it that way and discovered that the centre image had shifted to nearly in front of me and the near tweet was jumping up and down and biting my head off screaming, 'I'm here, I'm here'. This, with the mids and tweets x'd at 5khz and the tweets on a 6db slope, mids on 24db .

The tweets playing 800hz made it much brighter, which in turn made the right side highs much brighter. Changed back to lowering 800hz on my side and the image shifted back to where it was. Measured it on the meter and sure enough the far side was 2 db hotter. Lack of independent driver control compounds the problem.

You're right, at the end of the day, you have to do it by ear. I think, thats because all these instruments measure the response of one frequency in the crappy environment. They don't measure across 10 octaves simultaneously. Frequencies at different amplitudes, changing in real time. Plus the effects of interactions between the frequencies.

A concept like the ms-8 assumes that we knows 85% of the way we hear and process sound. Don't know about the ears, but I'm quite sure we don't know 85% about how the brain processes sound.

Anywhere else and I would have gotten torched for a post like this. Just seems that you're the right person to talk to and this is the right forum.