vidgamer

Want to further tweek your audio system? Here's an idea.

So I go through the effort of installing upgrade speakers, but there's still something not quite right. I finally got around to using a test CD, and in listening to the "in phase" and "out of phase" voice, I could tell that it sounded backwards! But, if I put my head in the center of the car (hard to drive that way, so I recommend doing it when not moving ), it sounds perfectly fine. Even though the speakers are correctly connected and in-phase, it sounds the opposite from the driver's seat.

Actually, I noticed this same issue in my previous car. So, I did tonight what I did before -- I flipped the phase of the left-front woofer speaker. Yup, they are now purposefully out of phase, at least for the center of the car where noone listens from! And yet, it's much improved in the driver's seat!

Mid-bass is much stronger now, and there is a better center image. Everything sounds so much better, I'm just blown away. The improvement actually seemed much more impressive than I expected.

Why does this effect happen? Since you don't sit right between the two speakers, the left & right sound waves are out of phase with respect to each other, at least in certain frequency ranges. Some ranges will be cancelled out, leaving holes in the sound (at least reduced levels, not completely empty holes mind you ). This is really bad for midrange, as you want singers to sound like they're right in front of you, and instead it's less-defined, like they're somewhat in front of you or all over the front or something.

Now, keep in mind that if you flip the phase 180 degrees, you're modifying the phase for all frequencies from that speaker, and you're probably throwing some out while you're bringing some in. This is not the perfect solution. However, all I care about is the bottom line -- how does it sound? It sounds great! So I'm in. I'm really pleased that it helped everything from mid-bass to midrange.

A bonus feature: note that even if you used digital delay to fix the seating position, you can only do that for one person, while your passenger gets crappy sound. This way, it'll sound great in both seats!

Avincar speaker upgrade... surround-sound in the rear... and phasing fix in the front.....
......... I have reached... Audio Nirvana.

(Is that overstating it? )

dark inspire

interesting...

jlukja

G.

So you just swapped the (+) and (-) leads on the front left door? You left the rears correctly phased?

vidgamer

The rear 6x9s need to stay in-phase! Else it'll ruin the bass. Low bass cancels out REAL easy if you are out-of-phase. But in the front, it's not the low bass that we're worried about, so the frequencies work a bit differently.

Yeah, I had to -- yet again -- disassemble the door, remove the speaker, and swap the two connectors. You'd think that all the times I've done that that'd I'd be better at removing and reassembling the door, but no... Actually, I can do it more quickly, but I always seem to forget to check something and have to undo it after having it part-way screwed in.

If you mean the rear doors, I dunno what to recommend...

The main thing to keep in mind is that the low bass will get cancelled out if two speakers are out of phase, but I wasn't finding low bass coming from the front speakers anyway, so that just didn't matter to me.