Yes, and it reaffirmed what I already believe based on my experiences in home audio years ago. I remember the hugely expensive magic copper speaker cables that the long gone audio stores used to push on me; promising me vastly improved sound qaulity over the regular priced copper speaker wire. Sadly as a young man I fell for it and even though I couldn’t tell the difference, I somehow believed it anyway and blamed the reason for not hearing the difference on some other weak link in my equipment line.
This business is like the mattress business where the consumer in most cases is buying a blind product. They can’t see or understand what’s inside the box so they have to trust reviews or the reputation of the company and hope for the best. These products often times are overpriced and over promise on what they can deliver. For me, CD qaulity is fine for car audio, and I’m pretty happy with that. The manufactureres that have to sell product and turn a profit though will keep showing us those truncated pretty graphs, and they will try to convince me that I need to have an audio format capable of supporting sound up to 40k Hz, lol. I can barely hear sound above 18k hz now.
If I were to recommend where to put most of your money to get the best sounding system on a budget than I would say, put it into the actual installation like treating the doors, and building a box for a subwoofer that is ideal for the sub being used. Buy good amplifiers, but I would say you do not need to get crazy there. See Bigblank69 videos, for which he is doing a great service to our community there. Get a good HU, and get decent component speakers, or the best you can afford and make sure they are installed correctly and wired correctly with the right amount of clean amplifier power. Make sure your amplifiers have good supply power input, with OFC cable of good quality, and 16 gauge speaker wire or more for subs. Use tuning tools like time alignment, available on most all decent head units. Even better, if you can afford it, use a DSP for tuning. All of these things will have a greater effect on sound quality than the difference between a 320k mp3 vs a lossless file.
So before I get quoted up the *** and flamed; remember that this is just my opinion based on my own experiences over the years. I’m not trying to push this on anyone who doesn’t want to listen. Remember I said that I haven’t actually tried high resolution audio and currently I do not plan to until the prices come down or someone wants to let me audition it on their system. I would love to find a car audio show/meet in my area to have the opportunity to do so but sadly the car audio business seems to be near dead now.
