stuck in the 70's guy using today's tech

[stupidhead]

hello folks!
My name is Geoff and I am an audio enthusiast! Home audio has long been my focus, and is a bit of a hobby. To help paint my preferences for equipment and sound I of course love warm tubes sound, have multiple Marantz receivers and lean towards AR (Acoustic Research) and generally what is called East Coast sound.
As for car audio, I am friendly with a guy who runs a very well respected Car audio store and have had him put systems together for me over the years, but the technology of today has exploded and I am thinking I want to explore and make decisions based on my exact desires, not what the masses do.
I will post a more detailed post in a sub forum but just wanted to reach out and introduce myself.
TIA

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[hispls 5,000+ posts]

hello folks!
My name is Geoff and I am an audio enthusiast! Home audio has long been my focus, and is a bit of a hobby. To help paint my preferences for equipment and sound I of course love warm tubes sound, have multiple Marantz receivers and lean towards AR (Acoustic Research) and generally what is called East Coast sound.
As for car audio, I am friendly with a guy who runs a very well respected Car audio store and have had him put systems together for me over the years, but the technology of today has exploded and I am thinking I want to explore and make decisions based on my exact desires, not what the masses do.
I will post a more detailed post in a sub forum but just wanted to reach out and introduce myself.
TIA

Welcome aboard. Not sure exactly where you live in NH, but Mike over at M&C in Portsmouth has been around for ages. Ritchie at Auto Sounds is another old timer in the industry and Jack up over the border in Sanford is another guy that has been a shop owner since the 80s. You have some good options for veteran installers that I know of, and there may well be someone out in Manchester/Concord. I think there's a DD dealer out around Nashua which would probably be a good stop and there's a shop owner out that way who really supports the hobby by judging competitions in the region who would be well worthy of support.

Car audio is a whole different animal than in the home, you had better have deep pockets and time and patience to put in a lot of work if you want to start approaching what you can easily put together in your listening room in the house. Our challenge mostly revolves around the fact that a vehicle is simply an awful acoustic environment in which it is near impossible to get equal pathlengths between drivers and your ears and everything is an irregular shape and either reflecting or absorbing sound. Oh, and don't forget road noise!

We've come up with a lot of somewhat workarounds these days. The value of sound deadening and custom mounting locations for fronts cannot be understated, and most importantly we have some outstanding options for powerful digital processing which should not be ignored.

On the bright side, power is cheap, lithium batteries have revolutionized feeding these cheap big amps, head units with amazing built in processing are not so cheap with the flagship models but extremely high quality, and there's loads of options for reasonably priced speakers which can be made to sound very nice.

Good luck in achieving your goals and hopefully you can get out to one of the competitions/shows in the northeast and check out what other enthusiasts up here are doing.