"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
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"Richard Crowley" wrote in message
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"Don Pearce" wrote in message
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On Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:51:44 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

I've been gone from the car audio biz for 20 years. Used to be 2-3
brands,
like Philips, whose speakers were considered top quality, in terms of
construction. Now, I'm totally in the dark as far as brands. Who's
making
top-quality stuff these days? I realize personal taste will determine
the
final purchase.


There are specifically car-audio groups out there where you will get
some much better informed advice than you are going to find here.

There are even occasional queries here from people who
misread the "audio" in the newsgroup name as "auto"! :-)


No - I didn't misread that. This seemed like a logical place for my
question. When I was in the audio biz, we allowed our tech to leave his
office whenever he wanted, and his knowledge of car audio was equal to his
knowledge of home audio and sound reinforcement. If there are any working
audio technicians here, it's not entirely unreasonable to assume they
might have knowledge of car audio issues.

The same rules would seem to apply for car speakers as for any other kind,
it's just that the loading is different.

If you can find posts from B. Feng, IIRC, he worked for Ford Motor Co. in
the Auto sound division.

My apologies if I am misremebering.

As always with speakers there is the matter of personal taste. There are
now programs that can map out the interior of a car to give someone a much
better idea of what sort of response a given speaker will have in a given
cabin. And it is amazing how much difference the space can make.

I remember reading about one of the GM installations where they were putting
in a system optimized for a particular car. There was another make that had
the same body and cabin except for a difference of 1 inch in the depth of
the rear deck, which made as much as 20 dB difference in some frequencies.

The point I'm trying to make is that in the 20 years since you were involved
in it, car audio has come a long way and can actually compete with home
audio in terms of sound quality, when you consider that an installation can
be designed specifically for a given car cabin.