Car Audio Installation: It’s Much More Difficult Than It Once Was

You’ve decided that you want to upgrade the car audio system in your vehicle. Great. We love great car audio so you are speaking our language. What we want you to consider carefully is who is going to do the work on your vehicle. “How bad can it be?  I installed a new stereo in my 2003 Corolla, and it was easy.” We hear you, but for the most part, those days are long gone. Most modern cars use a bus network to allow many parts of the vehicle to communicate with each other, and your stereo system is integrated into that bus network. If you make a mistake when you are installing your new tunes, you can cause major damage to the vehicle.  Even if this does not happen, you might find that the sound you ended up with was not what you wanted.  The good news is the staff at Audio Designs and Custom Graphics are skilled in all aspects of car audio installation.

Adding Bass Has Become More of A Challenge

Let’s assume you want to add some bass to your vehicle. In year’s past, you could connect a line level converter to the rear speakers to grab your musical signal, and then connect it to your amplifier. This way has also become a thing of the past in many modern vehicles. The rear speakers in your vehicle may be part of an active crossover network, and the signal you are grabbing literally may not have all of the music in it.  The result would sound lousy. What makes matters even worse is that many modern systems include an equalization curve that rolls off the bass at higher volumes. So you would crank up your stereo and at a certain point your speakers in the vehicle would continue to get louder, yet the bass would be getting quieter. Doesn’t sound like fun, does it?

Factory Equalization Is An Enemy Of Great Sound

So let’s assume you could care less about adding bass, but you wanted better sound out of the front speakers.  You buy a set of great speakers, install them, and they sound bad. What gives? Again, many new systems have equalization curves designed to make their cheap speakers sound better. Now that you have added better speakers, that equalization curve actually hurts the sound of your new speakers. You may also be experiencing an active crossover network, where the amplifier in the vehicle is dividing up the musical signal before it reaches your new speakers. So if your new speakers were not designed to reproduce the same frequencies that the factory had in mind, you will have a “hole” in your sound, and that will sound nasty.

Car Audio Installation:  Take It To An Expert

There is good news. We understand all of this stuff and we take a very different approach to getting it right the first time. When we begin any audio upgrade, we start by doing a diagnostic on your audio system.  This will show us any equalization curves, active crossover networks, and so on in your vehicle. Based on our findings, we will know exactly how to tie in our quality aftermarket components to best meet your goals. We can do this because we own thousands of dollars in very sophisticated audio analyzers and are well-trained in the operation.

With all this being said, all of us at Audio Designs and Custom Graphics invite you to stop by our facility. We will take a look at your vehicle and scope it out along with you.  After auditioning some components we will professionally install it so that you get the most out of your investment.  That is what you really want, isn’t it?