Car audio doesn’t have to be expensive or complex

 

I took a two-pronged attack for getting my audio setup working. I’d installed a car stereo once before, so I went about doing that myself. Even if you’re relatively inexperienced, as I am, this is often something that takes just a few hours. A nylon prybar, a screwdriver, and a wire stripper are often all you need to get started. There’s a lot of time spent twisting copper together, but none of it is rocket science. I’m not the kind of person who has piles of capacitors and resistors in my workshop – I’m a strictly plug-and-play guy when it comes to most of my electronics, and I’m much more comfortable inside a computer than under a dashboard – I’m not a car guy.

Not only does Crutchfield email you instructions to get started, YouTube is a veritable superstore of instructional videos when it comes to stuff like this. Before you buy anything, check out some tutorials for your car, and you can get an idea of what you’re getting yourself into.

For the speakers, those YouTube videos were what helped me make the decision to have professional installation done. Some cars will use removable harnesses for the stock speakers in your doors and rear deck, or have holes drilled in the right spots ahead of time. My Corolla doesn’t – it asks you to drill new holes and punch your screwdriver through the old speakers, destroying them in the process. There’s no going back once you damage the speaker membrane. With that said, it still isn’t highly technical labor. If you have a good drill and some spare confidence, actually putting speakers in is mostly just a bit of drilling and a connecting up a couple color-coded wires.

So I took my car to a local car-audio place and had them connect up the speakers I’d picked out – Kenwood’s 1665S and 6965S – while I ate Skittles in the waiting room.

I worried a little bit through the installation that I’d have a hard time discerning my new speakers from the old ones, despite the built-in speakers being of visibly low quality. As soon as I pumped some tunes into them, though, the difference wasn’t just apparent, it was like night and day. Drums sound like drums. Audio is cleaner and clearer even at lower volumes, while higher volumes don’t distort like they do on lesser setups.

The main components for my setup cost me less than $200, though splurging on the steering wheel adapter and some tools helped raise the price for parts north of $250. If I had installed the speakers myself, the investment would’ve ended there. Going with a professional tacked another $150 or so onto the total bill. In the process, though, I learned a lot about my car and ended up with a vehicle that’s a joy to drive. I can annoy the cars on either side of me with clean, crystal-clear curse words, and my favorite sounds sound exactly like I expect them to sound instead of being a barely-acceptable facsimile.

For how much time many of us spend in our cars, an investment like that pays for itself in just a few months. It might be something to save up for, for sure, but it’s far from a pipe dream. If you have a long commute each day or like to go on road trips, you’ll get, pun completely intended, plenty of mileage out of an improved stereo system. You don’t have to go over the top and get a touch screen, a beefy amp, and a huge subwoofer that consumes all your trunk space to make huge improvements to your setup and make the experience of driving significantly more pleasurable.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/03/11/car-audio-accessible/