How do you develop a soundstage/image from the driver's seat?
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But with road noise, wind noise, engine noise, hard surfaces, too small of a space, too much hard surface, and improper listening location I don't get putting the audiophile tag on any car system.
It's doable but there are compromises...that and what you end up with falls short of your home system even spending tons of cash.
The first hurdle is road/wind noise. If you own a tiny econo-box car, it gets extremely hard to overcome the noise. When you get up into a mid-sized or larger car, they tend to be much quieter from the factory. Even with these cars you need to (essentially) rip out the interior and coat the doors, floor board, firewall, roof, back seat divider and trunk with some sort of damping material. This, though expensive, will drop the noise floor of your car dramatically when driving.
On the soundstage, when you do one of these systems, you get just an OK soundstage (at least in my car). I (personally) get about two to three feet of depth when I'm driving maybe four or five at a stoplight (where you can pay attention). Placement with all of those hard interior surfaces can be a little sketchy at times but you do get a decent center focus. Placement picks up when sitting still but when you are driving your mental focus on that leaves (or should). At that point it just becomes really fine sounding music. One thing I've done to help with all of the reflective surfaces is install sticky backed felt around the tweeters to try and eliminate the immense amount of baffle diffraction. That really helps out a lot.
That said, in my case I'm more interested in realistic sounding instruments, vocals and dynamics. Sure, the dynamics can be a bit dampened because of a higher noise floor but they are still there in a good 12v system. The realism is a huge step up over a factory sound system not to mention you get deep solid bass from a proper sub. You aren't relying on some 4x6 door mounted speaker to reproduce a stand up bass, kettle or kick drum.
And sure, cranking it isn't supposed to be part of this forum but
oh dear Lord, when you lean on a good 12v system there is no bigger thrill you can get (in music).
It's a lot of work and you can dump as much cash into it as you want but the end result can be
extremely satisfying for the audiophile, sometimes more so than a home system.
