Is car audio any good for home use?

Does anyone use car audio in the house to good effect? I like the idea of looking in less usual places for hifi components - got a couple of cheap pro dacs that work a treat and undoubtedly challenge more expensive home hifi components. This led me to wondering if anyone has explored car audio components as a cheap and high quality alternative to the expensive dedicated home hifi market. Are there real reasons why this would not be a viable alternative?

Chris

 

Car Hifi runs on a 12 Volt DC power supply.

Homes don't come with 12 Volt DC power supplies.

For a car stereo capable of 4 x 40 Watts, you will need a fairly sophisticated (i.e. expensive) power supply.

A high powered ATX unit from an old computer might do it but bear in mind that these are not designed to deliver their full power rating on the 12 Volt lines alone. And they have fans. And don't even think of parallelling them.

Otherwise you will probably have to build one and that means a high power transformer, bridge rectifier and capacitors and a box to put it in at the very least. Don't forget that the bridge rectifier will need heatsinking by at least bolting it to the casework.

Frankly it's not worth the effort

 

Yep, unless you want to run your hifi off a car battery (which you will need to charge every so often) it will be complicated.

 

Plus, I could be wrong here - but I've always found car stereo gear to be extremely poorly manufactured - with even the higher end gear tending to cater for 'looks' and/or 'absolute power output' over quality.

I remember years back, a friend showing me a car which had been fitted out with a fairly hefty invertor (possibly a DIY job - I think it converted 12VDC to 48VAC or similar) with what I believe were some old large-box Mission speakers in the boot. The amp was only rated at 30watt per chnl, but sounded 10x better (and 10x louder - without distortion!) than car stereos costing much much more (complete with their silly boy racer 'peak' ratings).

The situation may have changed nowadays (the above was shown to me probably 6 or more years ago now) - but I still suspect the car gear is generally over-rated (in every sense of the word) and caters for a market with different values than ourselves.

Of course, most of the above is a bit subjective - and just because 99% of boy racers use cheap amps/speakers and deafen themselves (well, they must be deaf - you can hear the distortion from a mile away) doesn't mean all the kit is that bad ...

But yes, as someone else suggested - a 12V PSU to power this gear might be a costly thing ...

Steve

 

car audio

I didn't appreciate it would be so complicated from the outset, leaving aside the question of whether the quality made the effort worthwhile. I thought the gear could be hooked up to some sort of inverter. So there's no good quality car audio (using the sort of standards we apply to home audio) from what's been said so far.

 

there are actually some good sounding car systems out there but they take a lot of hard work to get that way and are almost completely diametrically opposed to the way that you'd go for home hi-fi. for exaple active filters are very common with on board time alignment and proper dsp systems (not the a/v stunt ones). also most systems run off seperate batteries and a bank of 1 farad (that's a huge amount) capacitors to take care of big bass.
car sound off's aren;t just about spl's (although true wmd levels are generated in this class) but there are also sound quality classes which are up there with the best of home hi-fi. if wadia miester was about he's be able to wax lyrical on the subject but unfortunately he's taking a sabatical from forum life.
cheers


julian

 

This is of course one farad at 12 volts,and whilst a good amount of capacity,(1 amp/second's worth of electrons at 12V)its not too far off that stored in many valve amps in the HT caps,and certainly well below that of a decent set of Krells...

 

I haven't done any car audio for many years but back then the British made Genesis 'class A' amps had a good reputation and sounded good to my ears. Also some brands, 'Becker' for instance did head units that put sound above features.
Things may be quite different now though.

 

I've got a Becker Mexico Pro slot load CD/tuner head unit in my car and it's bloody marvelous. Excellent sound quality and a lot of useful (mainly tuner related) features you don't get on most car radios and plain understated looks that fit my BMW interior perfectly:



Michael.