Sensitivity

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

Ah, is the term I'm looking for DC converter or a step-up converter? I really don't know much about how most electronics work so

There's a few ways of boosting the operating voltage, but they all add cost. The beauty of a 12v DC (14.4v actually) supply is that you don't need a power supply per se. The least expensive method to deliver high power is to use a lot of output transistors in parallel, allowing a lot of current delivery, but the load impedance has to be very low to get high power at low voltage.

[iamlowsound]

In the early days of car audio before switching supplies and inverters, nominal 12 volts was the operating rail voltage available for the power amps; actually around 14.1 with the engine running.

This means with a non-bridged complimentary output topology you could realize a whopping 8.9W RMS across an 8 ohm load, or 17.98W if you had a 4 ohm speaker available.

Still holds true today for modern Head Units. Regardless of what the box says your aftermarket HU only puts out ~12.5 watts RMS/channel give or take depending on how much THD you want in your measurement.

In the real world though, how much volume do you really need in a car?

You need all that power so you can hear those 83dB/W speakers talked about in the beginning of the thread . Seriously though you ideally would want at least 20 dB above the noise floor of your vehicle. Loud car on highway would need a louder system to overcome road noise.

It's not like it's the ideal listening environment for high quality audio.

Totally disagree if its done right. Car audio is the one place where I can guarantee the listeners ears to within a few inches. Time aligning each driver to the millisecond and balancing 28 bands of left/right EQ not only for tonal balance but for left/right positioning can make for a near perfect soundstage. Hearing your favorite tunes with the band at eye level and spread left/right across the hood of the car as they are on stage is as awesome as your first time at a concert with decent seats.

IME the level in dB is inversely proportional to the IQ of the driver.

Uh Oh . My system goes to 128dB @ 50hz and I still use tube driven preamps . I however blame the designer of the sub box for that

I have always wanted to put a MiniDSP into a stock car audio environment and put it into a SQ competition; just to see what happens.

lowsound

[byacey]

You need all that power so you can hear those 83dB/W speakers talked about in the beginning of the thread . Seriously though you ideally would want at least 20 dB above the noise floor of your vehicle. Loud car on highway would need a louder system to overcome road noise.

Totally disagree if its done right. Car audio is the one place where I can guarantee the listeners ears to within a few inches. Time aligning each driver to the millisecond and balancing 28 bands of left/right EQ not only for tonal balance but for left/right positioning can make for a near perfect soundstage. Hearing your favorite tunes with the band at eye level and spread left/right across the hood of the car as they are on stage is as awesome as your first time at a concert with decent seats.

Speaking from a recording engineering standpoint, there are too many things working against the quest for a quality listening environment. High ambient noise levels, too many reflective surfaces, especially concerning HF, and non-ideal speaker placement due to physical constraints, to name a few.

I'm not saying that I don't enjoy listening to music in my vehicle, just that I don't ever expect to hear the same way I hear in the control room of the studio.

83db/watt @1m is a pretty inefficient speaker. Is that anything modern? It sounds more akin to a load resistor.