Mindless Juices

I fixed my car today. Well, I fixed the speaker that wasn't sounding right on the passenger side. It did turn out to be a loose connection. It likely came loose on the "final" door slam before Mike and I hit the road after installing the rear speakers. It was a simple enough fix and now my car sounds significantly better. Seriously, what a difference 25% of your sound makes... hehe. So, a while back, when I was working at Circuit City, I asked one of the Road Shop guys which would you buy first if you could only buy one or the other: Speakers or a new head unit? The head unit (a.k.a. - "deck") seemed to be the consensus. Now, after installing new speakers on a factory head unit, I can tell you that there is NO WAY a head unit is the way to go, especially if you can increase the size of your speakers. For example, in the 1995 Civic, there are 4 1/4" speakers in the car from the factory. However, when you replace them with aftermarket, you install 5 1/2" speakers. This requires some minor modifications to your car, but all mods are hidden beneath speaker covers, so they don't even have to look all that pretty. That extra inch and a quarter of cone combined with separate tweeters built-in the Infinity speakers made a HUGE difference in both power and quality of sound using just my factory deck. Now, here's the important part: these speakers were in Sabrina's Integra and sounded just as good on an after market head unit with more power. In fact, I would be hard pressed to hear the difference between the two. In fact, the only difference I can tell is that "too loud" simply comes earlier on the volume scale of the after market head unit. Based on what I know about sound and electronics, as long as the "too loud" point is at 75% colume or below, you have sufficient power to make you happy while maintaining good quality. You hit "too loud" around 50% on the after market deck... and about 75% on the factory deck. So, the moral of the story: If you want to upgrade your mobile sound system, and care about SOUND, not features, then upgrade speakers first. Unless you have a desire for a CD player or Aux In, and even then, go cheap and put more money into getting better speakers. The only other features regarding a deck revolve mainly around amps. Many modern after market decks offer more/better tone control and various crossover and EQ settings. However, all of this means nothing if you don't have speakers with good frequency response and separate tweeters and woofers (and subs, if applicable). Wow, it sounds like I know a thing or two about sound, doesn't it? I don't, but I still think I might be smarter than the average bear. So, if you're an average bear buying mobile stereo equipment, listen to me.