If you remember our discussion last month about sound quality, you know that it's the most important part of a great car stereo system. Since you are all such good students, I know that you all took my advice and attended a live concert to "tune" your ears to good sound. You probably noticed how each instrument has a unique and instantly recognizable sound that must be reproduced correctly for your system to sound right. But I'll bet you also noticed something else. If you closed your eyes, you could pick out where each instrument and singer was located on the stage; this is also known as imaging. In addition, you could tell how high, how far away, and how wide the stage was just by listening. If someone blindfolded you and walked you to the stage, you could also instantly recognize the size of the room that you were in. These qualities are called staging. Good imaging and staging are absolutely critical if you want to make your car sound like a realistic live performance, and they are also the most difficult to get right in the automotive environment. Making a car sound like the natural environment of a given recording is quite an achievement, so here are several steps you can take to make it work in your ride.
Cars are small, with lots of highly reflective surfaces like glass, leather, and plastic. All of these things conspire to make your car sound like, well, a car inside. The first thing you can do to give yourself a competitive advantage is to pick a car that is conducive to good sound. Generally larger is better, since this gets you closer to the size of the real stage, and cloth interior surfaces will always absorb more reflective sound than vinyl or leather. A long, narrow vehicle is also better than a wide, short one. For example, a full-size pickup truck usually makes a terrible vehicle for sound quality, while a large sedan makes a very good one. The reason for this phenomenon is something called "pathlengths"
To understand this term, take a tape measure and go sit in your car. Measure the distance from your nose to the left speaker, then do the same for the right speaker. The difference in these two numbers is the pathlength difference in your system. To get realistic imaging and staging, you must make the pathlengths as close as possible. If your car forces you to sit too close to the near side speaker, all of the instruments in the soundstage will collapse to that side of the car. Now you see why it's harder to get good imaging and staging in the pickup truck than in the sedan. While you have the tape measure out, see if you can find a spot in your car where the pathlengths would be more equal than the stock speaker locations (which are probably in the dash or the doors). In most vehicles, that spot is the kick panels, the area beside the footwells, and in front of the doors. This location gets the speakers as far away from the seats as possible, making the pathlengths more equal. Most of the successful competition cars out there today use some form of kick panel speakers to win sound-offs - proof that the design is good.