How to Get Better Sound Quality in your Car
The sound quality of your car stereo is a big deal. When you pick out your music for a drive—whether it’s to decompress after a long day or to relax on a cross-country road trip—you want it to sound every bit as good as it does at home and with no sacrifice to the quality. Here are a few tips to make sure that your car sound system lives up to your music’s full potential.
1. Replace the sound system
The out-of-the-box speakers that come with your car are never usually the best in sound quality. Replace the factory stereo system with an after-market system. After the new speakers have been installed, you’ll be able to notice a world of difference in the sound quality and clarity and wonder why you took so long to make the switch.
2. Use a sound-deadening product
Cars, by nature, are not the best vehicle for sound quality. With the rattle of the road and the location of the speakers in the door panel, it’s not surprising why so much quality suffers when it comes to playing music in the car. A good way to remedy this in a cost-effective way is to install a sound-deadening product like Dynamat. When you install a sound-deadening product, it stabilizes the vibrations and steadies the sound, giving you a higher quality and more clarity.
3. Add an amplifier to the mix
As you would expect, adding an amplifier to any sound product and it’s going to make a huge difference in the output. Adding an amplifier will let you hear the music as it was intended to sound—with reverberation in the vocals and more precision with every note.
4. Add a subwoofer
Subwoofers are the ultimate accessory when it comes to improving the sound in your car. If you are really looking for that “wow” factor when you turn on the music, installing a subwoofer is really going to get you there. Though everyone famously knows subwoofers for really bringing the bass sound, you can adjust them to your personal music tastes and preferences. Just be aware that once you drive around with a subwoofer for a while, you won’t be able to listen to music in any other way.
5. Look at the music files themselves
Though everyone is always telling you to compress your files so that you have enough space for everything on your computer or your devices, you lose a little bit of sound quality when you do this. So, whenever you import or create new files, be sure to take a look at the default compression settings to use as little as you can for the sake of higher quality sound.
6. Adjust the sound settings on your phone
If you listen to music on your iPhone—like most people do nowadays—be sure to change the settings when you get into the car to improve the sound quality. If you have an iPhone, go to Settings, then Music, and then EQ. Once you’re at the EQ menu, there are tons of options for you to play around with to see what sounds best in your car and for your particular kind of music. (A note that this will only affect iTunes and not music apps like Spotify or Pandora.)
