Video: What's Wrong with Factory Speakers?
Learn more about why stock speakers sound the way they do
Crutchfield car audio expert Charlie had a problem. As a lifelong musician, he loved listening to music, but he found himself listening to talk radio during his commute. Then he swapped out his factory speakers and discovered a hidden truth: factory car speakers are poorly built and sound pretty awful. Watch him tell you the story about one of the easiest ways to improve the sound in your car. Then read about Charlie's current car stereo system here.
To find out which speakers will fit your car, use our Outfit My Car tool, and we'll help you get into better sound when you're on the road.
Read video transcript
Hi I'm Charlie. I've worked at Crutchfield for over fifteen years and I'm a musician. I've listened to music and played music all my life. I realized that I was listening to sports radio and talk radio 98% of the time and I just thought something was wrong with me, but somebody suggested changing the speakers in the car. So I put some Boston Acoustic speakers in there and low and behold I'm playing CDs again every day. I haven't listened to the radio in years.
And the point of all this is the culprit behind the bad sound in my car was something like this, admittedly a very worn factory speaker, but this is what a factory speaker looks like. And you'll see it's a paper cone with a sort of, it had a foam surround.it's probably disappeared years ago. Not a very big magnet. You'll find speakers like this in every factory system.
The manufacturer of the car sub-contracts the speakers out to somebody and they make the speaker as cheaply as they possibly can. And you know, I'm not saying every factory system sounds horrible, but as a general rule, they sound pretty horrible.
So what happens is you'll pull these things out of your car and put in an aftermarket speaker, something like this. This is an Infinity Kappa speaker, really designed to be powered with an amplifier, but you get an idea of some of the materials they use in these aftermarket speakers.
It's a woven glass-fiber cone. It's a dome tweeter that's made out of a sort of a metal hybrid material, a rubber surround so the speaker will play in your car for years without breaking down, a very large magnet, and a separate crossover network on the back that separates the highs and the lows going to the elements in the speaker.
So what happens when you take this thing out of your car and put this thing in? The first thing you'll notice is the bass sounds different. It won't boom. It gets tighter and more focused. You'll hear much better high end response and much better upper mid-range so the vocals and the instruments will sound very natural and very present.
The most impressive thing you'll hear is stereo sound stage which means you'll be sitting in your car hearing out of your speakers roughly what the sound engineer mixed when he was in the recording studio. If you spend a half an hour, you know, or more a day in your car driving to and from work in my book, for the price of a set, you know, a set of speakers up front and in back in your vehicle you just can't beat that.
That's all I got to say. Thank you.
Meet Charlie Pastorfield
My mission in life: cool guitars, Asian food, and helping you build a great car audio system.
I played rock'n'roll professionally from the 1970s up to 1995, and had a great career travelling up and down the East Coast playing clubs and opening shows for bands like The Kinks, The Beach Boys, James Brown, George Thorogood, Little Feat, Bob Weir, and lots of others. The time came for me to get off the road in 1995, and I'd heard that Crutchfield loved to hire musicians. I came straight here to apply for my very first job at the age of 44, and I've been happy working here ever since.
I first worked as an Advisor here at Crutchfield. Spending time on the phones, I soon learned that our customers trust us to give them accurate info and to recommend the right products. My experiences assembling PA systems for my bands put me in good stead when it came to helping people put together systems for their cars.
After a couple of years, I started writing for the Crutchfield catalog, where I learned the value of getting to the point quickly. Our web site really started taking off, and I was offered the job of writing about our products online.
I still play music frequently so I get to hear the latest pro audio gear on a regular basis, including a lot of the products we sell. I haven't been able to live with the stock sound system in any of my vehicles since I started at Crutchfield, and I've learned a lot by putting new systems in all my cars. And I have also put together a really nice home audio setup that has rekindled my love affair with records.
My life has always been about music, and Crutchfield allows me to continue that passion. We literally think, talk, and write about audio and video products all day long — and that's a good thing!
More about Charlie
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