Another reason to love the SVX

[lee]

This is a stereo system post so you can ignore the rest if your don't care about this topic.

There's two basic ways I know to get a good stereo soundstage image in a car.

1) Sit in the middle like in the McLaren F1 (anybody on this forum with enough money to buy one? If yes...can I be your friend ).

2) Time alignment. Several high-end head-units employ a signal processing scheme to electronically delay the signal so all the sound arrives at your ear at the same time.

So what does this have to do with the SVX? Of course this is dependent on how you sit in your car, but in mine the following conditions apply:

The cones of the two 10" woofers I use (back seat is always down in my car) happen to end up the same distance from my ears as the speaker in the passenger side door. It also turns out the tweeter has only about 1/2" different path length than the mid in the door.

So the only large correction that has to be made is for the driver's side, which surprisingly is less than a foot difference in path length.

Why should this matter? At least two reasons I can think of. Any sound coming from speakers at/near a crossover point will come out of more than one source - you want the paths to be equal to avoid muddying the sound. And two, even when not at a crossover point, you would like the sound of a chord spanning the various speakers to be in alignment, i.e., hit three or four widely spaced keys on a piano at the same time - it's nice to hear them at the same time too. Solo piano pieces always have been hell on stereo reproduction.

So all I have to correct is for the driver's side door and the sound stage magically appears directly in front of me instead of skewed over to the right - like I was sitting in the center vice on the left side at a concert.

Anyway, even if you don't have time alignment on your system, it's nice to know someone at Subaru seems to have spent a little time thinking about the quality of sound vice just sticking the speakers wherever there was room.