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The "A Word"
Edmunds.com
Member, Administrator, Moderator Posts: 10,315
The "A Word"
The 2015 Porsche Macan S offers an optional Bose audio system. It thinks of itself as kind of a big deal.
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Comments
You get hours of entertainment watching your host dink around with every button and slider on their system.
If it's not Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger in the phone booth on vinyl, it's not music.
You know, there is no doubt that the interior of a car is tough to design for, but on the other hand, they have lots and lots of time to come to their own EQ settings that they call, "flat." The interior of the average listening room presents a wide variety more- and less-absorptive and reflective surfaces, just like a car does, and frequently in a much less symmetrical layout relative to the speakers, too. And neither your sound system nor your listening room was designed and arranged by a sound engineer with a huge budget and a lot of time to spend, like your car was. Your car is a known, single-template listening environment.
Some other wild cards in a listening room, along with no real acoustic engineering or tuning other than following general rules on speaker placement and a balance of absorbent and reflective surfaces, are windows and doors that can be open or closed, ceiling fans, etc. The wild cards in a car are wind, road and drivetrain noise...but in a car those can be compensated for to an extent with active noise reduction/cancellation, because it's a known listening environment.
Can you get better-quality hardware in a car by going aftermarket, for the same money? Absolutely. Can you integrate them as well acoustically? I guess you could, but probably not for the same money.
The audiophile question? I don't have a dog in this fight - the people who spend $50 a foot on their cabling and interconnects, and have their listening chair bolted to the floor in the supposed sweet spot are going overboard, and the people who say their heavily-compressed source material coming through $40 earbuds is good enough, and laugh at the audiophiles, are doing it in the other direction. Sorry - that's all I got.
In this Macan, I think it's kind of silly to have controls for bass, treble, midrange...or even multi-band - and then have a separate defeat setting. You want to defeat all that? Just set everything back to 0.