Last year at the Florida International Audio Expo, I noted with a feeling of wistfulness that the entire parking lot was packed with cars featuring extremely high-end audio systems. I did a quick walk-around that year, but I didn’t have time to really investigate the goings-on. I’ve always had a love of car audio, but when we had our daughter, I pivoted away from the hobby because I rarely had the opportunity to crank it up, so the urge to keep modifying new vehicles quickly faded. But this was something I really wanted to check out.
Angie Landis
This year, I made the time. When I walked out to see what was what, the first person I met was Angie Landis, who lives in Lutz, Florida. She was pointing the open trunk of her car directly at the hotel. I wandered up and took a look inside.
Angie’s car, a 2020 Toyota Avalon, was that perfect combination of well-crafted custom installation and carefully curated stock appearance. The trunk was a showpiece, with three 12″ subwoofers and three amplifiers, all of which were highlighted by LED strips. The amplifiers’ guts were on full display, with plexiglass covers. It was slick, professional, and extremely cool.
The three Helix amplifiers comprised a 1300W class-AB mono amplifier for the subwoofers and two four-channel amplifiers with 150Wpc for the front speakers. The crossover and DSP were contained in one unit, also from Helix. All speakers were from Audiofrog.
Inside the cabin, the car looked totally stock. The only clue that there was an aftermarket system was the low-profile 6″ mid-woofer down low in the side of each footwell. Angie invited me inside the car for a listen.
Now let me be clear. These cars were not the type you hear on the street making boom-fart dinosaur sounds, with the license plates rattling. “I can’t stand those kids,” said Angie, with obvious disgust in her voice. “They don’t know what sound quality is.” The gathering outside the hotel was a sanctioned IASCA (International Auto Sound Challenge Association) event, which focuses on sound quality, tonal balance, image solidity, and overall realism—essentially everything audiophiles prize. Angie is a regular competitor at IASCA events, and she’s a true enthusiast.
The game changer that arrived after I left the world of car audio was DSP. Using room (cabin) correction to compensate for phase errors, timing, frequency imbalance, and positioning provided the ability to fix the main issues that had always plagued car audio. You have to sit off to one side, and the speakers aren’t all in one central spot, and the cabin itself creates a ton of nasty standing waves and reflections. DSP addresses all of that.
Complications abound in car audio these days. The stereo systems are deeply woven into the electronic infrastructure of the vehicle and it takes a clever, experienced installer to extricate the signal from a stock head unit. Angie’s system uses the stock head unit, but her installer had tapped into the Toyota bus system and fished out a TosLink output that topped out at 32‑bit/96kHz resolution, which was then fed into the DSP.
The sound quality would absolutely shock you. I asked Angie to cue up Colin Stetson’s “Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes,” and Shara Worden’s voice was a rock-solid presence right up front with a center image that rivaled anything I’ve heard in my own system. And the bass—obviously there was a ton of deep, tight bass, as that’s probably one of the easiest-to-achieve features of car audio. Cabin gain allows pressurization with far fewer drivers than are needed in a standard listening room. Stetson’s bass sax rocked the car with pressure waves, but the interesting thing was that the overtones and distortion on the top end of the sax were perfectly integrated into the overall presentation.
I wandered around the lot a while longer and ended up talking to Michael Myers, who owns The Sound Factory, a car-stereo-installation company in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mike’s car was a 2021 Subaru Forester, and this was another stunning installation. The trunk featured the same three-amp layout, but the subwoofer was one single 15″ Hybrid Audio driver located below the amp rack in a hand-laid fiberglass enclosure that followed the shape of the spare-tire well. The amplifiers and DSP were from ARC Audio and all speakers were from Hybrid Audio. The head unit was a Sony ES touchscreen, so neatly installed in the dash that it looked stock.
Mike echoed Angie’s belief that DSP represented a complete paradigm shift for the industry, elevating the precision of the sound in ways that were previously impossible. I can totally believe it. The sound in Mike’s car was superbly neutral. Of course, there was unlimited bass on hand as Mike cycled through some of his own demo material. But it wasn’t cartoonish, over-the-top bass. Despite the fact that we were listening loud inside the car, you probably couldn’t hear it outside unless you were standing right next to the vehicle.
We listened to music by the Cars and Steely Dan, along with some newer stuff I didn’t recognize. It was an immersive demo, with, again, a solid center image completely detached from the disparate speakers.
I asked Mike how much it would cost to recreate this system in a customer’s car. “The total retail cost, including equipment, and installation is $19,500,” he responded, “$12,200 for equipment and the rest for labor.” Holy hell—you could easily spend that much money on a pair of speaker cables.
Let me repeat: the sound quality in Angie’s and Mike’s cars rivalled anything you would hear in a demo room inside the Florida International Audio Expo. The world of car audio that I inhabited always aimed at sound quality. I had the same goals as these IASCA folks, but the maturity of the electronics has elevated it to a point where it rivals home audio. You should check out one of these events. It would shock you how good this stuff is.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
