Good audio.

I miss my car stereo. I took my amps and my subs out a few months ago in order to make a custom trunk floor and re-locate my car battery. Between moving and other delays, it is still at my parent's house. Today not having my stereo was really killing me. As I've said in past posts, I love music. I love it when I hear something that makes the hair on the back of my neck and cheeks stand on end.

I built my car stereo for sound quality. I have more power feeding my door speakers than my subs. When other people hear my car stereo, they are amazed by how good it sounds even outside of the car. I have spent hours tweaking it until it sounded absolutely perfect. This included getting rid of various squeaks and buzzing.

This brings me to why I chose this topic for today. As I was filling up at the local gas station some moron pulls up next to my with their stereo BLASTING. It was soo horribly distorted, I don't understand how they could listen to it. I don't care how much you like the song...WHY!?! Are you trying to impress someone with evil sounds? Ladies, is hip-hop that is barely recognizable appealing? I don't get it.

I'm also confused as to why people buy iPods for over $300. You are only getting a measly 20GB hard drive. It does look cute and stylish, but $300 worth of style? Heck, a 100GB drive costs $200. I'm sure that apple is making at least $200 profit on each one of the iPods.

Then people go over to iTunes and spend $1 per song. WHY!?! Do you realize that you are getting a horribly compressed version of the song? You also aren't getting a hard copy of the song or the cover art. The other thing that I can't believe is that people are paying for music on iTunes that they already have. WHY!?!?!?!?! Get off you ass and learn how to make some high quality MP3s. I'll even give you the FREE tools...

Exact Audio Copy (the program)

LAME (the encoder)

EAC will run pretty well with the default settings. This is a true Power User's program. I've got mine set up to rip the CD, compress it, add a MP3 tag, and dump it into a specific directory named after the CD. It even ejects it when it's done.

I wanted to post some screenshots to help any newbies on setup but it looks like my image hosting site is broken. Doh!

Personally, I can't listen to poorly compressed low-bitrate MP3s. After a couple of hours I get physically sick of listening to them. It's not sick to my stomach or anything but it a weird tension. It's difficult to explain.

Even if you can't afford a pricey home or car stereo, save up and buy some good headphones. A pair of Sennheiser HD555's will run you about $150. They are worth every cent.

Get a good pair of headphones, plug them into your CD player, and turn off any EQ and bass boost crap. You will be amazed by the things that you've never heard before.

...puts on trusty HD455's and plays some Moby...ahhhhhh...


BTW, my subs are acoustic suspension NOT bandpass. Why in the world would you want to magnify something that is already painfully resonant? I could see maybe a 5th order bandpass to extend the subs range but who has that kind of space. (yeah I'm a geek, gearhead, and an audiophile)