Not sure about emotion and soul but there sure are plenty of albums that sound WAY better in a car than on my main rig. I'm thinking overly compressed ones like Attention Attention by Shinedown. I can barely get through track 1 at home but in the car it loses a lot of that edginess and is sort of palatable. |
I don’t think there’s an AM radio station where I live that still plays music just people blabbing all day or weather. FM has some pretty good stations. Perhaps one reason the car sounds great is you’re not concentrating as hard on the music trying to hear every detail like some do on their high end home systems. Hopefully you’re concentration is more engaged in driving letting the music take a back seat not to mention a lot of music was mastered with listening in the car as the focus. |
I've had the same experience. Early in my hi fi journey, I bought records with songs I'd heard on the car AM radio, and was disappointed in the LP stereo version. The sound quality there was fine, but there just wasn't the same impact. For example, I would have to listen for guitar parts that were right out front over the radio. I think bdp24 has a good reason, in that the mix was different. There are a couple of other possibilities: - Car radio receivers are pretty darn good. They have to be, operating in a very noisy (ignition system etc.) environment. - Dashboards and car doors actually make decent baffles for speakers. Again, the environment (road noise) demands some good audio engineering there. Listening to music over a hi fi system is very different from listening to tunes in the car, as djones51 points out. The demands of driving require looking and thinking about the outside environment, not listening for musical detail in amongst the road noise. Hence the need for strong vocals and midrange elements. |
A little off topic, but..... Ever listen to a REALLY good cassette recording(not a pre recorded one, but off a clean LP) thru electronic Xovers, a trunk full of amps and thru separate drivers?http://milbert.com/ I'm imagining this is what it would be like inside a pair of giant headphones. The music goes thru your entire body. Dynamics like some of the great systems you've heard before. I'm not talkin about loud, but actually passing for "fidelity" |
