What is it.........

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"

Any song that comes over AM radio I don’t expect to hear. If it is a favorite song of mine, especially one I haven’t heard in a long time, and double-especially if it has good memories attached to it, then the element of surprise is heightened by those aspects. Also worth mentioning is the knowing that others are hearing the same song—and in far-fetched land—feeling the same thing. Most of that really doesn’t apply to a song I hand-select to hear over the big-rig stereo. That’s not to say that listening to the big-rig is devoid of emotion; it’s just a different experience. One has to know how to sort out one’s emotions 😉

I’m going to say it’s because the car radio runs off battery power and doesn’t have the harmonic distortion of AC powered systems.

Also another complete guess is that perhaps when our brain hears a low bandwidth signal it isn’t expecting anything to do with real sound, and fills in what’s missing.

When you hear a full bandwidth signal with actual dynamics, maybe the brain is expecting some thing more literal, instead of the mere represenation of music.  

in the same way, you can watch low quality comedy YouTube image and still laugh as hard as watching it in the theater, but it doesn’t have the immersive quality.

Also think of a voice over a squawky phone signal.  You will get the content of what someone is saying, but you might miss small cues like a sigh, that indicate additional meaning. 

The car is isolated from seismic type vibration by springs and gas pistons and there are no crossovers in speakers or room issues.

Sorry, I cannot relate to this post. I cannot think of a single instance where any music played on an inferior system, much less a radio, was more moving, compelling, soulful, etc. than on my finest system.

Imo, emotion or soul of the song is not conveyed well on poor audio systems. YMMV

If  you had ever heard ANYTHING played through Richard Clark's award winning Cadillac or Buick Grand National audio systems back in the day, your mind would be completely changed about what's possible in a car environment.

Oz