Fact is high end audio companies are putting their components in cars for mainstream name recognition and money. Car audio is a whole different animal from home audio. A maker is totally at the mercy of the varying, hugely challenging acoustics/materials in the myriad of car models. There is definitely limits to how nice a car audio system can sound, particularly under circumstances like highway speed, engine noise and lack of proper sound deafening of noise coming from outside the cab. Do you really think most customers would know the difference when their sound standards are low to mid-fi sound quality (due largely to not knowing what you don’t know - we as audiophiles don’t really have magic ears!)? At the end of the day this all about money for audio companies. If they hit the jackpot when their components become ubiquitous in a highly popular line of vehicles, but it didn’t produce sound quality even close to the potential of their 2 channel systems (or surround), I doubt their bean counters and executives would bat an eye. Their relative lines of home audio are much more expensive, but their lack of comparable overhead, coupled with economies of scale and overall margin percentage, would be a lot higher in today’s mainstream consumer market. Also, they would capture, or at least be in the running, for the small percentage of those car audio customers that end up delving into high end sound home audio. Plus, even those of us that know how good home audio can sound have largely been trained from childhood l to have low standards when it comes to car audio. Even though I know the sound could be better in my car, I long ago went away from even thinking about going after market with my car stereo. It’s just not worth the hassle for me and I, unlike a large l portion of the market that can afford it, have started resist flipping vehicles every 3 years because I don’t want the crazy recurring car payments (my wife has somehow in recent years curved my stubborn compulsive male mindset that started early in life loving expensive sports sports cars as well)!
