by Allan Chen

Lately, I've been having nightmares.

Not just any kind of nightmares, mind you. I'm talking about gut-wrenching, sweating-through-the-sheets, think-you're-about-to-die nightmares. We're talking some hardcore stuff here. Nightmares that fill you with fears and doubts. The kind that make you wonder if you did the right thing, made the right choice; they make you hesitate, they make you scared.

What's this all about? Why am I telling you about my noctornal dilemmas? Because these night terrors aren't the result of some repressed childhood trauma, or the side-effects of subconcious desires to wring the neck of my nearest coworker (which might surprise you, if you had seen where I work). I'm suffering from something of a different nature: an obsession. One that has completely taken over my mind and infiltrated every thought. It all started about a year ago, when I decided to buy myself a new car. Then, a close friend of mine betrayed me most cruelly in asking one, seemingly innocuous question: "Are you going to put a new stereo in it?"

I didn't think I was asking for that much. I thought I'd go out, ask for a few opinions, talk to a few dealers, learn a few pointers, and come out of it with a simple head unit and four coaxial speakers. Maybe I really wasn't asking for all that much, back then. But I guess I never realized how much my desires and hopes would escalate as I learned more about what was available on the market.

Soon, however, I found myself awash in a sea of information much more vast than I had ever realized. Car audio became my obsession, but also my bane, a double-edged sword that threatened to draw me to nirvana as it drove me insane (a slightly melodramatic exaggeration, but such is my wont). I read more and more yet found myself still hungry for knowledge. Every morning, I voraciously read Rec.Audio.Car, the car audio newsgroup. I ordered books upon books on designing systems and how speakers worked and why a common ground might be better than multiple ones. And I've even gone to friends, those who were physics, electrical engineering, and mehanical engineering majors, to explain some of the concepts and laws to me that I had not yet seen in my studies. Car audio was no longer just a hobby. It had become my life.

That was when the nightmares began.

In one instance, I'd be standing in the listening room at the local dealer, comparing head units to each other. In front of me would be piles and piles of specifications on output voltages and impedances and controller ability and a virtual alphabet soup of DAC's, DSP's, and EQ's. I was overwhelmed trying to remember what everything meant, whether it was good to be higher or lower, whether this amp would clip with that much output voltage or if my already too-tight budget would work better with one, two, or three amps bridged in mono-tri-stereo mode wired in a series of parallel circuits driving either as many or as few speakers as possible. It was too much!

All I wanted was a good sounding car stereo. I guess, that's still what I want; it's just that my perception of what sounds "good" has changed a bit over the past year. So maybe I'm not as demanding as I had thought. These nightmares - I'll get past them. Nothing that a little help from the likes of Eclipse, Butler, McIntosh, Dynaudio, and Velodyne couldn't fix as I search for my perfect system.

Care to join me?

Allan Chen

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