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My Corner
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Masochistic, and loving it... by Allan Chen Car audio is the masochist's hobby. Really - let's take a look at what a car audio enthusiast subjects him or herself to in the pursuit of sound quality (or bass, or install quality, or whatever else it is that floats your mobile sound boat). It's a situation that I have come to realize more and more as I have gone through my own pursuits in the car-fi world. I started out with modest goals. I was going to be getting a car at the end of the school year and I wanted to upgrade the stock system. I figured I'd get a new head unit and put in four coaxial speakers. My roommate had a very basic system, just as I described, that only cost him five hundred, all together. I was hoping to keep the whole upgrade under $750. It all seemed so simple and straight-forward. Then I found RAC. For those that have yet to be either blessed or damned to have found Rec.Audio.Car, it's the nation-wide car-audio-specific newsgroup. Just minutes after I had completed searching for "car" and "audio" on the Internet, I was confronted by what I consider to be the single greatest car audio resource available. As my interest grew, I found my plans for my "dream" system evolving, if not mutating. If I truly wanted good sound reproduction, I needed to add a sub. That meant I needed an amp (the 9 watts from the head unit driving a 10-incher didn't sound too appealing). Reading up on amplifiers, I then wanted to amplify the front stage, too. And quality amps require quality speakers, and it seemed as though component speakers were the way to go. The cycle went on and on and on... I was having fun and discovering, more and more with each passing day, that this was a hobby that I could really enjoy. I was dying to take all the knowledge I had gathered and consumed over the past year and apply it to a real, honest-to-goodness quality car audio system. But the system that I dreamed of far outstripped the funds that I had available, and there was simply no way that I could put together even a value-packed package unless it was done over several years. I was a college student with expenses left and right interested in a hobby that involved spending hundreds of dollars on pre-amp-only head units that required amps to drive high quality speakers coming out of quality sound processors. This is where the masochism comes back in (I do tend to meander, but I hope you didn't think I had forgotten my opening line so quickly). The problem is that there are many people faced with similar dilemmas. As my math professors might say, available funds are expressed in terms of "x," and cost of desired system is expressed in terms of "3x." Some people solve this problem by compromising here or there with one or two components. Others, absolutely dying to have a complete system, opt for an overall leveling down (kind of reminds of de Tocqueville...). But there are some, myself included, who absolutely refuse to yield to anything. It just might take me the rest of my college years to get my system put together. I just might go insane waiting for that last wire to be plugged in, for that last amp to be bolted down. But, I'll tell you this: whenever it is that I finally turn that completed system on, will be one sweet day. Allan Chen |
