Power Trip!

We've all heard the story about the rich Texan who walked into a Dallas hi-fi store, saw a 20-foot-high theater speaker and ordered two--one for each wing of his ranch house. Size was the hi-fi Gospel of yesteryear. Today, big and clean stereo sounds can be enjoyed in a space once considered impossible for such acoustic ambitions. That, of course, is your car, and it doesn't matter whether it's an outsize van or a trim compact. The car has been conquered by the combined forces of digital tuning, autoreverse tape decks, graphic equalizers, ambience enhancers, woofers, tweeters and even (continued on page 210)Power Trip!(continued from page 153) 100-watt amplifiers. Those goodies are being made by well-known brands and by newcomers. And like their larger-size audio ancestors, the new vehicular Wunderkinder have given rise to a new kind of retail outlet--the car-stereo specialist, who sells and installs the equipment.

Not so long ago, however, owners of car sound complained as much as they listened. Stories of fouled-up tape mechanisms, fading radio reception, weak sound and distortion aplenty were legion. Today, the cassette has replaced the eight-track cartridge, because it sounds better and it lasts longer. Broadcast reception is more stable, and accurate tuning is literally a snap--of a feather-touch button. Amplifiers pump out wattage sufficient to override interior and exterior noises. And amazingly compact speakers span the full tonal range, loud and clear.

There's something else, too. The interior acoustics of a car have been found to be ideal for stereo. You get the effect of a space considerably larger and more reverberant than would seem possible.

How come? For one thing, there's the headphone effect provided by the very closeness of the left- and right-channel speakers, which are usually installed in the side panels of the front doors. Their spacing with regard to the listener is much more intimate than in a normal-size room, so channel separation is exaggerated. That is to say the musical performers seem more spread out, and that gives you a big-stage feeling.

But the real kick comes from added speakers, usually mounted on the rear deck. Combined with the front speakers, they lend a sense of spatiality that is even more dramatic than that of surround speakers in a home system.

Of course, that kind of sound takes amplifier power. Now if your car just sat quietly to serve as a private listening room, the power needed would be minimal. But your car moves, of course. And there are heater and air-conditioner noises--not to mention road and traffic sounds--to overcome. That's why carstereo systems with ratings of up to 100 watts of power are being touted.

To make it even trickier, car speakers are often less than five percent efficient, which means they need even more power to give you all the rich sound churning around in the system. Of course, that becomes impractical if you push it too much. A too-high sound level in a car might even become dangerous, since it could isolate you from the real world to the extent of not hearing warning sounds.

Because of the power options--not to mention the choices in speakers, program sources and accessories--a "typical" car-stereo system these days is not easy to define or describe. It's a whole new world, far different from the old days when a radio came with the car.

Although Mitsubishi, Sony and others have systems with separate cassette and tuner components, just as in high-end home audio systems, the general pattern consists of three main sections. First is the music source--which has been fairly standardized as a combination cassette player and radio tuner. The industry calls that a head unit. This unit is your control center. Since the cassette portion does not record, it needs no signal meters and has fewer controls than a full-feature home unit. Most do have a Dolby button, and many feature automatic reverse, so that the tape plays in both directions without the need to remove and flip it.

Many also have a tape-select button for playback equalization. There are only two kinds of equalization in use today--70 and 120 microseconds. The former takes care of all tapes other than the normal ferric oxides. That includes chrome and metal tapes. So even if that control doesn't say Metal but does say Chrome, or something similar, the deck still can play metal tapes.

Another fillip is automatic search (Alpine calls it a "music sensor"), which scans a tape in fast wind and plays the next selection after a brief pause. Even more novel is Kenwood's "cassette standby" feature, whereby the tape automatically starts playing should FM reception fall below an acceptable level. Marantz has its CMS (continuous music system), whereby the radio tuner comes on automatically when the cassette is on Fast-Forward or Rewind.

In tuners, the big swing has been to digital tuning. You touch a button and the set locks in on a station--no dialtwirling or squinting at little numbers. Many units also can scan the broadcast band to give you a brief summary of what's available in a given area or lock in on the next station on the band that provides decent reception. Adding a digital clock to such a set is another possibility--it's been done on the MGT ECR-710, the Bose CRC and the Jensen RE518, for example, while Clarion's PE959A MK-II combines a digital clock with advanced electronics and so can automatically switch among AM/FM stations at the times preselected. A new item is the Schotz circuit--introduced by Proton (itself a new name in audio) in its models P202 and P201--which grabs weak FM signals and produces less background noise while doing so. That circuit, by the way, will be showing up soon in some home receivers.

Typically, the cassette/tuner unit also includes some kind of preamp for handling the low-level signals from the tape player or the tuner. Virtually all of those now offer separate bass and treble controls (instead of the old single-tone control, which was merely a treble-cut device). Also becoming standard is a left-right channel-balance control. On those units whose makers have in mind the use of four speakers (two up front and two more in the rear), there are also front-rear controls, such as the fader found on the Blaupunkt CR-2010, on the Clarion 2100R and on the Panasonic CQ-S900ETR.

Early systems also crammed a low-wattage power amp into the cassette/tuner unit. Enthusiasts seeking higher power would buy a booster--a special kind of amplifier that increases the output from the low-powered built-in amplifier. The booster does increase the wattage, but it also increases the distortion. In upping power from one watt to ten watts, it may also raise the distortion from one percent to ten percent.

Today, the booster has been replaced by hi-fi amplifiers that increase the wattage of preamp-output signals without adding distortion. Those car power amps are offered by several companies as musts for a given cassette/tuner unit. Some manufacturers give you the option of riding with a medium-powered built-in amp (such as the 4.5-watts-per-channel amp supplied in the Fujitsu Ten model CR-1033 or the 7.5 watts per channel in the Panasonic CQ-S900ETR) or buying a huskier separate power amp (Fujitsu Ten has four of them) that is fed from a suitable output on the cassette/tuner unit. Another option is the different power output you can tap from the same amplifier--for example, Craig's model 510 will supply 30 or 15 watts per channel for handling two- or four-speaker systems, respectively.

Most of the companies offering program-source units and separate power amps also market their own brands of speakers, though speaker specialists--such as Altec Lansing, JBL, Bose and Philips--offer new lines of speakers specifically designed for cars. In general, the car speaker has become as sophisticated as everything else, with two-way and three-way systems being offered. Even the formidable subwoofer has entered the car. Alpine has three models ranging up to its 12-inch 150-watt Model 6112. Altec Lansing's subwoofer is part of its AL-I system, which includes a pair of tweeters, a pair of midrange units and a special 40-watt amplifier for the subwoofer. Sony's Superwoofer system, the XS-L20, consists of a pair of eight-inch speakers intended for mounting in the rear of a car so that the trunk space behind them serves as a large enclosure for enhanced bass. Most systems will sound great in any size car, but a few seem better suited for one extreme or another. The Sony just described, or the rack-mounted Mitsubishi, obviously, will go well in a large car, van or R.V. Then there are more modest setups--such as Sanyo's FTC27 (a head unit with a built-in 9.5-watts-per-channel amp)--that won't crowd you out of a compact car.

Ancillary units abound. For example, Kenwood offers two graphic equalizers, one containing low-medium power amps for driving four speakers (the Model KGC-737). MGT has two equalizers: Its Model 206 is a five-band device with up to 30 watts per channel of output power; its Model 207 has seven bands and the same power. Pioneer, which makes just about everything in all categories, has a seven-band equalizer that also provides (if you want it) an echo effect by means of time delay. Panasonic's CQ-S series includes four new head units with built-in ambient enhancement. A remote-control accessory, the QR-101 by Fujitsu Ten, lets you (or, rather, your passengers) operate its Model CE-4130 cassette/tuner unit from the rear seat, while Blaupunkt's Berlin 8000 system and Roadstar's RS 891 equalizer/booster put a control unit at the end of a flexible gooseneck mounting, so that the driver has the stereo controls right next to the steering wheel.

Special add-ons for car sound are being offered by companies not involved in producing the main components. For example, the Omnisonix 801-A Imager can be fitted next to or under a cassette/tuner unit to provide a broader stereo effect (if you need one). Also intriguing is the release of the dbx Model 22 Type II autodecoder, which enables the playing of dbx encoded cassettes, not to mention a new circuit chip that can be incorporated into cassette players to give them dbx capability.

The notion of a custom-designed stereo system for a particular car is also in the works. We've just learned of a forthcoming system, developed jointly by a leading car company and a major speaker specialist, that will be individually tuned to suit the specific acoustics of certain 1983 cars.

Speaking of which, it seems as if the rise in car stereos, coinciding as it does with a drop in new-car sales, represents some kind of socioeconomic contradiction. But does it really? The rush to car sound may be a new way of expressing the traditional American love of cars. If you can't replace your present car, you can at least embellish it with a new reason for hanging on to it--the experience of glorious, full-bodied stereo.