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“What would not sucking be like?”
This was Ken Ward’s response to the question I’d asked him, the question this article looks to answer. It’s 2025, and sure, the stock audio systems in some cars sound phenomenal. I think about the Lincoln Nautilus I tested almost a year ago, or the Mercedes E350. Wonderful machines, though they also cost upwards of $70,000. In an age when many people don’t bat an eye at dropping $400 on nice headphones, why do more affordable cars’ sound systems just plain suck by comparison?
Ward is the technical marketing manager for Elettromedia, training dealers and installers on how to get the most out of the company’s car audio products, and founded the online trade community Educar. A couple of weeks ago, he explained to us how a simple wiring mistake could ruin the audio experience for many Kia EV6 owners. As I turned over the question he asked me—what “not sucking” would sound like—and struggled to find the words, he broke down what basic automotive sound systems are missing, and why.
“Somebody who cares about how [a car] sounds, they generally care about two things,” Ward told me over the phone. “They care about the spatial presentation—which not all normal people care about—and they care about the tonality, which is, ‘Do I hear the sounds in relative levels that I find pleasing?’”
Contrary to what I expected, Ward said that humans actually happen to cluster pretty well in terms of sounds we like. That is to say, we all tend to prefer the same distribution of frequency and loudness. This is something researchers have known for 50 years or more at this point, judging from a study Ward shared with me that was published in the 1970s. And it dovetails with something Matt Figiola, founder of high-end car audio studio and consultancy firm Ai Design in Tuckahoe, New York, also explained.
“The higher the frequency, the more directional sound is,” Figiola told me. “The lower the frequency, the less directional sound is. A subwoofer can go in the trunk as a result of that concept, and a tweeter has to go sort of somewhere up high and pointed at you, more or less, to get to you.”
“This is also why people set their equalizers with a valley in the mid-range, and they raise the tweeter and they raise the subwoofer—you know, that typical U-shaped sweep,” Figiola said. “And that is because the frequency response of your ears is the opposite: You can hear mid-range far better than you can hear highs and lows. So we, as humans, we want to raise the tweeter and lows because we have a deficit there, essentially.”
The result is that we’re especially sensitive to directionality at the high end, and we are looking for more bass down low. But there’s another wrinkle: While bass may be less directional, relatively speaking, confined spaces challenge it. “The smaller the room, the harder it is for us to perceive the bass in a way that we like,” Ward told me.
Put all of that together—and the fact that unless you own the greatest supercar of all time, you’re never seated optimally and centered in a car, like you would prefer to be in your home theater—and the car becomes the single worst environment for music listening imaginable.
“The fact that the sound from the near speaker arrives before the sound from the far speaker—that they’re not aligned in time—makes some notes louder, but other notes quieter,” Ward said. “And once this happens, you can’t fix it with an EQ. You can’t go in with your bass and your treble control, or with some cars with the EQ that’s in the tone control menu, and fix it. If the speakers are not aligned where you’re sitting, you’re screwed.”
The rub here is that car audio specialists can fix it—for one passenger. But addressing the problem for a single seat makes it worse for the rest. “OEMs, for various reasons, don’t like to ship cars that only sound good in one seat,” Ward said. He mentioned a German luxury automaker that has a rule that their audio systems cannot be tuned differently for left- and right-hand-drive markets. “They would rather do some things to the sound that cause it to suck less but be symmetrical than do things that cause the system to be great in one seat and suck in the other seat,” Ward added.
So, tone and space are important, but they affect all cars to some degree, even the expensive ones. Figiola called out the Porsche 911 as a particularly tricky environment. “They have tweeters on the dashboard, and they’re wedged really tightly into the crotch of the dashboard and the windshield, where the glass is just a couple of inches above the tweeter, and the tweeter’s pointing right at the glass. That’s a nightmare,” he said. “That is an audio nightmare because the speaker is pointing up directly at the glass, and you’re hearing as the driver a reflection of the tweeter’s sound.”
If those two elements don’t fully explain the deficiencies of stock car audio systems, what does? Cheaping out on power and hardware, for starters.
“The big problem that I was told early on in the game of these marquee brands was that the manufacturers put a tremendous amount of pressure on those vendors to design something that is very lightweight and cheap,” Figiola told me. “So weight is a big one, apparently.”
Figiola said that stock speakers in the average car, surveying all the makes and models he’s worked on, tend to be “somewhat anemic” and light. “They’re plastic in most cases. They don’t really have the qualities of a really great speaker in most cases. And what this whole car manufacturing apparatus does is they say, ‘OK, we’re going to put really cheap speakers in the car. And we’re going to throw a lot of DSP (digital signal processing) at it to get as much as we can out of those speakers.’”
Figiola called DSP “the key factor” in understanding modern car audio. “It’s like the unseen mechanism behind the scenes of what’s actually going on with the OEM audio system.”
For those of us who aren’t audiophiles, he explained the DSP’s role like this: “If you break down audio into its component parts—you know, frequency, amplitude, and time—an engineer has basically digitized the music and they are manipulating those three basic parts of audio. If you’re looking at, say, the woofer that’s in your door, [the engineer is] saying, ‘OK, well, here’s what’s happening when the amplitude’s very high—i.e., the volume’s very high. These particular bass frequencies are clipping, or distorting. Let’s roll that back. Let’s pull back on that so that when you do reach this amplitude level, that doesn’t happen. So they’re analyzing the breaking point of each and every speaker in the car, and they’re saying, ‘OK, if we do this to the signal, that [undesirable effect] won’t happen much anymore or at all.’”
Much of the reason why a base Honda Civic sounds so much better today than it did 30 years ago is because of advancements in DSP pushing those cheap speakers further than was ever possible before—and because it’s much less expensive to improve a system through DSP than through better gear. Software can only get you so far, though, and inevitably, you’re going to hit a wall.
“If you have a factory audio system, and you say, ‘This doesn’t play loud enough,’ you’re going to need more power to play louder,” Ward explained. “If it’s a base audio system, you might need some more speakers; if it’s a JBL audio system or a Harman/Kardon audio system, or a Bose audio system, you might have enough speakers, you just might need some more power. In order to develop more power, you generally need to dissipate more heat, which makes a larger heat sink required, and you usually need to pull more current from the battery, which means a bigger power wire. And those two things right there get you shot down in an OEM operation.”
“I have some friends who work for OEM tier one suppliers,” Ward said. “This is anecdotal, but my understanding is, if you go in and say, ‘I can make your stereo sound really great. I just need a pound-and-a-half and some copper wire,’ they’re going to tell you to get stuffed because they don’t want to give you a pound-and-a half, and the price of copper wire is really volatile. And also, they’re going to say, ‘We have a budget for how much current that we get to pull, and this is out of our budget.’ That’s not going to be allowed, even though the alternator can handle it.”
“What more power gives you is headroom, and OEM systems lack headroom,” Figiola said. “They’re using everything they’ve got.” The parts just have to be better than what corporate penny-pinching will allow.
“I’ll give you a couple of proofs,” Figiola continued. “You can give us a car, any car you pick. And we could we could run an experiment, right? We could say, ‘Let’s keep all of the speakers and the radio as is—let’s just change the amplification to our own with our own DSP.’ And just by doing that and putting a proper amplifier in with a lot more power and dynamic range and DSP-ing it ourselves, I mean—we kill the result. There is no comparison, even with their cheap speakers. Another proof: Leave their DSP and amplifier and radio and change the speakers. Same thing—we get a much better result.”
This brought me to my final question for our experts: With modern cars being as complicated as they are, and as technologically locked down as they are, has it gotten harder for the aftermarket to correct these stock deficiencies?
“The upgrade path is often simpler in a less complex vehicle,” Ward said. “But even so, this is becoming less true daily.” Ward used the Chevy Silverado as an example, which gained a fake exhaust sound for the 2025 model year (yes, even pickup trucks aren’t safe). “I don’t know how to turn off fake exhaust in that vehicle,” he said, which is a problem because an aftermarket subwoofer could make that artificial grumble unbearably loud, or mess up the presentation some other way.
Ward mentioned external pre-amps as a popular way to improve audio, partially because the days of replaceable head units are long gone. “There is a digital network [in most cars], whether it’s Ethernet or it’s some other flavor of network, that connects the amplifier to the infotainment system, and we have a couple of suppliers in our industry that make third-party boxes that connect on that network and give you untarnished, unmolested sound, so that you can add anything you want downstream, as if you had an old 1990s Toyota with an aftermarket radio.”
The trouble is that there’s always a lag between a car releasing and such solutions becoming available, and not every car will be able to benefit from it.
“For example, if you have a Ford F-150 with Bang & Olufsen sound, there is an A2B advanced network—an advanced audio bus that connects the radio and the amp. If you have an F-150 with standard audio, there’s no bus. You can’t add a pre-amp.”
Still, Figiola surprised me when he said that the aftermarket is far better equipped to deal with the complexity of modern car audio systems compared to those of the early 2000s, when small and power-efficient Class D amplifiers with DSPs became common stock components.
“At that time, it was very difficult to work around those systems. They were so proprietary. We just had to walk away from really doing audio upgrades in a lot of those because the car audio aftermarket hadn’t really caught up yet to this. But at this point in time today, it’s the other way around. And, you know, utilizing and keeping the factory [head unit] is commonplace.”
Today’s aftermarket gear “allows us to interface to whatever that head unit is and provide a means by which we can change everything else and do our own DSP and create an entirely new system, with exception of the actual head unit itself, and keeping all the navigation and voice prompts and all that stuff,” Figiola said. Which is what needs to happen, given that you can’t just pop in a different single- or double-DIN brick anymore.
At the end of the day, these experts can still take almost any car you’d give them and use one of many tools at their disposal to return it to you with noticeably better performance. Maybe they’d solve for power, the DSP, the speakers, or a combination of those factors. Automakers have found a way to maximize the potential of budget gear in today’s cars through code, and it’s impressive what they’ve achieved. But, as Ward elegantly summed up to me, “nobody has repealed the laws of physics.”
Got tips? Send ’em to tips@thedrive.com
Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
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