For decades, companies have touted the benefits of high-end car audio RCA interconnect cables. When it comes to noise rejection, environmental stability and cosmetics, better cables are a great investment. In terms of improving sound quality, accuracy and detail, do more expensive cables sound better? Let’s take a look at the physics behind cable differences.

Are High-End Car Audio Cables Better?

If you look at the top car audio RCA interconnect offerings from Audison Connection, Wirez, Stinger, JL Audio and T-Spec, to name just a few, you’ll find that all of them share one common trait: they have features that help with noise rejection. The audio signals being passed from your source unit or processor to your amplifier are typically under 50 millivolts, even at moderate listening levels. If the interconnect cable passes by a computer module or a cable carrying significant amounts of current, it may pick up electrical noise. Shielding the signal cables is important to keeping noise out of your audio system.

More expensive cables often include more than one layer of noise shielding. When designed properly, this shielding can help to prevent noise in the form of electromagnetic interference (EMI) from being added to the audio signal. If you are worried about noise, look for a cable design that is shielded from one end to the other without interruption.

Can You Have Too Much Shielding?

Any time two conductors are adjacent to each other, the magnetic fields from one impose a current flow in the other. Depending on the geometry of the cable, extensive shielding around a conductor can act as a capacitor, potentially affecting the perceived frequency response of the cable. We’ve heard minute changes in the top octave when switching from an unshielded cable to one with significant foil or mylar film wraps. Ultimately, keeping noise out of an audio system is far more important than having to add a tenth of a dB to the tweeter settings on your digital signal processor. Is it worth worrying about? Not at all.

What’s the Hype About Twisted-Pair Cables?

Invented in 1881 by Alexander Graham Bell, twisted-pair cable geometry was originally designed for telephone systems. The act of spiraling the two conductors together reduced electromagnetic radiation from the pair, reduced crosstalk between the pair and improved the rejection of unwanted interference from other sources. While these benefits sound great, specific circuitry is required on the receiving end of the wires in order to make this cable geometry beneficial. You can read our article on differential inputs for a full explanation.

Home Audio Guys Upgrade Their Cables, so Shouldn’t I?

If you have been lured into the dark and murky waters of high-end home audio interconnect cable discussions, you can easily fall prey to strange and often mythical explanations about long-strand oxygen-free copper, silver conductors, ceramic connectors, high-voltage DC bias solutions and hundreds of other strange features.

There are two huge differences between home and mobile applications that need to be taken into consideration. First and foremost, car audio systems need frequency response calibration with an equalizer in order to sound good. The reflections from windows, plastic, vinyl, wood and leather wreak havoc with the frequency response of the system. It is this tuning that determines the frequency response of the system.

Second and of similar importance is that cars and trucks are not stationary. Vibrations from the engine, bumps in the road, and cornering, acceleration and braking forces put a lot of load on electrical connections. Car audio interconnects need integrated strain relief to prevent the conductors from work-hardening and breaking. While there may be exceptions, most home audio interconnects are not suitable for mobile applications.

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Good Cables Help Ensure Great Sound

If you already have a car audio system that sounds good, chances are that upgrading the interconnect cables won’t affect the overall performance enough to make the investment worthwhile. If you have noise issues, then using the right kind of cables for your equipment can help a lot! Cables won’t fix ground-loop problems, but they can help with EMI noise.

As a final thought, you will garner more benefit from upgrading your speakers than you will from upgrading any other part of the audio system. You can learn about what differentiates mediocre speakers from great ones in this article about car audio speaker upgrades and this one about speaker technologies.

If you want better sound from your car audio system, drop by your local specialty mobile enhancement retailer today and talk with them about your existing system and your goals. They can help you navigate through the thousands of options to make your system sound better.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

We’ve suggested many times that adding a subwoofer to a factory-installed car stereo is one of the best upgrades you can make to improve the sound. After some careful consideration, we have another first-upgrade suggestion that might provide an equally impressive improvement to your audio system – sound deadening. Most car audio enthusiasts associate sound damping materials with the installation of new speakers or a subwoofer, but the benefits as a stand-alone solution are impressive. Let’s check it out!

What Is Sound Deadening?

In the simplest of terms, automotive sound deadening is a product that is applied to metal or plastic panels in your vehicle to reduce the transfer of sound energy into the vehicle. Deadening comes in sheets with a strong adhesive and in spray-on solutions. Large flat surfaces like door skins, the firewall, the floor, the roof, trunk lids and fenders are some of the most common candidates for damping material installation.

Upgrade Benefit 1: Less Background Noise

The interior of a modern compact SUV has a noise level between 70 and 75 dB when cruising on the highway. Imagine if you could decrease this level by 4 or 5 dB. You’d be able to hear more detail in your music and it would be easier to communicate with other people in the vehicle. Having sound deadening added to the outer door skins, the firewall, the floor and the roof offers a dramatic reduction in wind, tire and exhaust noise that enters the cabin.

A secondary benefit of the reduction in noise is an improvement in the performance and clarity of hands-free Bluetooth calls and voice recognition systems like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Upgrade Benefit 2: Improved Speaker Performance

Car audio speakers need to be installed in a way that prevents the sound coming from the back of the speaker from mixing with the sound coming from the front. While more and more vehicles are using plastic panels that seal the door skin completely, this wasn’t always the case. Having your local specialty mobile enhancement retailer apply sound deadening to seal any openings in the door will dramatically improve the performance of your car audio system. We’ve measured improvements of 10 dB in bass frequencies with no adjustments to the audio system.

Upgrade Benefit 3: Reduced Rattles and Buzzes

If you have a high-power audio system with large subwoofers, you may find that there are unwanted rattles and buzzes in the vehicle. Companies like SoundShield, Dynamat, Cascade Audio Engineering, Resonix, Hushmat, Stinger and many more offer foam layers that prevent wire harnesses, door release and lock rods, and plastic trim panels from contacting metal surfaces and making noise.

Upgrade Benefit 4: Improved Comfort

Many of the companies that offer sound deadening products also offer thermal control solutions to keep heat from exhaust systems and high-power engines out of the vehicle interior. These heat-blocking materials are great for the floor, firewall and transmission tunnel of cars and trucks.

Sound Deadening Is a Great First Audio Upgrade

You’ll find more and more specialty mobile enhancement retailers are turning to sound deadening as a first step in improving the perceived performance of an audio system. With the complexity of factory-installed infotainment systems, reducing the background noise level in a vehicle is a reliable way to improve almost every aspect of the driving experience. If you want to upgrade your car or truck, drop by your local professional car stereo shop and ask about adding sound deadening products to your vehicle.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

If you’re on social media, then you’ve likely seen numerous discussions or links to videos about amplifier power ratings. If your goal is an audio system that only plays loudly, then the wattage measurements matter. It seems that many consumers are confused about the correlation between power ratings and quality. Let’s look at why car audio amplifier power ratings and their accuracy are entirely unrelated to one another.

High-Power Amplifiers Can be Noisy

Whether measured accurately using purely resistive loads and an oscilloscope or with an application-specific solution such as the D’Amore Engineering AMM-1 and AD-1, determining the amount of power that an amplifier can produce is a hot topic in all aspects of the car audio community. For an amplifier to produce a lot of power, it needs a power supply that can dramatically increase the 12-14V provided by the vehicle’s electrical system. This same power supply needs to be able to pass large amounts of current to power low-impedance speakers.

Within an amplifier, the process of increasing voltage involves pulsing the battery voltage at high frequencies into a transformer. The output of the transformer is then rectified (smoothed) to something that can be used to feed the transistors or MOSFETS that drive the speakers. As simple as it seems, the process can produce a lot of electrical noise that can interfere with radio reception and the functionality of tire pressure monitoring systems and keyless entry systems.

High-quality amplifiers are designed in a way that allows them to produce power while minimizing electrical interference. While it’s possible to have both power and the absence of noise, it can be very complicated and expensive to realize. One way to tell whether the amp you’re looking at was designed thoughtfully is its signal-to-noise ratio specification.

A Discussion of Amplifier Distortion

Distortion is, in short, the addition of unwanted information to an audio signal. When it comes to amplifiers, harmonic and intermodulation distortion are problems. The higher the distortion measurement, the more unwanted audio information is present in the output. Distortion reduces the accuracy and clarity of the performance.

Many car audio enthusiasts are under the misconception that it’s impossible to hear distortion from a subwoofer. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It might be more difficult than with midrange speakers, but when it comes to reproducing music with accuracy, less distortion is always better.

Most companies don’t understand that providing a spec of <1% does nothing to explain the performance of their amplifier. Proper distortion measurements are related to output level and should be provided as per the chart below.

Do You Really Need All That Power?

If you’re having your local specialty mobile enhancement retailer install a subwoofer system in your vehicle, you need to determine how loudly you want the system to play. For a daily driver, a pair of 12-inch subwoofers in a vented enclosure, connected to a 1,500-watt amplifier, can produce more than 145 decibels of output. Assuming the subwoofers can handle it, you’d need to more than double the power from the amp to increase the system’s output to 148 dB. It’s likely that the woofers can’t handle the extra power. So, do you need a 5,000-watt amp? If you are running four competition-level subwoofers and compete with friends to see who has the loudest stereo system, sure! To listen to your favorite music, and not risk damaging your hearing, you don’t need silly amounts of power.

Big Power Means Big Electrical Systems

It takes power to make power. If you are driving a mid-2000s Honda Civic or Ford Focus with a stock battery and alternator, you simply don’t have enough electrical system to drive an amplifier capable of producing more than 2,500 watts of power. You’ll need to upgrade the alternator and add several additional batteries in order to provide the 100+ amps of current needed for every 1,000 watts of power.

Amplifier Power Ratings Aren’t All That Matters

When it’s time to upgrade the audio system in your car or truck, visit your local specialty mobile enhancement retailer and talk with them about your goals and expectations for your audio system. While there, ask to hear their demo vehicles (if available). These will give you a good sense of how many subwoofers and how much power you’ll need. Finally, take care to look at the real specifications that matter when choosing an amplifier. The realism of your listening experience depends on your choices.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

Specialty mobile enhancement installation technicians couldn’t upgrade the audio systems in our cars and trucks if they didn’t have access to high-quality, correctly sized wiring. Whether they are connecting a pair of speakers to a radio or running large power and ground wires from a battery to an amplifier, wiring and its size is crucial. There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings when it comes to wiring. Let’s break down a few and look at the truth.

For this article, we are going to talk exclusively about all-copper conductors. The alternative to copper is copper-clad aluminum (CCA). Aluminum adds unwanted resistance and reduces the power delivery efficiency of our audio systems. Pound for pound, aluminum is 61% as conductive as copper. One of the most significant issues with CCA amp kits is that it’s impossible to determine the ratio of copper to aluminum. In most cases, the size of the wire does not meet the American Wire Gauge standard.

Myth #1: If it’s not CCA, it’s OFC.

As with any industry, people like to throw buzzwords around. One that gets sprinkled around liberally is the acronym OFC, which stands for oxygen-free copper. Oxygen is a critical component in the smelting of copper. Oxygen is injected into the molten mixture that helps extract impurities that would degrade the resulting product.

High-conductivity copper does exist. Compared to the International Annealed Copper Standard (created in 1913), many modern, low-impurity coppers can achieve conductivity that reaches 101%. The standard, for those who are interested, is 0.15292 ohm for a copper mass of 1 gram with a uniform cross-section and a length of 1 meter.

Specifically, stating that a copper conductor is oxygen-free doesn’t mean that it’s pure or offers exceptional electrical conductance. In most instances, OFC car audio wiring is simply an alternative to copper-clad aluminum solutions. Much of it is made from recycled copper and contains other metals like tin.

Interestingly, the CEA-2015 standard for car audio conductors specifies a maximum resistance of only 93.15% of the IACS standard.

Myth #2: Your Small Speakers Need Big Wire

Initially established in 1857, the American Wire Gauge standard was created to identify the size of solid electrical conductors and, consequently, their ability to pass current without significant voltage loss. The gauge system is based on the number of draws of a conductor through a die, with more draws (higher gauge number) resulting in a smaller-diameter wire. The standard for standard wires is different than for that of solid wire.

As we discussed in our article about speaker power handling, most midrange speakers and tweeters receive only a few watts of power, even at high volume levels. If we use the example of a tweeter and make the assumption we are going to drive it incredibly hard with, say, 10 watts of power, we only need to deliver 1.5 amps of current during the highest peaks in our music.

Since all conductors add resistance to a circuit, they should be sized to provide an acceptable amount of signal loss for a given distance. The CTA-2015 Mobile Electronics Cabling Standard notes that a 20-AWG cable with a length of 21 feet will deliver 80 watts of power with less than a 1 dB drop in output. This does take into account the total length of both conductors in a cable.

Myth #3: Amp Kits Should Have Power Ratings

Decades ago, Phoenix Gold (and many other companies) published charts that outlined power wire sizes based on amplifier power ratings. As a general rule of thumb, these were helpful. However, without specifics about allowable voltage losses between the battery and alternator, and the amplifier, the numbers are somewhat meaningless.

We’ll look at a brand-name amplifier installation kit that includes what they describe as full-AWG spec 4-gauge pure copper power wire in a length of 18 feet. The kit is rated for 175 amps of current and is said to be compatible with a 1750-watt amplifier.

Assuming it complies with the CTA-2015 standard, the power wire will have a maximum resistance of 28.346 milliohms per foot, for a total of 5.102 milliohms for the length of the cable. If we pass 175 amps of current through that cable, we get a voltage drop of 0.89 volt.

The CTA spec for acceptable voltage drop is 0.25 volt. As such, a high-quality 4-AWG power kit would have a maximum power rating of about 50 amps for an 18-foot length. Keep in mind, this only takes into consideration the positive conductor. Your ground cable and the resistance of the vehicle chassis also need to be taken into account. In short, you are likely running too small of a power cable.

Get the Right Size Wire for Your Car Audio System

When it comes to power delivery to your amplifiers, bigger cables are always better. When it comes to running speaker wire to your mids and tweeters, you don’t need 12-AWG. If you are planning on having your car stereo upgraded, visit your local specialty mobile enhancement retailer and ask them about the size of power and speaker wires they will be using in your installation.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.