WHAT IS DSP TUNING?

It's no secret that a car's interior is a less than ideal acoustic environment. It contains many hard surfaces like glass and plastic, odd shapes and asymmetrical designs. This creates a world of problems when trying to achieve a high level of sound quality, issues like unpredictable reflection points, phase issues and offset seating placement.

 

A digital signal processor (DSP) is a device that grants us full control over the systems components. This allows us to compensate for the vehicle acoustics by altering time alignment, channel EQ, phase and crossover points for each individual channel.

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Terms like imaging, separation, stage height and depth get tossed around a lot in this game but what do they mean? Well picture this... You're at a live performance, your eyes are closed and you're in tune with your senses. Although you can't see, you know exactly where the singer is relative to you. How? Our brains are able to pinpoint the source of sounds based on the time it takes for soundwaves to reach us. Pretty cool right... With this knowledge, we now understand how humans perceive spatial imaging and how, at a live performance we're able to pinpoint where each musician is located without even being able to see them. It is through this medium that these terms are derived.

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So, what does this have to do with a DSP? All this information has been captured in the recording but cannot be reproduced if a DSP hasn't been implemented. Without compensating for the acoustic environment, we can't achieve a high degree of spatial accuracy. Simply put, without signal processing the sounds from each speaker will arrive at the listening position at different times. This causes issues with phase, staging and frequency response. The Ideal outcome is to have every speaker playing in unison to enable a coherent end result. 

 

Granted we now have great speaker positioning thanks to our custom pods, the timing has been corrected and the EQ optimized, the full potential of the recording has now been unlocked. Now you'll be experiencing all the elements of that live performance including a true stage center, spatial separation between musicians, accurate stage height and depth perception.  

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This has been a basic overview of vehicle acoustics and DSP tuning but hopefully this has helped you understand the depths to which we go to achieve the levels of sound quality we pride ourselves on.