Don’t change your head unit yet

When customers come and complaint about their crappy stereo system in the car, 9 out of 10 times it’s because they have stock loudspeakers in the car.

Most people have a misconception that by changing the head unit, you will get a dramatic improvement in sound quality. But the answer is yes & no. If you have good speaker in the car already, you will get improvement for more power, less distortion and you hear more detail in the music. If you have stock speaker, chances are your speaker isn’t good enough to produce the difference in sound quality.

Here is why, there is a specification they use for part of sound quality, which is “total harmonic distortion, or THD.” it’s measured in percentage and it shows how much the music was distorted when putting through the device (head unit, amplifier, or loudspeaker).

In a typical head unit, the most distortion is only about 0.1% THD until clipping. But for a typical speaker, you are talking about 3~5% THD when playing loud. So when you compare the 0.1% to 3%, it’s 30 times the difference!! so do you think you can hear the improvement of 0.1~0.01% on head unit when the loudspeaker is constantly spitting out 3% of garbage??

That’s why you need to make sure you have a good pair of speaker before you invest in the head unit UNLESS you are buying the head unit for functionality instead of just sound quality.