fettym@gmail.com

I've read the articles that are listed about the subwoofer upgrade. I'm curious about actual speaker upgrades. Has anyone done this or know if it's possible? I'm coming out of a B&O Q5 and that sound quality while not crazy, was better and it's an adjustment in the A6.

Thinking of doing a nice component set, maybe 600 watts, equivalent to what the BOSE would have been.

Thanks

at1183

I've come from 4 Acura TLs (06, 08, 09 & 10)... The radio was better in all the Acuras... Even the Bose in my current 03 CL-S, hits harder and deeper.

i need to invest in the DLS sub

siempre

I have a Premium Plus and also am very interested in others' speaker upgrade experiences and recommendations.

sgroer

I did the sub upgrade and am thinking seriously about upgrading the other speakers. Haven't had the time to investigate sizes, options, etc.

Metallic-Force

With all honesty fellas, I have the Bose, and if you guys are trying to match it. You'll be disappointed. It's not that great.

Like in the movie "the 40 year old version"... AIM HIGH!

RBeam6

Having the guide that sgroer put together makes the subwoofer upgrade such a relatively simple, unobtrusive and easy to reverse process I'd strongly suggest doing that first and seeing what you think of the impact/improvement on the overall sound quality of the system before trying anything more 'radical'.

I've spent what most any rational person would consider way too much time fiddling around with mid to high end av gear over the last couple of decades. This doesn't, by any means, make me the ultimate source of knowledge on the subject but I have managed to pick up a thing or two through constant trial and error.

When you have a system with inadequate bass response, and when I say this I mean extension into lower frequencies rather than overall output, the tendency is to crank the bass because that somewhat masks the lack of quality with more quantity.

In something like our factory system this is especially problematic because all of the speakers are likely being driven by one multi-channel amplifier. Lets say you're talking about a 7 channel car amp or home receiver. When a manufacturer gives the overall power rating for something like this at a given distortion figure (I'll use 140 watts because it's the first number that came up when I searched the Audi site for 'audi concert') it's just 7x20. But that rating can mean wildly different things depending on their testing methodology.

On some lower end gear the only thing they're guaranteeing is that each individual channel is capable of producing that power at a single frequency as long as none of the other channels is doing anything at all. With very, very few exceptions even the better to best gear is giving that per channel rating with only two channels driven and a full frequency spread. The reason for this is simple. It's pretty cheap and easy designing an amp circuit that hits a certain number on a test bench so that it can be used in your marketing. When you start working to improve the underlying power supply that feeds these circuits so they are better to handle real world demands things quickly start getting heavier, bigger, more expensive and tend to generate more heat which can be problematic to deal with when the thing is in a small space with minimal ventilation.

With most home theater systems you are at least sending the most energetically demanding content to a powered sub taking that load off of your receiver or amp. Yeah, I know cranking the stock subwoofer (I believe sgroer came up with the apt 'subwafer' term for referring to it) produces little audible bass increase but I bet it's still sucking its fair share of juice from the communal watts pool.

So taking all of that into account (and, for simplicity's sake, ignoring the million other things that can impact performance) you have a perfect storm of factors conspiring to make the factory system perform at its very worst. A likely lackluster power supply in the amplifier that probably has difficulty maintaining stable current and voltage under load and a tendency to try and compensate for poor quality bass by forcing the system to generate more of it. Because the car manufacturers don't want to be constantly replacing the speakers under warranty the amps almost always have some sort of soft clipping circuit built in so you don't melt the voice coils when the system is under distress but those things are all about protection at the expense of sound quality.

I'm not sure what all might have improved with the Bose 'premium' system since the 07 Audi I just traded in but Bose is a company known for spending much of their operating budget on convincing the public that their mediocre products are worth the premium prices they charge. What little they spend on R&D seems to focus much more on making their product 'cute' rather than better. But using a decent quality source (decent = anything but Sirius) the base system in the A6 is, to my ears at least, very obviously superior to the Bose in the 07 I'd been driving for four years. Since adding the subwoofer and amp to the system I have the overall system bass 'dial' turned way back compared to before (the new sub and amp are probably never being pushed much beyond idle) and find the system to be completely acceptable even at highway speeds with the sunroof open.

Since I have access to good prices via an outlet store here in town I had given some thought to swapping out the other factory speakers with something better but things get so much more complicated with that kind of project. A car is such an acoustically hostile environment and I'm pretty sure whatever analysis they do to compensate for squeezing a bunch of speakers into a tiny, noisy space is applied to all three systems. The individual channels of the factory amp are almost certainly eq'ed against the specific speaker in the specific location in the specific car. You change the characteristics of one thing in that chain you might get lucky but it's a pretty big crap shoot with a lot of up front effort involved.

Replacing a sub tends to be a much less complex equation but, if you read my other post and know I didn't go the smart route and just use the same pieces as sgroer, even that took a fair amount of trial and error before I got a result I was happy with.

Anyway, sorry for the long post (especially if you know more about this stuff than I do) but it's been a long work week and I needed something to do while I waited for the caffeine to start working it's magic.