Another thought about car radios

  • Thread starter Thread starter Richard Steinfeld
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Richard Steinfeld

We were talking about Hyundai radios.

In the field of home stereo, which I'm familiar with, the
performance of AM radio circuits has been terrible. The FM is
usually good-to-excellent; the AM quality is similar to that of a
cheap table radio. AM radio transmission engineers sometimes take
pride in putting out a signal that's as good as it's possible to
transmit, and that can be surprisingly decent. Of course, AM is
subject to interference. But AM can travel long distances. We've
had two classical music stations on-and-off in the Bay Area
transmitting on AM, and they've been tolerable; classical music
is far and away the most demanding test of any audio system --
rock music isn't even in the ballpark.

Old car radios delivered excellent performance on AM. They had
outstanding circuits. If you don't believe me, sit in the seat of
an antique collector car with a restored original radio and be
amazed. However, in recent years, the AM performance of car
radios has declined to the point where it's not much better than
home stereo quality. And I'd not be surprised to find that the AM
performance of a rotgut $20 all-in-one car stereo from the auto
parts chain is no worse than a $500 name-brand receiver --
they're probably both using the same AM radio chip. The
manufacturers just don't take AM seriously (and, hell, with
everything sounding like Rush Limbaugh, why should they?).

In short, changing from an awful window antenna to a vertical
whip will vastly improve reception on AM, but it won't deliver
decent music quality from a typical car stereo.

Richard
 
Hi again Richard. I recently found a 2 tube superegenerative radio project
I built when in junior high school. Fifty three years ago as a matter of
fact. Parked here at my house was the XG350 so having an inquisitive mind.
I fired the old "beast" up and tuned it to a local AM station. The signal
was better on the 53 year old homebrew radio than the XG350 piece of Doo
Doo that came with the car. The old antiquity had a ferrite loop for an
antenna . Sometimes a trip to yesteryear yields "surprises".

I also understand the broadcast mental attitude on Rush Limpballs lol
 
| Hi again Richard. I recently found a 2 tube superegenerative
radio project
| I built when in junior high school. Fifty three years ago as a
matter of
| fact. Parked here at my house was the XG350 so having an
inquisitive mind.
| I fired the old "beast" up and tuned it to a local AM station.
The signal
| was better on the 53 year old homebrew radio than the XG350
piece of Doo
| Doo that came with the car. The old antiquity had a ferrite
loop for an
| antenna . Sometimes a trip to yesteryear yields "surprises".
|
| I also understand the broadcast mental attitude on Rush
Limpballs lol
|

Ha ha.
Well, the question for me regarding car audio is not "how great
is it?" but "Is it adequate?
Audiophile quality in a noisy car is absurd. People are dumping
all this money into it. What a scam.

The OEM radio in my 2000 Sonata, the one that turns itself on
when I hit bumps, is a top-end model, the H935. Like every car
stereo with CD, it's designed to damage the compact disks. I'm
getting more un-fond of it the more I learn the thing. It's got a
vertical CD changer -- the kind that I'm certain will
self-destruct. And the tape section that I really want has no
Dolby (all commercial music cassettes were recorded with Dolby
encoding); Dolby tapes played back without Dolby sound ratty. So,
let's see: the CD stinks and the tape stinks. And this stereo's
damn tall in order to accomodate the CD changer that's unwanted
and will break. I think it's called a "double DIN" profile.

I'm toying with the idea of ripping it out and replacing it with
a "Lear Jet" normal DIN stereo that I'd bought from JC Whitney 15
years ago (I lucked out, but you might not). This one has Dolby
and a 5-band EQ. When I called Lear Jet, they were incredulous
that someone ripped off their trademark: "We haven't made car
audio for over twelve years. Where did you say that you bought
the thing?" To muddy the waters further, it was made in Korea and
imported into the US via Canada. I've often wondered if the
buyers at JC Whitney even look at products before putting them in
their catalog. (Good story, huh?)

What I'm not clear about is whether it would be possible to
install the older car stereo into the Sonata's dashboard neatly
or not.

Richard
 
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