The I-Pace Audio Settings Thread

Honestly the “best” setting is whatever makes you enjoy the music you listen to the most. I have the premium audio system and when set to neutral (no surround, no EQ, no sub boost, panned to dead center) it is quite balanced and pleasant overall. For my taste I may actually REDUCE the subwoofer a little bit and at most I may boost the HIGHEST EQ (>8K) by 2 or 3 dB to create a little feeling of “space” in some music (but again depends, a lot of pop and commmercial music already does this in the recording and doing it again becomes brittle).

Also keep in mind most people really aren’t aware of their own hearing curve and how much (if any) hearing loss has alreeady occurred. I know a lot of people who really don’t hear particularly well over 5K anymore and to them the “settings” that makes music sound good is very different. I still can hear well over 12K.

So based on the source material I say whatever makes it sound most “fun” is the right setting. EQ is the most useful processing, 100 Hz controls the “punch” of bass (not the rumble), avoid 200-800 Hz as it is a tricky range and reducing/increasing can cause loss of prescience or feeling of “boxing’s” 1-2K is where most vocal presence is and you may try actually reducing 1K by 2-3 dB to create a little more lightness in some material (in fact this trick is sometimes much better than boosting >5K to create brightness). And avoid boosting 4-8K like a plague, it already is done most of the time and create a brittle/harsh characteristic.

jsimon7777 said:

Cars are such horrid places for sound, though EVs are at least quiet. I'm looking at getting a new stereo for home:
Paradigm 85f or 95f speakers
Parasound Hint 6 DAC/integrated or Rogue tube integrated amp with some kind of DAC: Cambridge, PS Audio, or Ayre Codex

It's interesting how many options are online, but the reviews usually disagree with each other, and forum members definitely disagree with each other. Then you get the specs, return policies, and so on. At least I can hear what I'm buying at the local store.

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A very good point, I usually don't get into this as people have very strong opinions. Cars are not ideal audio environments even if you take away external noise. The shape of the cabin and placement of speakers make audio pretty hard, but some cars actually do a good job. Add to that the fact that the smallest environmental change (like temp or humidity) will have a larger impact to the quality of the sound than "high end audio" elements and you start getting an idea why car audio should be approached as a balance. I find the Jaguar premium audio system pretty good in that aspect, the only cars I have had that are a little better are the i8 and some Audi Bang and Olufsen (not Bose) setups.

For home my advice honestly to people is: listen to it with the kind of music you like and see what resonates. It should bring the music to life and make is sound "alive" to you, specs and other issues are irrelevant. The most perfect and correct speakers are professional studio speakers and I would NEVER listen to music on them for fun. They are accurate, highly detailed, full range, flat and perfect and god suck the fun out of listening to music! And I have never found "audiophile" or very expensive gear to be worth it. There is a sweet spot in the middle where you can find the equipment that sounds very good. There are some exceptions where the ultra rarefied high end actually produces something great, but it is an exception. Most of it is branding, marketing, hype and buzzwords. My favorite examples are the very high end store demoing me speakers and at the very end I pointed out to them the tweeter on one side was blown the entire time, they didn't believe me until they took the cover off, and the time where people were arguing that directional audio cables sounded better...

Disclaimer: all of the above is my professional and personal opinion and is not meant to insult or negative anyone elses views on their favorite audio gear.

epirali said:

A very good point, I usually don't get into this as people have very strong opinions. Cars are not ideal audio environments even if you take away external noise. The shape of the cabin and placement of speakers make audio pretty hard, but some cars actually do a good job. Add to that the fact that the smallest environmental change (like temp or humidity) will have a larger impact to the quality of the sound than "high end audio" elements and you start getting an idea why car audio should be approached as a balance. I find the Jaguar premium audio system pretty good in that aspect, the only cars I have had that are a little better are the i8 and some Audi Bang and Olufsen (not Bose) setups.

For home my advice honestly to people is: listen to it with the kind of music you like and see what resonates. It should bring the music to life and make is sound "alive" to you, specs and other issues are irrelevant. The most perfect and correct speakers are professional studio speakers and I would NEVER listen to music on them for fun. They are accurate, highly detailed, full range, flat and perfect and god suck the fun out of listening to music! And I have never found "audiophile" or very expensive gear to be worth it. There is a sweet spot in the middle where you can find the equipment that sounds very good. There are some exceptions where the ultra rarefied high end actually produces something great, but it is an exception. Most of it is branding, marketing, hype and buzzwords. My favorite examples are the very high end store demoing me speakers and at the very end I pointed out to them the tweeter on one side was blown the entire time, they didn't believe me until they took the cover off, and the time where people were arguing that directional audio cables sounded better...

Disclaimer: all of the above is my professional and personal opinion and is not meant to insult or negative anyone elses views on their favorite audio gear.

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To be clear, I'm not triggered. I think this is a fun subject to discuss.

I don't think any reasonably priced music system, and maybe not any, is going to sound like somebody unamplified in the same room singing and/or playing an instrument. At least I've never heard it sound so good. However, good gear has a distinct cleanliness to the sound that pleases my ear and gets part of that feel. It's different from just listening to the music. It adds an additional visceral quality.

I have two distinct memories I compare to: my friend picking up his acoustic and singing next to me, and my cousin, who studied opera, singing a few bars at a family dinner and vibrating the room. No, three. A month ago, listening to a handbell choir play Cohen's Hallelujah. When they finished, and despite them being a bunch of amateurs, you could hear a pin drop in the parking lot. The sound was magical.

My old stereo, once high end, now sounds like mud. Age is not kind. The ipace stereo is certainly loud and clear, but it doesn't sound anything like a good home audiophile setup to me. My old Sennheiser 480 headphones, bought when I was 13, sounded great for 25 years until something went wrong with them. Even a few years ago, they blew away the Monster and cheap Sennheisers that I bought for plane rides.

So I do think there is a difference in sound, but there are a lot of things to get out of music. I'm super happy much of the time listening on a mediocre stereo, because the music still gets through. It just lacks that certain visceral quality I'd also like to have. It doesn't shut me up.

Plus the good stuff plays loud and clear.

I did go to Frys and listen to the high-end consumer-level Klipsch. It was in a theater room and just didn't sound good. I listened at the local best buy, where they had some audiophile gear, and it sounded dramatically better, but the gear was all in the price range of what I listed above.

Also, I think the main reason not to listen on monitors is that nearfields require sitting close and far fields get messed up by the acoustics of a house, so why not have something that kicks out the bass and such in pleasing ways?

jsimon7777 said:

Also, I think the main reason not to listen on monitors is that nearfields require sitting close and far fields get messed up by the acoustics of a house, so why not have something that kicks out the bass and such in pleasing ways?

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Great stuff, no disagreement from me. My main point is that a great deal of what is sold as "audiophile" equipment is sheer marketing hooey. The things people talk about and emphasize and point to have little to do with creating the experiences you describe. Accuracy and pleasantness are not exactly one and the same. All audio systems "color" the sound in particular ways, and its a matter of what the is. Obviously distortion, lack of power, imbalance, missing spectrum components due to holes in the overall drive set up, etc are all starting points. But it really doesn't take audiophile gear and pricing to design and manufacture something that is not hampered in these ways.

Two examples of what I mean are focus on DACs and tube amplifiers. In the early days of digital DACs were not great, had IMD and harmonic distortion characteristics, were not linear, etc etc. The first waves of very good DACs were in rack gear costing 20K for a stereo pair and the difference was incredible. Today I can get incredibly precise stereo DACs for a few dollars in parts and these exceed anything humans can hear. So the skill is in designing a correct circuit and signal path, yet manufacturers will keep "selling" this is why something sounds great. Adjacent to this is the hilarious claim of conversion at higher and higher frequencies to recreate the high end "accurately." Anyone who has the least understanding of sampling theorem knows how much bs this is and yet even some professional audio people fall for it.

Another example is that some people love tube amplifiers, to me the way they color and distort the sounds is unpleasant. And make no mistake, even the most EXPENSIVE tube amp will do both, it is in the nature of how tubes work. This is before we start talking about how they change with temperature as they heat up and how they age. That is why years ago we moved rapidly away from them for most amplifier designs, with only exceptions being components that actually benefit from the characteristic of that distortion (including inability to accurately reproduce transients and high frequency content). Guitar amplifiers benefit greatly from the sound characteristic of tubes, complex music not so much.

My advice when people ask is almost always the same: go listen to the gear, see what sounds good to you. Ignore marketing. Some people love amplifiers that ALWAYS use signal processing on the output and there is no "off," others I know who are not professionals will sense that and not like it. Some people love fake stereo or spatial processing, others (like me) can't listen to them for more than 5 minutes (I am not talking about proper surround decoding for source material that was encoded for this). Neither is right nor wrong, its just taste.

The I Pace audio designers have managed to position the speakers so there is somewhat unified audio field (which Bose systems in cars almost always fail to do, I hear different frequency ranges coming from different locations and slightly time skewed). Also there are few big holes or imbalances in the spectrum and the overall sound doesn't collapse with a little bit of loudness. To me this makes listen to music in the I Pace fun.

epirali said:

My main point is that a great deal of what is sold as "audiophile" equipment is sheer marketing hooey. The things people talk about and emphasize and point to have little to do with creating the experiences you describe. Accuracy and pleasantness are not exactly one and the same. All audio systems "color" the sound in particular ways, and its a matter of what the is. Obviously distortion, lack of power, imbalance, missing spectrum components due to holes in the overall drive set up, etc are all starting points. But it really doesn't take audiophile gear and pricing to design and manufacture something that is not hampered in these ways...

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I've never listened to a tube amp stereo, so I'm not sure how they'll sound. I guess I'll find out if I like it. You're not the first to say that they color the sound. I think that's the point of them. Do I like the color? No idea.

The car is the only place I like sound processing. It makes it sound like I'm not in a car anymore, like I'm in a more open space. I like that, in a car. Also a lot of the systems I've heard compensate well for the odd space with a bit of processing.

Definitely a lot of snake oil out there, and a lot of high prices. With a lot of work, I can probably find something that will fill my 4000 cu foot room, sounds good, and doesn't cost so much. Or I can just spend some money and know it's gonna work out because it was all put together for me at the stereo store, and I could listen to it beforehand. And all that cable snake oil blows my mind.

Meanwhile, my friend keeps chasing the perfect sound, buying online, and ends up paying thousands for parts he doesn't use. No thank you.