brettikivi

this makes sense. My A2 gets a reindeer fur cover in the sunroof each winter and it changes the sound signature in the car significantly if it's there or no. If this works out with the car change, I'll maybe try to do some white noise tests at speed (with a passenger) to get some hard datapoints. But just turning the audio off should indicate if some active NC is being used, maybe. Or pulling a fuse.

well, it did hit -33 at the weekend, but it's been +1 today and ... it's over at my local mechanics anyway. Possible it tried to do a regen a couple of times and couldn't as it was frozen and a forced regen might fix it. Let's see... most of the other stuff for the replacement of the car next week seems to be in place, just need to find time to go through the financing with the selling dealer. And then work out what's going with the car and what not.

Danke für die Bestätigung. I've also seen that XBB have an OBD dongle that should report data on the status of the system, including when there is nothing seen, so full operation... i will test and see if this is enough or I need to add an aux light. Would want to do the Elite 24 this time (which is 30+30 ref, so legal still)... now to see if the deal happens. But i also got a P20E8 error today. Time to visit a mechanic and see what they say...

*IF* we are talking science, they are the only story in town. Everything else is conjecture and hearsay. Like directional cables can't be proven and character and emotional conjecture can't easily be measured... they may be real, but they're personal and perceived. Impulse response, Waterfall diagrams and reflections tell a very pretty story which we can start to fix with DSP or better installation positions. There's a reason all three of my cars have tweeters on the dash.. first, path lengths and second, directivity. I can read the diagrams with the falloff at 30 degrees off-axis. They're all silk tweeters, too, because as a a rule I prefer the way they sound. Doesn't mean I don't like the titanium ones in my home-built floorstanders. Don't need bass? Low E on a contrabass / double bass is 41Hz. Fundamentals are therefore 20.5 and 10.25Hz. without those, you're not getting the full picture. This is really clear with the above mentioned floorstanders. They weigh 40kg+ each side, they are tuned nicely but they simply can't drop below around 40Hz with authority. Not enough cone area and below tuning. It's also unclear how many years I've been dealing with DSPs, speaker design and / or car hifi, whether I'm 30 or 50. Let's not talk about attaching external speakers to a ghettoblaster at age 15, eh? Or whether I've spent too much time dealing with monitoring, PA systems and the problems that come with live sound, never mind the big collection of caps and coils in the cellar. You have your opinion and it differs from that of a couple of us, as noted in this particular thread.

Danke! Muttersprachler haben hier generell 'nen Vorteil... aber es ist ja ein Bereich die ich relativ gut kenne. Hab' ja meine Hausaufgaben gemacht This looks interesting. As said, I don't hear anything on my system that says there's a filter, but I may be wrong. Need to test thoroughly elsewhere and I don't have time for that right now. I suspect it's intended as a "subsonic" to stop the sub bottoming out, as it's probably a ported enclosure and under tuning excursion is not well controlled. Tuning is likely IMO to be at 45-50Hz to get thump.. but there's cheating going on anyway. Carmody commented that tuning a speaker to have a mild hump at 60-70Hz makes it sound like there's more bass than there actually is, and oh look what those curves imply... Are there any settings in VCDS that state "Canton" vs "normal"?

two words: headroom and dynamics. At the end of the day, the home room acoustics will affect just as much as the car, just with the car bringing more challenges to start. Speaker design has changed a lot over the last decades. Thiele-Small only came into being in the 70s, and with valves being replaced with solid-state electronics, different design requirements came up. The move from Phono + RIAA to cassette (some stunning stuff on metal cassettes!) and then CD from the mid-80s has also had its effect. I've heard some Celestions from the late 60s and some Tannoys of the same era, and yes, they can be very, very good. But the requirement for sound levels, clarity, separation, staging, lack of distortion ("valve warmth" could easily be argued to be pleasantly sounding harmonic distortion) and sound output from a physically small speaker driver has led to larger xmax, requiring more powerful motors, larger coils and tending to lead to lower efficiency... so power requirements have gone up. As Class D has become more common in applications where power requirements are critical, the outputs available have gone up to match. Remember we're talking an order of magnitude more power for an increase of 10dB, and without super-efficient box designs - which don't really work in the car - you end up needing power. We don't get to overrule physics. Seas A26 driver is a good example of this: with very low suspension movement, large size, it becomes super-hard to cross over well because it's an 8", so you need to XO low but then the tweeters,, so we end up with 3-ways and as these reach mass market, the quality of the XOs goes down and the demand for simplification goes up. "needs to sound as good or better and be cheaper". Lots of car audio design has been driven by competition from the 80s in the US - IASCA and the likes - with Phoenix Gold and their "cheater" amps being an example that spring to mind. Lots of those were extremely under-rated to get into the specific class; after all, you can measure with 1%THD or 0.001% THD and get wildly differing outputs. Much of the old school stuff - I'm talking the 70s+80s amps from the likes of Marantz, Pioneer, Philips and Luxman - are massively overbuilt to a level that allows headroom and bandwidth, with decent (but not stellar!) S/N ratios and dynamics, because they use massive transformers and caps, so the power output is there when needed. With the size and cost requirements of an in-car system from an OEM, that's simply not in the budget. They'll have good crosstalk numbers because frequently dual-mono designs and the luxury of space on the PCB. I'm looking for bass that goes through the floor *at a very low level*. I'm listening at 65-75dB; the system could probably shake the building walls when parked outside but that's not the point. Having headroom is. it's effortless, drops beautifully and can rock out without running out of puff. I've done 70000km in the car in 2 years, that's 700 hours of seat time at 100km/h and a lot more in reality. Don't I deserve a decent soundsystem? The efficiency problem is further compounded because the car itself is a leaky box. So you can't really use a bass reflex and expect it to behave reasonably. The argument here is simple: the port air is part of the same air that's being moved by the driver. So it's no longer really a chamber that's separated with the port. But that means also the car itself is a massive bass "amplifier" (similar to a corner) but with a specific frequency, due to the largest length available in the car and the length of the wave that will fit. I suspect in a Superb that's around 60Hz. Any audio designer worth their salt is going to use that. Same with using the windscreen / dashboard interface as a "horn", and playing with the reflections from the side windows to add an illusion of width. T-Lines don't really work as they're too massive. Horns, either. Inifite baffle is eminently possible if you can protect from the weather, but that brings its own challenges. Linkwitz transforming the output based on the resonant frequency apparently gives a good idea of the increase in bass. Very sure the Canton uses this, but there's no replacement for displacement, also in the size of the driver you're using. I run 8" in the other two cars and the difference is definitely there. I've heard the B&O and Burmester systems (the latter in a C-Class in Chicago, of all places) and they're fine. But overpriced. Beats in the Ateca was OK but not good; one A6 had an OK system, the last one was poor. MBUX was not impressive, nor was the Tiguan. Last OEM system that *really* impressed was Dynaudio in an XC90 back in 2007. at 800W and 3 8" subs? nah. At 85dB/W/m, no, really, no. Could run WinISD and do the math, 30 sec with an online calc says 115dB max.

@Wacholek depends on the output transistors; you're asking for double the current for the same output power. I might try to measure my car at the weekend, I'm going to have to take it apart to move it if I get a replacement, so might as well do it now. I'm within 3dB from 30 to 12k if I remember correctly, smoothed to 1/6th octave. There are some spikes I couldn't easily get rid of, but they don't really disturb during listening. Dayton Audio mic into my phone with AudioTool gets me darned close. I'll spec it out here; - CSS SDX10 in 30l sealed. Weighted, double-baffled box behind the single seat. (fake) Speakon connector. That's 25mm of xmax and power handling of 400W... yeah, right, it's been happily eating 1kW for over 2 years. - SounDigital 1600.1 4 Ohm feeding the sub, so that's capable of 1.6kW, but i have the gain relatively low, so I suspect much less output. Power is fed down the driver's side (and I am assuming it's a 16mm2+ cable). - DSP is MiniDSP C 6x8. Fed at high level from the front outputs. There is no high pass filter on this setup that I can recognize; seven rings is a real test and it simply can't reproduce the *really* low stuff, most is fine. It's tucked behind the display with the USB cable fed into the glovebox. - fronts are powered by a Soundigital 4.100, 66W / channel, fully active for the fronts. Crossed over at 3kHz IIRC, need to check - Front system is a Helix S 62C.2, no crossovers in use except on the DSP Fronts are limited to above 80Hz with the sub set up, without it they are allowed full range. (It's uncomfortable to sit in the back with the sub up, so I have a setting with the rear speakers on and the sub off). All TA is done in the DSP, as is the EQ. Everything is on 0 in the head unit; DSP off, full front. I have some whitenoise tracks if someone wants them, from 3kHz to 20Khz, and from 50 to 5000. Haven't got around to tuning the sub properly, but it's pretty good as is. Levels are dialed in so they are within 1dB per driver from the driver's seat. TA is accurate as i can make it, I don't remember the software limitations. The new car (should it happen) would have Canton. I figure the easiest upgrade is just to transplant this across and then take the mids into use in the doors with a spare pair of channels on the DSP. Will be more difficult to integrate yet another set of drivers, but it should give a decent voicing with the Helix S 3Ms, matching the rest of the system. But I will need another pair of amp channels... that shouldn't be a problem, there was enough space behind the glovebox, I think. The sub amp is more of an issue as that's currently hidden in the left cubby in the boot, and that space is taken by the Canton sub. Agreed that SD sounds good, BT is OK. Android Auto has a wierd 2kHz or so hump for me, I had to turn it down quite a lot. @spacelordwhat's your system?

seems to be SLA. Interesting - now to find out if that's compatible with a real aux light...

what's 8G3 on headlights? SLA or just bi-xenon?

car started after some charging with the MXS, and I used it again today (after driving for an hour or so last night... well, around 30min driving, 30 min idling, as people do here when it's 30 below - you don't stop the car, you get out and return to it later) - and it's been charging again tonight at the warehouse and again plugged in. Still only "orange" on the Ctek, though, so I have a feeling the battery may be on its last legs. Also some interesting judder - or thump - with power going to the rear. Was sliding it around a corner and - da da da - hmm. Maybe a dodgy bushing on the rear axle? Haldex oil was done last year. Will need to send it to service again as well. Now to decide: should i keep it or swap to a petrol 272? decisions, decisions...

so how are you doing this? Epass24.com?

got to listen to a Canton the other day on a test drive.. I'm underwhelmed. True, it was cold, true, no real music testing was done, but that was not what i was expecting. @MartiniB no idea, i haven't tried active cancellation or convolution with a phase-opposed version of the "standard" road noise at specific speeds, which would probably work well. Still have to find a way to implement it, the DSP i have probably can't. Source interference is hard with Spotify.... and for the record, Android Auto doesn't use BT for the sound, it uses Wifi Direct in the more modern versions, and I suspect a different codec in the cabled ones. which explains why it sounds different to BT.

I would have driven it for the first time this week, but it has decided to not start. Then again it is -27 out, so .. just hoping I haven't got a dead battery. My CTEK is unfortunately in work warehouse, 3km away, and the other car has decided to run on only 2 cylinders. That's currently in a heated parking garage, warming, to see if that cures it. I kind of hope it won't so the problem is easy to find, but I need this car running in the near future....

without the sub, no foundation. You also need to overcome the road noise, so the order of magnitude more power for bass becomes important. Imaging gets better with the sub, too. Haven't heard Canton, don't imagine it can get as effortless as my system. Staging in my car is pretty damned good, thanks, both in terms of width and depth. But then I'm running 8 channels of DSP and a bunch of EQ and Time Alignment to get it that way. Drops like a mofo, too, with a 10" in the boot that you *don't* need to turn up. It is possible to get excellent imaging and staging, and at low levels, too, but it requires some wizardry. Helix S6.2C, CSS SDX10 on an SD1600.1/4 ohm, SD4.100 active through MiniDSP C-DSP 6x8 for fronts. That's less than €1250 plus fitting. SDX is a 10" driver in a 28l sealed box behind the driver's seat. Drops beautifully. I tuned it in the summer at around 75dB levels, not 90+. Dayton measurement mic and AudioTool makes lots of things possible. Good test tracks include Newton Faulkner's Teardrop (try the drop at 01:45), Hotel California from Hell Freezes Over, the Tiny house concert from Ed Sheeran, the Going Dumb remix, Cody Fry's Better.. and the subbass on the Weeknd's Sacrifice.

I did some research on this not so long back and keeping an eye on the market here, in Germany, and in Sweden, all says the same: there ain't many manuals, if at all. No longer orderable here, >95% of the used stock is DSG. Same elsewhere. .Bret

mine likes to drink around 1l per 15000km. Serviced in Feb, the low oil pinged a month or so ago, I added and then again. I will try to keep an eye on it... but it's done 180000km, 2018, 110kW and it sees lots of long trips with decent average speeds (100km/h). I figure this amount of consumption is OK, if a little higher than the Octys I'd driven before.

estate. wow, €70 for the light alone? oha. The camera is something i'd like to do. I figure it makes sense to do while the tailgate is apart, especially if it's funny clips. I will have to ask someone about this. . Bret

I'm assuming I need to take the complete inside of the tailgate apart to replace it, and that this would be a prudent time to add the backup camera if that was in the planning. Anything else I should watch for? My belief is that some water from the wash nozzle got inside the plastic and then it froze, cracking it. thanks! . Bret

my one front left has worn visually more than the others; but the knackered ball joint was on the other side. I'll be replacing at least the pair of tyres next spring when they get put back on. As far as rotation's concerned, anyone with Winters is not going to be affected; there are also still some directional tyres out there. Currently running Turanza 005s, with 32000kms on. They were 5.xmm when I measured and you can really feel that they're ageing on wet roads. Surprised it's that high mileage. Alignment was done when they fixed the joint and the car feels much better now. Didn't notice any strange wear patterns. Need to check pressures but they were 2.7 all-round and they should have set them before the alignment, so...

bah humbug. 850 for new pads, both front bearings and a lower control arm ball joint with alignment. Could have been worse, was hoping for better as it's going to need new tyres in the spring...

64k under my control, the car is just shy of 180000km. And you can really hear the hum at 100km/h... I also drive some gravel, not that much. The roads are generally bumpy, not potholed. But winter does take its toll and snow can be super uncomfortable at times... I'm okay with the timing of this. The "fix", to move the one tyre to the rear, has helped things a lot. Winter tyres will be on anyway in a few weeks.

was vibrating when i went down to the office Wednesday. Took it to the mechanics... control arm lower joint, 2 front wheel bearings making noise and one tyre out of round. Added to the upcoming water pump and rear brakes, this won't be cheap...it it's defence, we're now at 64k kms on my watch in <2 years with nothing other than routine maintenance, so it's not so bad. Also saw a lovely petrol in Sweden. I could get very on board with that....

The standard Xenons are - simply put - a decent starting point, IMO. Here, you're allowed, as in Sweden, to put what you want on high beam. The rule for us is anything over the ref 100 must be on a switch. I've been fair stunned a couple of times by trucks with the set of lights on the roof plus others... there's serious light on the roads out here. And we're not even that far up north. Yes, this light is absolutely legal, also in places like Germany. That's a ref 50 light. The standard Xenons are only 17.5 each, so total at 35. I have 75 on the A2 (2x37,5) and 80 (17.5 + 17.5 + 45) currently on the Superb. That's around 81000 lumens and I'd like more, tucked away under the bumper like here. Heated glass would be nice, too, to stop the slush freezing on the lens. But "Why?", I hear you ask. Some context: a few months back I came home on a Saturday night, we'd had some training in the warehouse. After realizing just how quiet it was, I timed it: I had around 10 minutes at 80km/h without flicking the lights down as there was no traffic and no streetlights, either. From Jyväskylä to Suonenjoki it's mostly unlit, same from Lahti to Varkaus. That's hours at a time with minimal streetlights and all sorts of interesting animals around; bears, deer, wolves, wolverines, badgers, moose... you want to avoid those at -26C. Light is life. I counted less than 10 vehicles coming the other way between Tiinantupa and Suonenjoki that trip. That's about a 20 minute drive. If it's cloudy, it's *dark* in a way the UK rarely is any more unless you're in the highlands of Scotland. Road lighting is sparse and the traffic even more so; it's dark in Helsinki at 1530 in winter. And that's the deep south... up here it's even more extreme. I have months where I am using lights all the way to the office and again all the way home, and I'm leaving before 5 to get in by 10 and leaving again at 4. No such thing as too much light IMO. I've not had any comments on my running lights, we went through "MoT" a while back, too. Was up in Skellefteå a couple of months back for work, just when it hit super warm in May. Was very pleasant indeed! Should have stopped in Haparanda for kötbullar in Ikea but we had a train to catch...that's a very wierd border, with the time change.

Hello neighbour! Not bad. What's the light and it's ref? I removed my honeycomb and my lazer linear 18 sits directly under the plate. Might swap it out for the 24 and give my wife the 18.... more is more.... you are probably down south if you already have darkness again

got it *thoroughly* filthy the other week and then washed it. Was getting on my nerves, the grit in the door jambs... now almost clean again. So many insects, though...