Generally I love the octavia 2 FL with Bolero I've just bought: quieter and faster than my old Renault scenic, better fuel economy at speed, and a better sound system mostly. But...

 

Can anyone comment on whether an amundsen or columbus sounds different to a bolero? I think the bolero is set up to give too much low bass (50-100 Hz?) in comparison to mid bass 100-300 ish. Like having "Loudness" permanently turned on. So it's either booma-booma or a tinny overall sound, or both. The mid and high EQ controls don't seem to be able to fix things either: I can get it reasonable for music that doesn't contain much in a certain frequency range, but then a different type sounds ropey.

 

Or can the Bolero firmware be modded to change the eq?

 

ps There is a "how to listen" pc application from one of the American speaker manufacturers that plays music with different audio degradation and then grades you on accurately assessing what it is: it's handy for describing stuff like this,

edit: found the link: it's at http://harmanhowtolisten.blogspot.co.uk/

I never use preset eq's and set treble, bass etc manually.

Typically you'll need to crank the treble right up. But so much depends on what music style you listen to and personal preferences.

depends entirely on music as above but also your personal taste.

 

I like having my midrange higher than trebbel but im not a fan of harsh tweets and too much trebbel.

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but I'm a bit of an audio nerd, and I totally agree with the OP. The Bolero in my VRS is tuned to give a LOT of deep bass and lots of 'in your face' high mid / treble, which sounds initially quite impressive, but after a while this gets really fatiguing, and some music falls totally flat. Vocals are never 'up front', and the overall sound is never that punchy. This is compared to the sound in my old Mk1 Focus, which didn't even have component speakers! I'm wondering if the crossover between the door woofers and the tweeters leaves an eq hole in the middle? 

 

I haven't done a proper EQ test (but I am an acoustic consultant so will do). My ears tell me the system is lacking around the 150 - 500Hz area, and is pretty weak around the 500 - 1Khz area. No amount of adjusting the three EQ sliders gets a satisfying response - it seems the 'mid' setting relates to around 2kHz and the 'treble' just alters what is coming through the tweeters (which needs to be reduced half way). I can get most of the way there by compensating with the EQ on my phone, but it's still not ideal.

 

Am considering downgrading to a bog standard pioneer head unit, as these give you a decent three band sweepable parametric eq that you can use to tune the system. Either that or one of these ridiculously expensive (£800) VAG compatible head units from Pioneer (AVIC F950DAB) or Kenwood (DNX521DAB).

 

On the other hand dub reggae sounds pretty great on the Bolero..

Edited 8 April, 201412 yr by cupachump

I had the bolero in my Octavia limited edition and the sound quality was amazing however the bolero in my Octavia facelift is as bad as described above. I would be interested in knowing if it is the bolero or the speakers.

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I had no end of trouble trying to sort the sound quality of my Octavia which had a columbus fitted. No matter what I tried in terms of equalisation, it always sounded very harsh in the high frequencies, lacked mid-range, and sounded very flabby in the bass frequencies. 

 

In the end, I tried changing the speakers and amplifying which did improve things a great deal but fundamentally, the Columbus has equalisation that you just cannot correct. 

 

Finally, I swapped out the Columbus for a Kenwood DNX521 and it now sounds fantastic (poor sound insulation and shoddy mid/bass speaker placement notwithstanding!).