Buying Tips For the Mobile Enthusiast

The inside scoop on how to shop for the latest and greatest mobile poop.

At last, the big day is here (no, the tractor pull is NOT in town): It’s time to go shopping for a major mobile entertainment upgrade. Today’s the day you get your new car stereo! Now, before you go off all buck-wild and half-cocked, let me school you in how to score the hypest, illest audio/video gear.

First, think about what you want before you head out. Everybody calls it “car stereo,” but we’ve adopted the term “mobile entertainment” because it’s so much more than audio gear. Want to play movies? No problem — a dealer can hook you up with DVD, a widescreen LCD TV, even 5.1-channel DTS or Dolby Digital surround sound. How about gaming? For the better dealers, it’s a snap to jack your PlayStation 2, Xbox, or GameCube into the video system — again, with stellar multichannel sound. With some systems, you can use the same screen for both video entertainment and navigation — let’s see the stock system do that!

You’ve got two ways to prepare for the major chips you’re gonna throw down on this rig: One: set aside a specific amount to spend, or Two: decide that whatever you like, and whatever it ends up costing, hell, you only live once. As we speak, you may be fixing your lungs to bellow out the enthusiast’s battle cry: “I’ma get me some of them amps and woofers!” But hey, slow your roll, dawg — let’s line up the choices so you get it right the first time.

Let’s say you’re going whole hog, starting from scratch, which, if you have the...uh, scratch, is the best way to go. By far, the best advice I can give you is to not limit your future options. Hear me now and do it later: Whatever you buy today needs to be either upgradeable or expandable tomorrow. Even if you’re buying only the in-dash CD player and speakers today, don’t get a system that can’t accommodate amplifiers and subwoofers down the road. You won’t be able to grow with your tastes and budget, and you won’t be able to sell that boat anchor, either.

The centerpiece of the system will be the head unit, the in-dash piece that produces your main sources of entertainment: radio/Satellite radio, CD/CD-R/MP3, and possibly DVD. Of course you want great sound and reliability, as well as a name that won’t embarrass you in front of your homeys, but look at the everyday stuff as well. Can you see the display in the daytime, or does it wash out? Does it have a million microscopic buttons that’ll have you crashing into the first light pole you encounter? For upgradeability, you want some preamplifier outputs, preferably four of them (two front, two rear), so you can add amplifiers without using sound-robbing adapters. If you’re not buying amps with the head unit, make sure the head unit has built-in high power so you can actually hear the thing play.

The head unit might be the brain, but the speakers are easily the most important — and personal — choice anything else — determine the sound. There are 147,813 brands of speakers because there are at least that many opinions as to what constitutes good sound. Play the speakers through the head unit you’re considering to see if it has the juice to make them go. The dealer’s installer will know what speakers fit in your vehicle and whether or not you can move up a size or two for better bass.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. You’re auditioning your desired head unit and speakers with your well-worn Whitesnake greatest-hits CD, at your natural listening level (somewhere between jet engine and nuclear Armageddon), and you notice the salesperson holding his ears and sobbing softly in the corner. Welcome to the concept of distortion. You have now gone beyond the head unit’s power capability, or the speakers’ threshold of pain, or both. The music is no longer clean and sweet. It sounds like, well, Whitesnake. You, my friend, need the answer to everything American: more power. Now that you’ve chosen a head unit with pre-outs, just add an amplifier, and you have the power to shatter glass — in the next guy’s car! Not so fast, though: they don’t call them power amplifiers for nothing — you have to plug them in to your vehicle power. You do that with a power amp install kit, which includes the cables, fuses to protect the system, and distribution (if you want to use more than one amplifier). Sometimes all the connecting components you need won’t be in an all-in-one kit; if the dealer suggests more, buy them. Make sure you get big enough power cables to upgrade later (cables are the single hardest thing to replace if you screw it up); 4-gauge is a good place to start. And don’t skimp on the cables that deliver music from your head unit to the amps.

The bigger power amps can reduce an alternator to a simpering little girly-man and rob the juice they need from your accessories, so to keep them juiced up and keep them from dimming your headlights while you’re rocking, you need a capacitor, which is a fancy name for “massive power reservoir.” A capacitor looks kinda like a mini-nitrous bottle, so it has mucho cool factor. Get one. Don’t be a cheap bastard.

The final core items you should consider are subwoofers. A car is a noisy environment, and all that noise (wind, engine, tires) robs bass more than anything. You absolutely cannot make a mobile entertainment system sound anywhere near as good as a home audio system without subs. You want to audition subs like you did with the speakers. Don’t get the ones that just fart out that one-note bass, because you’ll hate it after about seventeen seconds of driving. Sure you want them to play deep, but you also want them to play music. Make sure they match up well with the amplifiers, playing both loud and deep without distortion.

Other Tips
First: This is America. We’re capitalists here, which means nothing is really free. Gotta pay to play, homes. If the dealer is throwing in cables, you can generally be assured that those cables suck. If the dealer advertises free installation, it’s my experience that the installer usually isn’t a world class artisan. Exactly how many cars do you have? One? Yeah, thought so. So take it to someone who does upgrade work and stands behind it as long as you own the vehicle. I’m not saying don’t shop at price clubs and warehouse stores. Just know that you get one level of expertise with them, and another level with a full-service mobile entertainment center.

Second: Leave your friend, “the expert,” at home. They’ll talk you into what they like, but what about YOUR needs? The real experts are at the dealer. They’ve been doing this for years, maybe decades. They’re not experts at just one car (which isn’t your car, by the way), like your buddy.

Third: Listen, and learn. You might know a great deal about mobile entertainment already, but you’re guaranteed not to learn any more if your ears are closed and your mouth is running. You may not agree with everything the dealer says, but the more you know, the better your system will look and sound.

And last, but not least: The reason they call it “entertainment” is because it’s fun! Now go get entertained!