Fine Tuning Your System

Fine Tuning Your SystemAs was stated earlier, a vehicle is a less than perfect environment to try to reproduce music accurately.
The diagram below is what you hope to see when testing the frequency response from your system. Most systems need significant equalization or other tweaking to achieve a flat frequency response.

The diagram below is more likely what you would see from a system before it was fine tuned. There may be more dips and peaks and they would be at different points but this should give you an idea of what you might see.

If you have a graphic equalizer similar to the one below, you would start with all sliders at their center position where they basically have zero effect on the signal (as in the image below).

While watching the levels on the RTA, adjust the equalizer slider that corresponds to the frequencies where correction (boost or cut) is needed. If the RTA display looks like this:

You might set the sliders on your equalizer like this:

To achieve this:

It is unlikely that you would be able to get a perfectly flat response with an equalizer. It is not necessary to have a perfectly flat response to have a nice sounding system. As a matter of fact, the average person would not think a flat response sounds good.