Please 'Boom' Responsibly As most of you have noticed, the noise ordinances have become much tougher lately. Most of this is due to idiots, yes IDIOTS, who drive through residential areas with their windows down while their system is playing at full power. To make things worse, the music they listen to has all sorts of foul language that's not suitable for small children, (who may be playing outside). There are even a few people, who are even beyond idiot status, that play their systems at full power through residential areas after 10:00 PM (when many people go to bed). I don't believe that this type of behavior is good for the industry. If the fines get too stiff, people will stop buying large systems. If this happens, more people will get out of car audio (who wants a mediocre system). People get interested in things because they're exciting. A deck and four 6.5" speakers are not going to interest many of the younger car audio enthusiasts. If car audio enthusiasts keep annoying more and more people, the fines will keep getting tougher. All of this will only reduce interest in the equipment that fuels the industry. If you want to listen to your system at full volume, get out on the highway where there's little chance of bothering anyone. When you get to a red light, turn it down. If the only thing attractive about you is your 'system', you have some work to do. Bottom line... Think about what you're doing. Think about other people. It's not the end of the world if you have to turn the volume down for a little while.

Fine Tuning Your System:
As was said earlier, a vehicle is a less than perfect place to try to reproduce music or any type of audio.
The diagram below is what you hope to see when testing the frequency response from your system. Most systems need LOTS of equalization or other tweaking to achieve this 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 likely be at different points but this should give you an idea of what you might see.

If you have a graphic equalizer like the 10 band EQ below, you would start with all sliders at their CENTER point where they basically have zero effect on the signal (as in the dia. below).
While watching the levels on the RTA, adjust the EQ slider which affects the frequencies which need to be boosted or cut. If the RTA display looks like this:

You might set the sliders on your EQ like this:

To achieve this:

It is unlikely that you would be able to get a perfectly flat response with a 10 band EQ. 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.
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