Harmon Kardon Sound System

[Jklotz]

Is my question even valid? Like does quality get affected depending on USB vs Bluetooth Audio, etc?
As for me, I'll tend to listen to bass-heavy music (hip-hop, rap, dubstep, drum n bass, etc) and I find bass +6 is "good" but +8~10 would be the best But when I turn the volume knob to 15 or higher, the music quality tends to get distorted...probably because my treble is +5?

I could be wrong, and our music styles differ greatly, but I think I read some folks saying the fake engine sounds piped through the stereo will cause distortion when set to the higher settings. Did you try turning that to off?

 

[namja]

I could be wrong, and our music styles differ greatly, but I think I read some folks saying the fake engine sounds piped through the stereo will cause distortion when set to the higher settings. Did you try turning that to off?

Oh I turned that engine noise off 100 miles into my roadtrip back up the coast of the Western US.

 

[MerlintheMad]

But when I turn the volume knob to 15 or higher, the music quality tends to get distorted...probably because my treble is +5?

That would be my guess as well. Almost a consensus is that the treble is harsh, or "brittle" as @Jklotz puts it. Some listeners are so sensitive to it that they turn treble into the minus range. There are going to be audiophiles who have such finely "tuned" hearing that the HK will not satisfy. But for most "mortals" it is an amazingly well put together "soundroom".

I could be wrong, and our music styles differ greatly, but I think I read some folks saying the fake engine sounds piped through the stereo will cause distortion when set to the higher settings. Did you try turning that to off?

The MY18 cannot turn the piped engine sound OFF, only to a lowest setting. But I've never heard any distortion not related to treble overkill that I thought even for a moment came from the piped/faked engine noise.

 

[namja]

That would be my guess as well. Almost a consensus is that the treble is harsh, or "brittle" as @Jklotz puts it. Some listeners are so sensitive to it that they turn treble into the minus range. There are going to be audiophiles who have such finely "tuned" hearing that the HK will not satisfy. But for most "mortals" it is an amazingly well put together "soundroom".

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm definitely a "mortal" as you define it. HK is also 1000% better than the factory sound system I had in my econobox. I just like feeling that bass and lyrics or drums/kicks. Oh well, it's not that big of a deal I suppose..

 

[Stinger GT SS]

My settings are Bass +5, Mid +3, Treble +6, QLS set On Stage & Clair-fi is off.
Usually only listen to DAB & Bluetooth Music & occasionally Apple CarPlay on long trips & old school music mainly 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s stuff the sound is great to these old ears & it’s the best sound system I’ve had in any car I’ve owned.

 

[MerlintheMad]

My settings are Bass +5, Mid +3, Treble +6, QLS set On Stage & Clair-fi is off.
Usually only listen to DAB & Bluetooth Music & occasionally Apple CarPlay on long trips & old school music mainly 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s stuff the sound is great to these old ears & it’s the best sound system I’ve had in any car I’ve owned.

I bet your high frequency hearing is shot to hell. Mine isn't great, thus the +1 treble setting. Carry on; whatever works for you, I am glad the HK can provide!

 

[Stinger GT SS]

I bet your high frequency hearing is shot to hell. Mine isn't great, thus the +1 treble setting. Carry on; whatever works for you, I am glad the HK can provide!

Yep, listening to loud live rock bands in the the pubs of Sydney during the 70’s & working in loud industrial plants in my earlier years as a Maintenance Fitter/Welder then radiation treatment 5 years ago on my head & neck has a tendency to knock the crap out of ones hearing.

 

[me&stinger]

There are going to be audiophiles who have such finely "tuned" hearing that the HK will not satisfy.

 

[Kimberly Lazarski]

I tend to turn treble up because I love the loud crisp highs; I like treble like many people like bass. At just shy of age 48 I can still hear to 17kHz.

(though I do have a notch in my hearing response around 15kHz ever since a tire exploded near my face while putting air in it; I was leaning right over the tire. I now respect the 3-year rule for tractor, trailer, and industrial tires like I do for cars and trucks; even if it looks good, at 3 years it's binned and replaced)

 

[StungBlueGT2]

I was an audio engineer for 20 years. One of the tricks we used to do when mixing a record was to burn a CD and take it to the car to do a listening test. The idea was we know our cars audio system better than most because the amount of time we spend listening to them, and that is they way most folks will end up hearing our final product. As good as the studio monitors we were using were, in a tuned control room, it was always interesting to hear what a car stereo would reveal about a mix. If I were doing it today, I don't think I'd even bother with the HK system.

I've only had my car 2 weeks, and was out of town for a week of it, so my experience is limited. I do think something is off with the HK system though. I'll try to play with it some more this week and see is I can't come up with some settings that improve the sound. So far, I've just messed with the 3 band eq and I can't seem to find a place where things sound balanced. The bass response seems to have a distinctive 120hz (or thereabouts) bump, but the eq for the bass seems to be more of a shelving type filter, so boosting or cutting is doesn't seem to change the character, just the overall level, which sounds really odd with a lot of material I've listened to. The mids are scooped in an unnatural way and the highs are brittle and have a really grating harmonic distortion thing going on. It's almost like all that processing is creating a phase distortion that blurs everything.

Like I said, I'll mess with it some more when I get time and report back if I find a setting that make for a more natural/pleasing listening environment.

I appreciate your expertise and your detailed explanation, however your description is similar to how mine sounded before changing a few settings and using FLAC or very high quality audio sources.

When you get a chance please provide your EQ, sound settings and type of audio source as these will make a significant difference on the quality and sound reproduction from the HK system.

I admit I'm no audio engineer, but do have years of experience with car audio and spent a while tuning my HK system before I found the right combination of settings. IMHO the bass response from the downward firing subs is lacking and needs to be boosted for it to project the bass frequencies through the cars frame like it was designed. The mids are strong and clear if slightly elevated, but the highs are too bright and need to be tuned down for most types of music.

I've found that bass at +8, mids at +4, and highs at +2 with Clari-fi OFF, QuantumLogic "On Stage" on, and volume between 7-10 sounds best. I know everyone ears and preferences are different but this is a good place to start tuning to your liking. Hope this helps and look forward to your feedback.

 

[namja]

I appreciate your expertise and your detailed explanation, however your description is similar to how mine sounded before changing a few settings and using FLAC or very high quality audio sources.

When you get a chance please provide your EQ, sound settings and type of audio source as these will make a significant difference on the quality and sound reproduction from the HK system.

I admit I'm no audio engineer, but do have years of experience with car audio and spent a while tuning my HK system before I found the right combination of settings. IMHO the bass response from the downward firing subs is lacking and needs to be boosted for it to project the bass frequencies through the cars frame like it was designed. The mids are strong and clear if slightly elevated, but the highs are too bright and need to be tuned down for most types of music.

I've found that bass at +8, mids at +4, and highs at +2 with Clari-fi OFF, QuantumLogic "On Stage" on, and volume between 7-10 sounds best. I know everyone ears and preferences are different but this is a good place to start tuning to your liking. Hope this helps and look forward to your feedback.

What genre?

 

[Jklotz]

I appreciate your expertise and your detailed explanation, however your description is similar to how mine sounded before changing a few settings and using FLAC or very high quality audio sources.

When you get a chance please provide your EQ, sound settings and type of audio source as these will make a significant difference on the quality and sound reproduction from the HK system.

I admit I'm no audio engineer, but do have years of experience with car audio and spent a while tuning my HK system before I found the right combination of settings. IMHO the bass response from the downward firing subs is lacking and needs to be boosted for it to project the bass frequencies through the cars frame like it was designed. The mids are strong and clear if slightly elevated, but the highs are too bright and need to be tuned down for most types of music.

I've found that bass at +8, mids at +4, and highs at +2 with Clari-fi OFF, QuantumLogic "On Stage" on, and volume between 7-10 sounds best. I know everyone ears and preferences are different but this is a good place to start tuning to your liking. Hope this helps and look forward to your feedback.

I played with it for a few minutes today. I'm not sure what that Clari-fi thing is doing, but my guess is it's adding harmonic distortion in addition to phase distortion in order to try to simulate space. The original Dolby surround sound encoders did this. I'm not a fan of either. Keep in mind the right kind of harmonic distortion can be a good thing - that's why certain older mics/tube preamps/tube amplifiers are so sought after. They add a certain amount of harmonic distortion in a very musical way (ever hear of a vintage Neve recording console? Hooked up to an oscilloscope, the harmonic distortion is off the charts. But some of the greatest records of all time were recorded on them and only the best studios had them). But the Clari-fi, designed by Lexicon, a well respected company in the pro audio community, is way over the top. It's a shame really. It could have been far more useful if the end user had the ability to dial in a little bit of it. As it stands now, it's 100%, which is WAY too much, or it's off. It might have been a cool way to tame the sterile "digital" sound a little, but to me, it's completely useless as it stands now.

So today I turned the Clari-fi OFF and it was a major improvement. It must have been on since I got the car. So far, the "on stage" thing seems the best, but again, it's one of those "let's mess with the phase to try to fake a larger space" kind of things. I think the reason it works ok is it's turned down a little in the mix. Seems to me the "in audience" setting is the same algorithm, just more, like the Clari-fi thing.

Anyway, my approach in any system is to first turn all that crap off and zero the eq then tune from there. I should have some time to play with it this weekend. I'll let you guys know if I come up with something better.

 

[me&stinger]

I have enhancements turned off and all my EQ levels are in the negative.

The quality of sound (the way we listen and enjoy what we're listening to) is subjective but good audio is still good audio. A good audio system will play just about any format well. Better, uncompressed formats, will sound better of course. But if we standardized a sound system by the formats we're listening to, it's not improving the audio quality of the sound system. The HK may have quality components but how the components work together is the issue I'm having. To put it bluntly, they're clashing with each other instead of working together. The more speakers there are the more complicated it is. Having said all of that, I believe software updates can improve the sound quality night and day. That's if it's important to Kia.

 

[ZyroXZ2]

Now that my HK system has broken in and I've had about 2000 miles to understand it, I have some thoughts here, too. By default, I always turn off all audio enhancements of any sort (including the engine sound enhancement, duh, right?). In my partial audiophile life, I've always found that "sound enhancements" cause levels of distortion that always bother me. They're like dents on a car: the music is still fine, but it's just not as original as its source. Additionally, I always try to have the highest possible quality source music format. In my older cars, it was always a CD or some sort of plug-in device with high quality formats (in one case, MP3s, but they were all 320kbps, 44.1Hz), though I have only been able to play direct plug Google Play music from my phone at this time:

- I used to have the bass at +4, but after it "broke in" and I added an exhaust that muffled out the deeper bass notes, I moved it to +6. But no matter what the setting was, it's just too "punchy" for having two subs in the floor. I can only surmise those are 6" drivers, because I've heard 8" drivers, and they don't punch like this. That, and/or the acoustic or lack there of an acoustic enclosure is what makes the bass so "ugly". There is no happy bass setting.
- My mid is at +2. It helps "fill" in the sound a bit, but...
- My treble stayed at 0. For some odd reason, turning it up brings out some "flaws" in the audio not being studio quality source. So keeping the treble at 0 actually masks that I'm not playing lossless audio. Any higher, and it starts to become grating to me like nails on a chalkboard (not literally sounding like that, but my ears respond uncomfortably as the treble goes up).

It's weird that for such a "great" sound system with sooo many speakers and dual subs, it actually only sounds marginally better than the factory sound system I had in my 2018 GT... I have no doubt that part of this is engineered this way: punchy bass can be heard on the freeway, while low frequency booming bass cannot be heard against road noise without being of high quantity which makes it rattle your chest when you finally slow down to a stop. I recognize there are things done a certain way because of the average person and driving conditions that are different to what I would be listening to in my living room or even on a pair of headphones. Even so, I'm a little disappointed in the HK system as I've heard better stock systems.

 

[G-70170]

I hope I can find a 2018 Stinger GT1 AWD by 2021-22 with around 30k miles for ~$26,999, the car is awesome is phenomenal to drive.

 

[KiaStingerNewb]

I hope I can find a 2018 Stinger GT1 AWD by 2021-22 with around 30k miles for ~$26,999, the car is awesome is phenomenal to drive.

You will. They are expected to hold their value pretty poorly.

 

[DT88]

I hope I can find a 2018 Stinger GT1 AWD by 2021-22 with around 30k miles for ~$26,999, the car is awesome is phenomenal to drive.

You won’t find one that was driven kindly unless someone who bought it for its looks alone decides to sell. We all bought the Stinger to drive it like a sports car. If you didn’t, you wasted your money.

 

[me&stinger]

You won’t find one that was driven kindly unless someone who bought it for its looks alone decides to sell. We all bought the Stinger to drive it like a sports car. If you didn’t, you wasted your money.

I drive my car responsibly.

I've accelerated a few times a little above speed limit or to make a pass. Other than that I don't have any desire to drive hard. if I ever decide to sell my car, which I might add is unlikely, the person who buys it will be in good shape.

 

[DT88]

I drive my car responsibly.

I've accelerated a few times a little above speed limit or to make a pass. Other than that I don't have any desire to drive hard. if I ever decide to sell my car, which I might add is unlikely, the person who buys it will be in good shape.

Yeah I mean I don’t drive it hard everywhere so I should clarify, if you never want to drive it hard, it’s a waste to buy it.

 

[me&stinger]

Yeah I mean I don’t drive it hard everywhere so I should clarify, if you never want to drive it hard, it’s a waste to buy it.

The kick in acceleration is fun. I haven't floored it yet but I was watching this video on YT where this guy was flooring his Stinger on Autobahn. That must be a rush.

Edit: Here's the video