[jmorris644]

Its not you, it is the system. There is a very long thread about the poor sound quality in the PS2. I am an audiophile and am not happy at all with it.

 

[jmorris644]

I have these settings on mine. It does seem they tweak things a bit each software update so I spend a session reconfiguring things each time to my liking. Also check the source - Spotify likes to reset things with app updates so it goes to “automatic” instead of “very high” bit quality.

View attachment 13545

How do you have the other two screens set? Speaker config and surround.

 

[jmorris644]

Surround off for sure

I default focus to all because in driver focused it’s a bit too quiet for my kids. And in driver it’s like the front main speaker is working over time. I go back and forth whether I prefer driver or all.

also. i need the volume at 40% or more to really have everything come through. Gets a bit painful for me higher than 60% though at that level it does contribute to sessions of spirited driving…

I hope that some day I will find a setting that is satisfactory for me. I am a long time Mercedes owner (This is my first non-Mercedes in 15 cars) and I have owned 3 recording studios. So music was always playing in my cars. I have found myself having nothing playing more often than not in the PS2. I am quite sad about that.

Ironically I had a friend that sold Maserati's and he told me that I would not like them because they had crappy radios. He knew me well. So I passed on getting one without even driving one.

 

[jmorris644]

From a positioning (balance and fader) standpoint I like this setting the best. It is amazing that the front speaker is still very active. The bummer about this setting is that the front subwoofer gets turned off.

My hearing is still very good so I am happy with the highs. Here is my EQ setting.

 

[jmorris644]

I wouldn't admit to being an audiophile to us headphone engineers. lol.

hah, funny. That is why I sold my last studio about 2 years ago. You can do way too much "in-the-box" today. Here is a link to my last studio RiverRock Studios | Multi-room recording studio that has hosted major labels and independent artists

 

[jmorris644]

will definitely play around with these alternative settings. I've tried rear-focused under I think a similar idea, but I think the system is front-biased so much (like the driving I guess!) that it doesn't sound satisfactory at all to me.

Else, I can only chalk up to folks' different experiences here as preference based. I'm not a card carrying Audiophile but def have a preference for different sound systems and those eq settings are good for me. When I've increasing the low frequencies like those settings, it gets to be way too boomy for me. But I also tend to listen to heavier bass music that maybe is already amped up with those frequencies at baseline? Or, it's just Polestar's system is bass-biased, matching my baseline preference.
I could also believe that Spotify applies its own filter for different tracks depending on some metadata. Wolfmother, Beck, and White Stripes come through very differently compared to each other in Spotify (car or laptop app), but the same tracks played through YouTube Music on my laptop sound more equivalently mixed.

edit: also, @jmorris644 sorry you seem to be TCAMed right now - what software version are you on? I def saw an improvement in sound after 1.9-2.0

I have not tried any streaming apps yet. So far I have solely used lossless audio through bluetooth. Maybe when they re-enable the USB connections I will try that too. I am hoping better bandwidth than bluetooth. But I am fearful that the source quality and/or bandwidth is not the issue.

re: TCAM, I am good now. My car got delivered with 2.0. I had to do a dual-battery reset. So no issues since.

 

[jmorris644]

This is a bunch of garbage.

Audiophile or not. I rocked out to Stix “Come sail away” today in my stock audio and it was awesome. The audio is fine - it’s a car for god sake.

My reference point is other cars that I have owned. There is no reason for you to get antagonistic here. I was trying to rock out with Earth Wind and Fire yesterday. So somewhat similar music tastes to you. We are all just trying to find solutions.

 

[jmorris644]

You're another of the handful of folks which have what can only be described as a 'different' HK system to everyone else. When I say a handful, I really do mean a handful, half a dozen or so people report that their systems have almost no low frequency response and end up doing crazy stuff like that to get it sound even close to acceptable.

Those settings are -totally- unusable in almost everyone's cars. I can't even begin to describe how utterly awful that sounds, and this is nothing to do with personal taste, audiophilia, golden ears or any other nonsense - it's just horrific.

If I get time later, I'll run a sweep with a calibrated mic and show you what your settings produce in my car.



Just to be clear, there's a very long thread where a small subset of people complain about poor sound quality in the PS2. I think your car is broken... The difficulty is that unless you can get yourself an A-B test with a known good car, there's no way of proving this.

With some gentle tweaks, the PS2 system (in my car at least) is superb - crystal clear with perfect imaging and bass that goes plenty low enough without anything rattling or distorting.

Interesting. I had not run across any reading that gave me the impression that there are some 'different' HK systems out there. It would be hard to imagine that with wiring harnesses the connections could get mixed up. But I do have the impression that I am getting full bandwidth out of the front sub-woofer. Also, no matter what setting I use for the space location setting the front middle speaker on the dash is always active.

If you can figure out how to do a sweep I too have a calibrated mic and can use REW.

 

[jmorris644]

It's a faff because there's no line input to do the sweeps... Makes it -much- harder than it needs to be.

LOL, I had to look up what 'faff' meant.

 

[jmorris644]

LOL, I had to look up what 'faff' meant.

I would be very interested in doing some comparison. What about running REW using bluetooth? Am I able to connect my laptop to the car? I have not tried that.

 

[jmorris644]

Generator > Sweeps > Save to File (Make sure 'add Timing Ref' is checked).

Save the resulting file on your phone or whatever. Could use AudioWagon for this with USB stick if you haven't been updated to P2.0, but otherwise, you'll have to bluetooth it.

Set REW to make a measurement but make sure the volume on your laptop is turned all the way down.

Hit play on your source device and play back the sweep you generated earlier.

I should be able to do that this weekend. Today is 'yard day' according to my wife. Spring has finally arrived in Minnesota.

I assume that all tone settings should be at neutral positions and surround turned off.

I will also put the mic as close to the drivers ear position as I can. Now where did I put that calibration file.

 

[jmorris644]

(Make sure 'add Timing Ref' is checked).

I just downloaded the most recent version of REW. I do not see this option under Sweeps.

 

[jmorris644]

He's referring to me, and the fact that your settings aren't too far off from mine.

I'm with you as far as comparison to other cars, except my comparison is against Volvo, including experience with my HK and B&W systems, the loaners I've had, and what's over on Swedespeed. I've been in two other loaner Polestar 2s as well, and the sound system setup to achieve a reasonably enjoyable experience has consistently been along the lines of what I shared. That said...the Polestar 2 does seem "lesser" than HK systems in Volvos. I can say that the physical speakers in the Polestar 2 look to be more cheaply made than the HK speaker from our Volvo that I have sitting on my shelf. I pulled the front center dash speaker from the Polestar just to have a look at it.

I'm of the mindset that "do whatever sounds good to you", but I'm just surprised, and a bit skeptical, that the 'optimal' settings for Polestar's HK system would be such an extreme departure from what 95% of people on the Volvo side are experiencing.

I did some more playing yesterday. @p-a-tellnes thought that the EQ was only +/- 3db. I was guessing yesterday that it was more like +/- 1db.

Also, I was fascinated that the two tone options were still active and affected the audio when the EQ was active. It would have made more sense to me that the treble and bass became non-functional when the EQ is active.

 

[jmorris644]

I would do it twice. Once with everything neutral and flat, and then with everything set to your preferred/'optimized' settings.

good point. I will do that.

I am very excited to see the results.

 

[jmorris644]

It took a while but I found the Add timing ref. I had to also select "measurement" option.

I will get to this this weekend and report back.

 

[jmorris644]

Ok, I did some measurements. Fair warning, I am not all that proficient at reading REW graphs. I usually post them to an audiophile site and let the masters interpret them for me. But I will give it my best and please chime in. Warning, I may have to split this post into a few sequential posts. I am not sure how long each post can be. For every measurement I used the same sweep file and the same calibrated UMIK-1 microphone. I help the microphone across my right ear back to front so the end of the microphone was just in front of my nose . I was sitting in the drivers seat for all of the measurements. Surround was off and the seating sound experience was set to "all" for all of these measurements.

Here is the first SPL graph. This graph shows tone neutral and EQ off. This actually looks pretty good.

This graph is a little interesting. I thought to compare the above graph with the EQ turn ON but all settings neutral. You can see slight differences as the frequencies increase.

So I decided to look at 150Hz as there was a 10-15 db drop. I pushed 150 to 100% with the EQ and left all of the other settings the same. At 100% boost, 150Hz increased by about 3db. Here is that comparison.

I then, for the heck of it, pushed 74, 150, and 300 Hz up 100%. As expected it pushed frequencies form about 60-400Hz by 3db. Here is that graph.

Now, here is my personal settings as compared to the neutral graph. As I guessed, I was pushing all lower frequencies by about 10db.

Personally I am not a big bass guy. I run Magnaplanars for my home speakers and they are definitely not big booming speakers. The lack of fader control aside, I was puzzled as to why I wanted to push the low end so much. I think that maybe this next graph may show it. This graph combines the neutral graph with phase. I am just learning how to read the phase graphs but it looks to me as if quite a bit of the low end is 180 degrees out of phase. A thought: If the rear sub woofer is out of phase by 180 degrees with the front sub woofer then they would cancel each other out. This is just a guess as I do more research. I am surprised by the large ranges that are either 180 or -180 our of phase in the low ends.

As I mentioned, I am new to interpreting all of these graphs. So any insight is welcome.

 

[jmorris644]

The bass needs longer distance to reach 180 degees phase shift and I donˋt quite understand the measurement results in this region.

Very good point. I had not even thought of that. So yes, that makes the low frequency out of phase very odd.

I found this table to help

 

[jmorris644]

Isn’t it just an equalizer in J or a V setting depending on if you like bass or treble? Not an audio file - but isn’t that kinda it?

I do not know what J or V setting is?

 

[jmorris644]

This is a very interesting writeup about the difficulty with car audio. I am going to reach out to the author and see if I can get their opinion on my graphs, but what I found interesting is the point made in the Midbass - low mids section

"Clean timing and phase relations between the speakers are necessary against acoustic cancellations. "

Sound Philosophy and Challenges

miniDSP is a leading manufacturer of Digital Audio Signal Processors for the HomeTheater, Hifi, headphone and Automotive market. Join our large community of Audiophiles, Engineers and DIYers using our innovative products.

www.minidsp.com

 

[jmorris644]

I can't figure out how to get rock music to sound good on my PS2 sound system (the plus package one).
No matter what I do, the drums (especially snare and kick) are much much louder than the guitars and vocals and very distracting. Does anyone know what I can do to increase the gain on guitar and vocals? I'm not very well versed in setting up equalizers.

I just realized that I unintentionally stole your thread. My humble apologies. I am going to create a new thread to continue the measurement discussions. Sorry....