Product Spotlight: Hertz H8 DSP Digital Interface Processor

Known best for its speakers and amplifiers, Hertz has recently added an impressive digital signal processor called the H8 DSP to its mix of car audio upgrade solutions. Since more and more car audio enthusiasts these days are working with factory-installed source units, Hertz focused on making its processor solution easy to integrate into these vehicles. With a full suite of tuning tools on hand for your installation technician, upgrading a vehicle audio system with the H8 DSP will transform it into something truly amazing.

Hertz H8 DSP Features

The H8 DSP features four speaker-level inputs, a pair of RCA auxiliary inputs and a TOSLINK digital input. On the output side, there are eight RCA outputs that will provide up to 4V of signal. The four speaker-level inputs will accept as much as 15V, and the RCA aux input is good for 5V. The processor also includes input level optimization LEDs to help maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of the system. Another increasingly important feature is called the Universal Speakers Simulator (USS) technology. This circuit presents an appropriate load to the factory amplifier or radio so that external load resistors aren’t required to make the system function.

Hertz includes a few welcome hardware connections that make using the H8 DSP quite convenient. First, the system includes enough memory for two tuning calibrations. External wire connections are available to let users switch between these presets quickly. The system also includes remote turn-on detection circuitry. This processing will allow the H8 DSP to turn itself on when it detects that the factory radio turns on. There’s also a remote output, so the processor can then turn on your system amplifiers.

Hertz DSP — The Hertz H8 DSP is compact and straightforward, yet provides all the tools required to extract incredible realism from your car audio system.

The software includes an input/output configuration wizard that helps simplify the setup process. Not only does this help with signal routing, but it also enables the de-equalization process. Many factory-installed radios, including some that seem surprisingly basic, include speaker-specific equalization processing. The de-equalization process uses a test track (available as a download from the Hertz website) to undo the factory EQ curve as much as possible. The wizard also sets up some basic crossover settings that mean the system can be up and playing very quickly before the fine-tuning begins. This feature gives your installation technician a level playing field from which he or she can start the calibration process of your new speakers.

Signal Processing Features

In Expert mode, any of the eight channels can be configured with high- and low-pass filters with the option of Butterworth or Linkwitz-Riley filters with slop options up to -24 dB/octave. Crossover points aren’t infinitely adjustable, but there are 68 frequency options available – which is more than enough for any possible system design.

In terms of equalization, there are 31 bands, spaced at standard 1/3-octave spacing. Each band is adjustable on 0.3 dB steps up to plus or minus 12 dB. There’s a cool “select all” button that lets your installer change all the bands at once. This is a great feature if the person tuning your system needs more than 12 dB of cut or boost in a single band, as the entire set of slides can be moved at once.

Your installer can enter the distance between the listening position and the speaker, and then the processor will calculate the delay for each output. There’s a fine-tuning window that lets them add additional delay in 0.02-millisecond steps. There is also a polarity adjustment control of each channel that is labeled as “Invert Phase.”

The level of each of the eight output channels can be adjusted in 0.5 dB steps from 0 to -40 dB. There is a master volume control setting that works in 1 dB steps from 0 to -60 dB and a master subwoofer level control that provides 0.5 dB steps from 0 to -12 dB.

DRC HE Remote Control

The H8 DSP ships with the DRC HE remote control. This compact (2.48- by 1.4-inch) remote includes five buttons and a small 4.5-character, 12-segment display. The remote provides master volume control, subwoofer level control and balance and fader adjustment. The presets can also be toggled by the remote, along with the source input (speaker, aux, or digital). The included connection cable is 14.76 feet (4.5 meters) long. Finally, two-sided tape is included to surface-mount the remote in your vehicle.

Since the processor can operate in a stand-alone mode using the remote as the master on/off switch, it doesn’t require a traditional source unit to be in your audio systems. You can play music from a smartphone through a Bluetooth receiver or a media player like the Audison bit Play using the TOSLINK digital connection.

Upgrade Your Car Audio Experience with the H8 DSP

Whether you have an existing sound system or are planning a new build, having a signal processor like the Hertz H8 DSP in the system is a worthwhile investment. Drop by your local authorized Hertz retailer for a demonstration today! For more information about Hertz car audio products, visit their website, Facebook page, Instagram page, Twitter feed or YouTube channel.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

Product Spotlight: ARC Audio X2 6.2 Component Speakers

When it’s time to upgrade the stereo system in your car or truck, drop by your local ARC Audio authorized retailer and check out the X2 6.2 component speakers. This 6.5-inch two-way speaker set offers class-leading sound quality and detail at a price point that won’t hurt your wallet. With ARC Audio’s focused design goal of delivering a product that’s as compatible with as many vehicles as possible, these speakers are a great choice for someone who wants better sound without having to invest in an elaborate installation.

ARC Audio X2 6.2 Component Speaker Set

The X2 6.2 speaker set includes a pair of 6.5-inch woofers, a pair of 20 mm tweeters and a set of passive crossover networks. The woofers are based around stamped steel baskets with compound-curved spokes. This shape helps to prevent resonance in the basket and provides excellent support for the motor assembly.

Power handling is always a top consideration when designing a speaker. Aside from the relatively large Kapton former and copper voice coil winding, ARC has included cooling vents in the basket that allow hot air to escape from under the spider. These vents also help to improve linearity at higher excursion levels, so bass and midbass frequencies are reproduced with improved clarity.

In terms of moving parts, the woofer cones are made from injection-molded polypropylene that has been reinforced with glass fiber strands. This reinforcement reduces cone resonance at high frequencies and excursion levels to deliver an impressively accurate listening experience. The glass fibers also add thermal stability to the cone, so it remains rigid at extreme temperatures.

A butyl rubber surround adds additional damping to the cone and extends the service life of the drivers as compared to similarly priced options that use foam surrounds. The spider at the base of the cone is a linear design made of a Nomex cloth blend that furthers the low-distortion performance of these speakers.

ARC Speakers — Cooling vents integrated into the basket increase power handling by allowing hot air to escape from around the voice coil.

The tweeters in the set feature 20 mm dome-shaped, wool-damped silk diaphragms. A waveguide built into each tweeter helps to improve the off-axis response. Each tweeter uses a high-quality Y-35 grade neodymium magnet for excellent efficiency in a compact package. ARC Audio includes surface- and flush-mounting hardware in the kit, so your installer has a variety of integration options.

The two-way passive crossover networks feature -12 dB/octave attenuation networks to ensure that the transition between the woofer and tweeter is smooth. The networks include audiophile-grade polypropylene capacitors for excellent power handling and clarity. The compact design of the crossovers allows them to be mounted near the amplifier, under a seat or in the dash with ease.

Designed to Work with Existing Mounting Locations

The last thing you want to hear when choosing a new speaker for your vehicle is that it won’t fit, or that you need to spend extra money on fancy mounting adapters. The transducer design team at ARC Audio invested countless hours in measuring and confirming standard sizes for the 6.5-inch class of speakers. Armed with this information, they designed the basket of the X2 6.2 woofers to fit into as many vehicles as possible. The baskets include mounting holes for all the common fastener patterns to make the installation as hassle-free as possible for your technician.

Upgrade Your Car Stereo with ARC Audio

If you want your audio system to sound better and play louder, drop by your nearest ARC Audio retailer and ask to audition the X2 6.2 speaker set. We know you’ll be impressed! For more information about these speakers or any of the amazing ARC Audio products, visit their website. You can also learn more about the brand – and some of the amazing installations that feature ARC Audio products – on their Facebook page, Twitter feed, Instagram page and YouTube channel.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

Drone Telematics is Ideal for Families with Young Drivers

If there’s a young driver in your family, upgrading your vehicle with a telematics system like Drone is a great way to know where they are and how they’re driving. Drone combines high-speed cellular LTE connectivity with an onboard GPS receiver to relay the exact location of the vehicle to your smartphone or the Drone website. You can even configure geofence notifications, so you know when the vehicle arrives at or leaves a specific location. Let’s look at how these features work to help keep parents calm when their kids are driving the family car or truck.

GPS-Based Vehicle Locating

The X1-MAX, X1R and DR-5400 Drone modules include an integrated GPS receiver antenna. Location information is visible within the DroneMobile app on your iOS or Android smartphone or on the Drone website. The GPS locating capability is impressively precise. This accuracy lets you know which side of a driveway you’re parked on or exactly where the car is in a mall parking lot.

If your son or daughter is out with the car, you can check their location and speed while they’re on the move. If you expect them home at 10:30, you can see whether they’ve left their friend’s house or movie theatre, or if they’re just around the corner.

Young Drivers — When you use the Drone app to find the location of a vehicle, you can click on the icon to see how fast the car is traveling.

Geofences Deliver Instant Alerts

A lot of families allow their kids to use the family vehicle to go to work at a part-time job. By logging into the Drone website, you can create alerts based on an address or a geographic area on a map. The website allows you to set these warnings (called geofences) based on a radius around the chosen location or using a rectangle or adjustable polygon. Another option is to use the POI (Point of Interest) feature to set an alert. You can enter the address of a business or someone’s house, and the Drone system will let you know when the vehicle arrives at or leaves that location.

As you can see from the above screenshot, this family has configured the system to let them know when their son arrives at the drugstore where he works. This information will also be recorded in the Activity Log so that it can be reviewed later.

Speed Warnings Promote Safety

You can always click on the Location tab, then click on the vehicle icon to see how fast it is traveling. Likewise, you can configure the system to send an alert to your smartphone if the vehicle exceeds a preset speed limit.

The Curfew Alert feature is another way to monitor the use of your vehicle. Once you’ve configured a start and stop time, the system will send a notification if the vehicle moves during that time period. There’s no way to sneak out at night with the car when this is activated.

Drone Reduces Parent Stress

Most of us trust our children to take care of our vehicles. That doesn’t mean that we don’t worry when they’re driving. With Drone on board, we can check their location and speed as often as we want. Visit your local authorized Drone retailer to have the hardware installed in your vehicle, then choose from the Premium, Premium Plus or Ultimate service plan packages. You can learn more about the fantastic features of Drone by visiting their website, Facebook page, Instagram page and Twitter, or their YouTube channel.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

The Importance Of Proper Car Audio Speaker Installation

The speakers in your mobile entertainment system are one of the most critical components in determining how your system sounds. If you choose poorly designed speakers that have distortion issues from poor cone, suspension or motor design, no amount of signal processing can make your system sound great. The methods used to install your speakers are as important as the design of the speakers themselves. In this article, we are going to look into some of the common mistakes that occur during speaker installation and how to maximize the performance of your speakers.

Speakers Need A Stable Foundation

If you want to listen to a record player, you want the unit to be on a solid table or stand. You’d never try to hold the turntable on your lap – the needle would jump and bound all over the place. When it comes to speakers, you want all the energy from the motor to move the speaker cone and not the basket. Why would the basket move? Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

When the voice coil pushes the speaker cone out, the inertia of the cone is also pushing back on the fixed magnet. If the speaker isn’t mounted securely, it will buzz, vibrate and otherwise move around. These vibrations cause all manner of distortion.

Look at a set of high-end home audio speakers. Years ago, Linn had a set of narrow floor-standing speakers that used a pair of small midrange drivers, roughly 4.5 inches in diameter. The front baffle of the speaker enclosure was 1.5-inch thick MDF. If you knocked on it with your knuckles, it sounded like concrete. And yes, those speakers sounded excellent!

Speaker Installation – Consider Mass

To combat the forces generated by the moving speaker cone, you will want to consider beefing up the mounting surface. In the case of a subwoofer enclosure, an extra-thick front panel can help. Vertical braces on either side of the speaker mounting surface help even more. The best solution is to run full-size braces from the front of the enclosure to the rear. Full depth braces lock the front and rear panels together and add dramatic strength to the speaker mounting surface. These braces also control vibrations in the rear panel to improve performance further.

For a smaller speaker such as midrange or midbass driver in a door, adding strength is a little more difficult. The most common practice is to add a layer or two of butyl damping material (sound deadening) to the metal around the speaker. You can even add a layer or two on the inside of the door skin if you are concerned about thickness. Damping materials with an aluminum layer add a little extra mass.

If your installer is constructing a set of speaker mounting adapters, then ask if they are using a material that has some mass to it. HDPE and ABS are good; acrylic is even better. A material like Corian – the DuPont countertop material – is fantastic. You can easily cut and shape Corian and glue parts together with Cyanoacrylate (Crazy Glue). You may want to use thread inserts or t-nuts with all of these materials. While it is readily available and easy to work with, don’t use wood for speaker adapters inside doors – it will get wet, swell up and deform. It can also hold water and get moldy.

Speaker Installation – Location Matters

If your audio system is going to use factory speaker locations, most of the time these are acceptable to provide an unobstructed output path to the listening area. The last thing you want to do is block the output of the speaker by putting something in front of it. Keep magazines, books, paper and other objects from piling up in front of, or on top of, your speakers.

For subwoofers, the location of the sub has a dramatic effect on how it sounds. You want the energy from the subwoofer to be able to mix with the sound from your midbass speakers as easily as possible. For this reason, hatchbacks and SUVs are great for bass. If you have a sedan, then firing the output of your subwoofer through a ski pass-through works well. You can get away with firing subs into the trunk of a sedan, but you will want to ensure that your midbass drivers can play fairly low – say 75 Hertz or so – to ensure that you don’t lose impact and dynamics.

Back-Wave Cancellation Problems

We use speaker enclosures for two primary reasons – to limit the movement of the speaker cone and to prevent the sound coming from the rear of the speaker cone from canceling out the sound coming from the front. You need to prevent the rearward sound from mixing with the front. For midrange speakers, this means building good quality mounting adapters. Your installer can also use sound-deadening materials to seal up openings in the interior skin of your door panels. You will get better speaker performance with proper back-wave management than you will just buying better speakers.

Weather Protection Ensures Longevity

When mounting speakers in a door panel, it is inevitable that the back of the speaker will get wet. The interior of doors are not completely watertight, and this poses a challenge for installers. Creating an enclosure out of a water-resistant material would be the perfect option, but there is rarely enough mounting depth and it is difficult to create an enclosure that is large enough not to affect the performance of the speaker. For many years, installers have used foam ‘hats,’ cut in half to protect the top of the speaker from direct exposure to drops from the window seal. These are a good option. A thick foam gasket mounted behind the speaker mounting surface can also help. Companies like SoundSkins and F.A.S.T. Rings have ready to apply pre-cut solutions.

There are dozens of other considerations when it comes to having your speakers installed. The most important task for you is to partner with a retailer that does high-quality work and has an excellent reputation. Choosing great speakers for your car audio system is a lot of fun. Hearing them perform up to their potential is even better.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

Control Your Vehicle with Google Assistant or Apple Siri

Drone from Firstech has made communicating with your vehicle more accessible than ever, thanks to integration with digital assistants like Google Assistant and Apple Siri. Remember when Michael Knight used to talk to KITT using a communicator on his watch? KITT could start the engine and be ready to go in a split-second once Michael arrived on the scene! If you’re feeling like recreating some classic ’80s television or simply want to unlock the doors of your vehicle without having to touch anything, Drone and the DroneMobile App have made this a reality.

DroneMobile and Apple Siri Control

Version 4.3 of the DroneMobile app for iOS adds Siri digital assistant integration using Shortcuts. Shortcuts is a scripting app that acts as a go-between for DroneMobile and Siri so that your voice commands can control your vehicle. Once configured, you can say, “Hey Siri, lock my car.” Siri will confirm the vehicle you want to lock using the name you entered on the Drone web interface. You can say “Yes,” and the vehicle will lock a second or two later. You can tell Siri to start your vehicle just as quickly. Just say, “Start my car.”

Google Siri Control — When you request an action, Siri will confirm the name of the vehicle using the information you provided in the Drone web interface.

Adding the shortcut from DroneMobile to your smartphone is easy. All you have to do is tap on the Add to Siri icon at the top of the Controls Screen. The Shortcut app will pop up and let you customize the command text. You can configure it to recognize any text command you want. If you want the standard “Start my car,” then click Add to Siri. Alternatively, you can enter a custom command string like “Fire up my ride” or “Kitt, it’s time for action.” Other Drone commands that are compatible with Siri and the Shortcuts app are Stop, Lock, Unlock, Trunk, Aux 1 or Aux 2.

DroneMobile and Google Assistant

If you are an Android phone user or have a Google Nest smart speaker in your home or office, then you can integrate the Google Assistant app with DroneMobile to control your vehicle. You’ll need Version 4.4 of the DroneMobile app to make this happen. The Google Assistant and latest DroneMobile apps are, of course, available from the Google Play store.

Drone has added an extra level of safety and security to its Android solution by including a PIN code. You can configure the PIN by logging into the Drone web interface, clicking on Edit Profile, then scrolling down to Unlock PIN.

Voice commands work a little differently on Android. If you want to remote start your vehicle, say, “Hey Google, use DroneMobile to start Kelly’s Truck.” In the background, Google Assistant launches the interface to DroneMobile, then transmits your request to start the vehicle. You’ll be asked to confirm the PIN for starting or unlocking commands. The system works best when you say the pin as a number, rather than a series of digits. So, one-thousand two-hundred and thirty-four trumps one two three four.

Talking To Your Vehicle Is Easy

Giving your engine a few minutes to warm up while you gather your belongings in the morning can dramatically reduce wear on the engine and make the vehicle more comfortable if it’s hot or cold out. Being able to use voice commands with the latest versions of the DroneMobile app means you can multitask. When breakfast is finished, and you’re loading the dishwasher, just say, “Hey Siri, start my car.” All of the functions that work with your phone or smart speaker will also work with an Apple Watch or Android SmartWatch.

If you’d like to be able to use voice commands to control your vehicle, drop by your local authorized Firstech dealer and ask about the Drone telematics interface and a Compustar, Arctic Start, FTX or iDatastart vehicle security or remote starter system. You can find a dealer near you using the dealer finder. Be sure to visit the blog section on the Drone website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube to learn about any new features, products and technologies from Firstech and Drone.

This article is written and produced by the team at www.BestCarAudio.com. Reproduction or use of any kind is prohibited without the express written permission of 1sixty8 media.

Product Spotlight: Hertz H8 DSP Digital Interface Processor

Hertz H8 DSP Features

Signal Processing Features

DRC HE Remote Control

Upgrade Your Car Audio Experience with the H8 DSP

Product Spotlight: ARC Audio X2 6.2 Component Speakers

ARC Audio X2 6.2 Component Speaker Set

Designed to Work with Existing Mounting Locations

Upgrade Your Car Stereo with ARC Audio

Drone Telematics is Ideal for Families with Young Drivers

GPS-Based Vehicle Locating

Geofences Deliver Instant Alerts

Speed Warnings Promote Safety

Drone Reduces Parent Stress

The Importance Of Proper Car Audio Speaker Installation

Speakers Need A Stable Foundation

Speaker Installation – Consider Mass

Speaker Installation – Location Matters

Back-Wave Cancellation Problems

Weather Protection Ensures Longevity

Control Your Vehicle with Google Assistant or Apple Siri

DroneMobile and Apple Siri Control

DroneMobile and Google Assistant

Talking To Your Vehicle Is Easy

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