Listen before you buy! While listening to different models at a car A/V retail store is a good idea, the best way to shop for car speakers is to install them in your car and try them.

Car speaker shopping fallacy #1: The best way to shop for a car speaker is to go to the store and listen to a bunch of different models.

Reality: While listening to different speaker models is a good way to get a feel for how different speakers perform, it does not give you the most realistic experience of how a speaker will sound in your system. Why? Because each vehicle presents its own, specific acoustic challenges.

Think back to your experience shopping for home speakers. You can listen to a pair of home speakers that completely rock your world in the retail store listening room, but take them home and squeeze them between the barcalounger and the fern plant in your den and they will sound quite different.

The same is true for your car. Unless your retail store's got a weather machine and can simulate a semi passing you on the right, it's not going to give you the most accurate assessment of how the speaker will sound in your vehicle. Speakers that sound especially bright and full in the retail store may sound boomy and brash when you crank them up in your ride, while speakers that were dull-sounding and flat in the store might really shine in comparison. The only way to really understand how a certain pair of speakers will sound in your car is to, well, install them.

The best way to evaluate any speakers — car or home — is to install them where you plan to use them and test out some of your music. Retailers that offer a money-back guarantee make shopping for speakers a whole lot less stressful.

Car speaker shopping fallacy #2: Specs tell you the whole story on how a speaker will sound.

Reality: There are 2 reasons why you can't rely on speaker specs to evaluate a speaker's potential performance: the lack of specification standardization, and your own personal tastes.

First, there is no industry-wide, standard testing procedure for measuring car speaker performance; different manufacturers use different methods to arrive at their figures for specs like frequency response and sensitivity.

Second, how a speaker sounds is a subjective judgement — it's not something you can quantify. Maybe you're a "low-end" fan who wants to feel the bass bouncing off your chest; or maybe you listen for crisp detail and clarity on the high-end. Whatever your tastes, it's your music, how loud you crank it, and what type of vehicle you drive, that are the biggest factors in how a speaker will sound to you.

As John Atkinson explained in a November 1998 article in Stereophile:

Anyone who looks at published measurements should never assume that one measurement — a frequency response, or an impedance curve, or a dispersion pattern — fully or even partially describes the sound they will hear. It's only the totality of all possible measurements that will give the [shopper] any idea of what's going on. What you hear always depends on more than one measurement. Ergo, no one measurement can tell the whole story. ²

But, speaker specs can be useful tools to help you whittle down the choices and, when you understand what they mean, specs can be a good guide for making an educated and informed purchasing decision.

² "Measuring Loudspeakers, Part I," Stereophile, November 1998