Crutchfield: The Podcast Ep. 32

Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Crutchfield, the podcast I am your solo host today, J. R. Training manager here at Crutchfield. If my calendar is correct, you are seeing this episode in your podcast feed right there in that, that little lull after christmas. Right, how was your christmas? You get some really cool stuff. More importantly, did you give some really cool stuff? I gave my sister a Bluetooth speaker made by house of Marley. She is a huge bob Marley fan, she loved it. I gave my girlfriend a massage ball from enjoy, which is a new brand of massage products that we carry here at Crutchfield. She works with horses and it has very stressful days working with horses and their owners and the massage balls going to prove very relaxing for her. You know, I personally don't do a whole lot for christmas anymore. Of course, I get my closest family members, my grandkids stuff, but I don't really do the whole put up a tree, lights, anything like that. My big activity, this christmas was to perform in a christmas story, the musical at a local community theater and absolutely had the time of my life. It was my first musical theater experience. So I looked to hopefully do more of that because it was great as for this episode, it is another one of our Crutchfield lives. We did a few weeks ago we, we had some fun, we had Francis in the studio talking with me about TVs, specifically Oleds versus LCD TVs and the pros and cons of each. We also had eric and Gavin joined me in studio to talk about some of the new products were carrying and some of the demos we've recently been doing for advisors. And lastly, chris baker from our tech department joins me to talk about electric vehicles and what we know about them so far. There's a lot, we don't know and a lot we do know. So a little bit of an update on that and maybe a little talk about the future. And uh, and again, we want to find out more from the manufacturers. Uh, you know, how, how easy is it going to be to put in big, massive, awesome stereo systems in electric vehicles because they run differently than internal combustion engines. So, or ice as they sort of call it now. So anyway, that's the deal. Here's a bonus episode of our Crutchfield Live and look for more really fun content on our Youtube on our facebook. Uh, and drop us a line if you have any questions or thoughts you want us to address on a future podcast episode. Hit us up in an email podcast at crutchfield dot com or you can leave a comment on crutchfield dot com slash podcast. Either way it works, it'll make it to me, no matter what. So thank you so much for listening for being a, for being a listener to crutchfield the podcast and uh, have a great New Year. So, here's the question regarding electric vehicles with so many electric vehicles on the market now and more coming soon. It seems like they're announcing a new one every day. There's a lot to choose from. What type of electric vehicle would you be most interested in? Your four answer choices are an electric truck or Suv, I mean there's some cool vehicles coming out, the rebellions, the jeeps, the, the cybertruck, nice timing. Uh, the uh, so lots of cool off road type, very capable utilitarian vehicles. Or are you more interested in like a sedan or minivan type of a thing? Uh, there's plenty of those which is from, from Tesla's two Priuses too. I believe there's some Toyota's, I mean, there's a bunch of bunch of those out as well or maybe you're not feeling it at all and you're more of an internal combustion person and don't plan on changing anytime soon. Uh, and your fourth choice is you're more into hybrids rather than full on electric. Uh, so those are your four poll question choices. Would love to see your answers by the time we get chris from our tech support department in here to talk with me about uh, what it's like to install aftermarket audio gear into electric vehicles and hybrids because there's some things to think about that you do don't have to think about on, on internal combustion engine for short. Rego says for me it would be the ford Lightning truck and Tesla, I'm a ford F 1 50 driver that ford Lightning truck might be a future purchase. I am definitely into that Matthew says electric truck definitely. Pat says the Lightning already reserved one man. The ford Lightning performing well in our poll already. That's fantastic. Raymond Burgess said a hybrid would be nice on Youtube. So excellent. The conversation is rolling on. Uh, we have, we have a comment from a, from a community post that was on our Youtube channel uh, from earlier this week. And I wanted to start by answering that question. Uh, since uh, since it came in a few days ago, a guy named, uh, it's on Youtube mid mass Guy is his user name. I'm guessing he's a guy from the middle of massachusetts. Uh, he says, hello Crutchfield in need of advice looking to buy a new A V receiver sold my Rx a 30 80 which as Francis and I know model numbers, we happen to know that's a really nice Yamaha receiver uh, and surprised you sold it. I mean that's a great receiver but there's upgrades about there. Sure. My options are Yamaha a six A or a den on a VR X 4700 H two solid receivers. Just a normal 7.1 set up, watching movies and some music. Your input would be great. Thank you. I love that. He says, normal 7.1 system brings a smile to my face like thinking of that as the basic like that's where you start with home theater. Now I still only have a 5.1 at my house. What do you have? I've got a 5.1.2 very nice. So mid mask I just need 7.1 and I have the two receivers. He's considering over here on this computer if we can bring that up on the screen for everybody to see. These are two really nice receivers, the den on and the Yamaha, both nine channel receivers which I recommend if you know you want seven channels. I've always recommended get an extra two channels. So you're already in the right ballpark there. Mid mass guy because now you have two extra channels you might be able to buy up some speakers, you might add some at most speakers or some speakers in another room. You've got some headroom, some upgradability. Sure. You have some thoughts on this too. What do you think? Yeah, I'm more of a done in fan done in Marantz I've stuck with for the past what, 56 years now. Um So deadlines are great. I think you brought up earlier that therefore um stable across every channel. What I've got here on the screen is the comparison of these two which you can do with products on our website and that was one of the first things that jumped out me out at me is the minimum impedance on the Yamaha. You can go down to four ohm speakers and what that kind of means is that amplifier is built to drive lower impedance speakers. So it's a high current amplifier. It's more capable. It's more stable and should perform better but it's only six of them stable on the surrounds in the center channel. Whereas the denizens forum, stable across the board a little bit more stable, a little bit more speaker options for in the future if he wants to upgrade. I mean to Yamaha's defense, very few surround speakers are forum but it's definitely something that you'll, you'll find if you're trying to go super high. It's really just an indicator of AMP quality is all I'm thinking of now. You know, Yamaha's putting out a lot, little bit more power at 100 and 50 watts compared to 100 and 25 watts. And for a basic 7.1 channel set up, I don't know what speakers you have that could play a role in which one I would recommend. But in all likelihood either one of these is gonna do a fine job. Uh It's not like one of these is a dud and one of these is the winner. You could go with either one and be very happy. Uh for me it might come down to do you use or do did you use music cast in your 30 80 music cast as Yamaha's wireless, multi room audio system. And if you were using music cast and you have music cast maybe speakers in another room or anything like that. If you've set up a system you could probably stick with Yamaha because this will be replaced that zone of wireless music right now. Dannon has a system it's called Helios and you can basically do the same thing with it. Uh but they don't work together for your other rooms, yep. Let's see what we got any other comments before we do that on youtube Alonso. A V receiver with pOLk speakers. We're gonna stick with the a V receiver discussion for a second. A V receiver with polk speakers versus the new clips sound bar with a wireless sub and surround speakers. Oh that's well you have thoughts on that. Yeah. Is the speaker wire already run um you know is that going to be easy to run speaker wire for it? That's typically the biggest deciding factor. Certainly the ease of setup, the clip sound bar wins hands down. They are awesome. Sound bars are now no they are not that clip sound. I've heard it, we've done some product spotlight video on it. It's an amazing sound bar and uh that's a that's a pretty great sounding system and it would rival many dedicated, you know, separate component home theater systems that being said an a V receiver with more channels and more speakers and a tougher install. But in the end more discreet sound, more accurate surround sound, you can have more speakers, you can go with speakers in your ceiling. You have more capability and much more customization, correct? One channel is too loud, you can turn it down and the receiver menu etcetera. So yeah, tough call, tough call. Yeah, both are great. It kind of depends on how ease of setup versus how many options do you want. Uh BRian Hanover just said L O L. So apparently we said something funny. Eduardo says, hi, thank you guys so much. All right. One of our main discussion points today and the reason Francis is here is because we want to talk about the difference between Oh LED TVs and LED TVs. A lot of people shopping for TVs right now we've got a lot of, you know, sporting events coming up and TVs are popular. TVs are looking better than ever. And it's still a common question we get on the phones and our chats when our sales advisors are talking with people, what should I get an old or in LED And you have some thoughts on this, I'm gonna bring up an article we've got on it. But if you want to just sort of get the conversation rolling. Sure. Yeah. So first of all, it's an important question because as we know, TVs are not cheap and their investments you make and you shouldn't need to buy tv for another 5, 10 years at least if you buy one from us as we sell some pretty good ones here. When it comes down to this question, we're specifically looking at, you know, Q LED, which is a Samsung technology versus O. L. E. D. Which was created by LG. But Sony also uses this technology um you know before we get off, which one's better? Um you know for this situation versus that one Jr and I were talking everyone essentially agrees here at Crutchfield, get the biggest tv you can for the room, you can measure it out, you can talk to the spouse, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, make sure that you can get the biggest tv possible in the room because really that is important. Very very important. Absolutely viewing distances you can sit closer to TVs than you ever have before because the resolution is there it won't start looking blurry or anything like that like your old tv did you can sit way close and if you can't sit way close it's even more important to get the biggest tv you can get and if you can get the biggest colette available, they're not cheap. But yeah that's the thing to do. Uh if you have to choose between an old lead you can afford and an L. E. D. That's bigger go led because L. E. D. S are looking great as well. Absolutely. And getting better every year. You know the biggest thing that comes down to, you know what is best for you is gonna be your your environment, what room you're in, what you like to watch etcetera to put it. Really. Basic Oleds will have the best contrast ratio of any T. V. That's really ever come out as far as technology, we kind of talked about it as the natural successor of plasma. So if you do have a plasma tv now and you really like those inky blacks, oleds is the natural kind of step up from that. It's it's truly better in every way I would argue. Um But you know that that's gonna be the biggest thing is what you're watching and where you're watching it. Um Oh LED TVs are generally not as bright as the vast majority of LED TVs from the cheapest to the most expensive. Um Whereas LED TVs because they literally have lights behind them. Yeah, let's talk about the fundamental difference right? And LED Tv is called an L E D Tv because there are light emitting diodes, there's a big panel of them behind the screen and how many lights there are goes up with, the more you spend, the better tv that you get, the more of those light bulbs there will be you got it Yeah it used to be, you'd have one back light in an LED fluorescent tube and it was amazing in your ceiling. Um And then we we kind of got better monitors have used I think they called edge lighting for for many, many years with bigger TVs that just can't work when you have a 75 inch tv with a light that's going around, you know the outside perimeter. So manufacturers kind of wised up to this and started creating backlighting zones where they literally have different lights on different parts of the T. V. Um The biggest benefit of that is you do get a brighter tv with more actual lights behind it but also you can turn those lights off or dim them depending on what's being shown on the tv. And the best led TVs have a lot of lights, they're very small so they can have even more of them and they do something called local dimming. So you'll see it called full array local dimming or F. A. L. D. Uh and that is going to be your top of the line LED. So you can get better contrast parts of like for example if you're watching a scene of a movie where it's like the you know the dark sky and you've got you know dark sky with stars over here and the moon over the moon needs to be bright. The light bulbs around the moon can be turned on and the light bulbs and the rest can be damned or turned off and it really is the test of a nice LED tv if you get a really dark um you know static image with a very bright highlight on it. You will see those backlighting zones, the cheaper tv you're looking at. So with an Ola the difference is that each of the eight or so million pixels that there are in the screen are their own individual lights or self illuminating. So you have a pixel level dimming. Not just zones of bulbs but each individual pixel can be turned on or off as far as that goes. So individual subpixel subpixel and so that moon will not have any kind of halo around because of the, you know the bulbs but only the pixels that actually light up the moon will be lit up and the rest can be turned off. So that's where you get your better contrast ratios. That's why those TVs can be thinner. One other big difference between Oleds and uh and LED TVs is viewing angle. Right? So viewing angle, if you have a wide seating area and old will give you vivid colors, clear picture and will generally look better even off to the sides far left and right. Uh If you're looking straight on either tv looks pretty great. L E D S Oleds uh not a huge difference there but viewing angle kind of makes a difference, definitely big selling feature of that period. So sort of to sum up, it all comes down to light and viewing angle, the light in your room. If you have a very bright room or if you want to watch tv in the daytime with you know the curtains open and the sunlight pouring in. you might want an L E D Tv because it will be brighter colors, will look better in that bright sort of situation. Uh If you have a room where you're gonna, you're gonna watch movies at night, you can darken the room and you want the most cinematic experience possible. Oleds got you covered. Uh and that's probably the best way to go. Um of course there's a lot more to it. How much do they cost? How much can you afford? What size can you get? And all of those should be factored in as well. And the good news is is the best LED TVs are looking almost as good as Oleds and the old, the best old TVs are almost as bright as Led TVs, They continue to refine and perfect these two main technologies, so get a good one, get the biggest and the best one you can afford. Uh and when if you have to make a choice, go with bigger. Yeah, yeah and obviously reach out to us um you know, our sales advisors are more than willing to hear you out, listen to your actual unique needs and make a good recommendation. Um so definitely reach out to us chat us, call us and we'd be more than happy to discuss that with you. As long as we're talking TVs, let's talk a little bit about getting four K. How do you get four k. Most of us watch tv through streaming these days. I mean a lot of the stuff we want to watch is only available on streaming and amazon and netflix and HBO original shows I mean that you're probably streaming them and you can stream them in four K. With some of those apps you're going to pay a little extra like with netflix with some of them Disney HBO amazon it's kind of just included. You just gotta have the hardware. What hardware do you need to be able to stream in four K. Yeah that's the probably the best part of smart TVs in general is that you don't need anything when you buy one. Nowadays the apps are either pre loaded on the machine or you can download them from an app store. L. G. S got their store, Sony has google play they use android operating system on their TVs. So the wonderful thing is when you buy that $1,005,000 tv you are ready to go short of having an internet um you know at your house that's fast enough. I think we are rule of thumb is 25 megabits per second. I was doing some searching on this HBO recommends 50. Okay. Right uh And so but yeah. Suffice it to say you need good internet and 25 to 50 or better will be enough. Yeah and then and then the next thing on there is just like J. R. Said you have to pay for the streaming service, some of them do have different tiers to get four K. Netflix is definitely one where you have to pay attention to that. Um And they've got it gets complicated unfortunately on those but just read through on that specific subscriber, they'll talk about the features they offer at a specific um you know price point, you just want to make sure that if you've got a four K tv go for the four K version it is absolutely um you know, game changer compared to 10 80 P or full HD um you know, and then last but not least when you're actually kind of getting into this, you do have separate streaming box and I still really like this idea. So as opposed to using your LG magic remote and just clicking on the netflix app, you might want to get a an apple tv four K. You might want to get an NVIDIA shield tv. It's the one I use personally or chromecast Roku is extremely popular. Um and the biggest benefit of those is that they tend to be a little bit quicker. So when you're loading an app, when you're skipping forward or going or scrubbing as we call it, you're gonna have a slightly better experience on a dedicated set top box as you would with a built in app that's kind of a rule of thumb as you know, the cheaper device you buy for streaming might actually be slower than the nicest, you know, Sony or LG s built in apps are as again everything is getting better and faster and brighter every year. It's funny you mentioned this, my girlfriend's neighbor said, hey can you help me with my netflix, my tv won't play netflix anymore. And basically we boiled it down to the netflix app in her five or six year old Samsung tv doesn't work anymore. And so I happened to notice she's renting this house and she didn't even by the T. V. She just like using it and there's a an Apple tv sitting right there. I'm like, hey, let's turn that on. And lo and behold the netflix app, there works just fine. So we made her day. So yeah, so yeah, so hardware, you need something that streams in four K. Newer TVs obviously do it the best of Roku's and apple TVs do it. You need really good internet to make it happen and you'll be able to stream in four K. And it will look better than non four K. Without a doubt. Is there anything that could possibly look better than streaming in four K. Absolutely. So this, this kind of comes down to what type of of user you are if you were someone that went out to blockbuster or did netflix when they sent you a disc in the mail that that's how I watched all the seasons of 24. I had to get, I had to get like the five discs at a time. Plan to be able to 20 different rotations of disks through the mail through snail mail. Anyway then streaming is is by far just the saving grace of of that old style the world is very inconvenient. You had to physically go or put something in the mail to get that stuff. So streaming for most people four K dolby Vision HDR on a smart Tv or dedicated set top box is truly incredible without a doubt. However, anytime we're streaming something over the internet, there is major compression taking place. So the kind of rule of um as far as every streaming service does it a little bit better. Apple Tv plus has a pretty good compression that they use. Netflix is really aggressive, amazon's aggressive but essentially what they're doing is they're taking that, let's say it's a four K file, they're taking a four K blu ray and they're squeezing it down and removing all these extra information so that we can actually stream it on our non five internet, you know, an american typical american home. It's kind of like listening to an Mp three compared to a cd. Absolutely. And we'll go on record saying for the vast majority of music consumers, mp three files are great. They're convenient. You can hold thousands of them, you know, on a small ipod nano, incredibly convenient. Absolutely. So there is no competition with streaming as far as convenience, It is the most convenient way to watch something in great quality. However if you don't want to have to rely on that streaming service or internet or um knowing that it's gonna be there in a year, it might leave netflix. We've been watching some shows recently that left netflix halfway through the season. Um you know then the best thing you can possibly do is buy a four K. Blu ray player. We sell tons of these and the biggest major difference is you're not compressing that media any more than the original company that released that day decided was the best quality they could fit on a disk. So quality wise the biggest thing you'll notice video if you pixel peep as we call it, you will notice some better video. Audio is vastly better on a physical medium. Um you know you're you're dealing with un compressed D. T. S. You know, DTs X. Or True HD or adobe at most from Dobie is infinitely better on a physical disk. Especially if you're you know have a nice home theater. Like a lot of our customers do or have a nice sound bar that can actually deal with that dynamic range. The best possible movie watching experience is your deal. The biggest, oh lead you can get with a four K. Blu ray player. If you just want to watch whatever you want to watch whenever you want to watch it then any tv is gonna do great. Just get as big as you can afford and stream everything and you're gonna be very happy. That's kind of what I do. I'm a streamer. Are you a disk guy? I mean I stream 90% of the time, but when I have that one movie I wanna watch that, I want to own buying the four K blu ray disc is definitely the best way to watch stuff. Even today, fred says great info. My wife needs to see this so it doesn't seem so bad when I go by a 75 inch Sony. Oh, fantastic fred, thank you for that comment. Made my day Francis, thank you so much for talking TVs with me at four K and all of that. Fantastic. Thank you man. While chris is coming in, I want to give you the results from the poll we did earlier, I asked you guys what type of electric vehicle would you be most interested in? Do you know what the winner was? Take a guess? What do you think won with 50% of the vote? They're keeping their gas cars, nope. No, there's a lot excitement about electric trucks and SUVs. That's true. The products coming out from forward especially I know there's a lot of excitement about the giant F 1, 50 Lightning, Lightning. Yeah, we want to get our hands on one of those hybrid vehicles. Got 33% of the vote electric sedan or minivan got 16% of the vote zero. People watching this said no thanks. I want to keep my internal combustion engine nice. The ice cars are, it's a transition, definitely. It's, it's a whole paradigm shift in technology. You know, people getting used to the idea of driving electric cars around. It's like, well, how much do I really drive every day? You know, the range anxiety is the biggest complaint that we get, not we get, but I mean that I hear and people discussing the potential for changing over to an electric car. So, with so many people clearly interested in electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles either because they're really cool or because they are better for the environment or they're quieter or, or whatever your reason for getting one at some point, you might want to think about upgrading the audio system because just because they're electric doesn't mean they all of a sudden started putting great systems in cars, right? Doesn't mean they necessarily designed a great sound system for it, although they have designed highly super efficient sound systems for the cars because we have a limited supply of electricity for the accessories in the car. Right? So, uh, an internal combustion engine has an alternator, that char the battery and the size of the alternator and the battery and the wiring sort of determines how many amps of current you can draw off of that to power your stuff, that amplifier, your windshield wipers, the heater. I mean, anything that uses electric power steering, for example, uses five or six amps of current every time you turn your wheel and that depends on the size of the vehicle. The lightning. I'm sure that's gonna be a bit more because of the giant tires and you know, the mass of the vehicle and everything. So in a regular internal and engine vehicle, you can upgrade your alternator and your battery and your wiring to create more headroom to create. You have more power to use the power more stuff like big amplifiers for subwoofers and stuff like that. There are even companies who will re manufactured alternator for you and give you the ability to have instead of 100 and 20 amp alternator. You might be able to boost it up to 1 85 or 200? That's not possible to do in most hybrid and electric vehicles though. Right? Because it's a whole, yeah, nobody's doing that. So let's talk hybrids first and then electric vehicles. Second with hybrid vehicles. We've been seeing those around for a long time now. And when I look in my computer and I'm helping a customer, there's a big note about how big of a system we could put in there. Oh yeah. Why is that? Why are we limited in in a hybrid vehicle? Well, we don't want to leave people stranded with a big bill for repairing their car just because they put a solid bumping, you know, big fat sound system in their vehicle, there's this humongous battery in there. There is in addition to an engine in a hybrid vehicle, right? Don't I have all the electricity. I could possibly need to put a big stereo in there for a few minutes. Sure. Uh the thing is that maybe even up to an hour it might take a while, but if you exceed the current draw, even on a traditional alternator, if you exceed the current draw of that device with your system because you still have to run the car, you still have to run the headline lights, the heater, the various whatever runs off of that electrical system has still got to have current available for all those things. And on a traditional ice car with an alternator. If you hit around close to that 100% mark, you're in the zone of, you're gonna damage it soon. And literally if you hit 100 and 15% current demand, which is seriously could with a big subwoofer pounding in the back with a, you know, 1000 1501 whatever it might be, as soon as that thing hits 100 and 15% of current draw, that alternator is toast and an alternator. You can call up, you know, one of your local auto parts stores and go down and go get one usually pretty easily. They've been around for decades and decades and it's a straight up proposition to swap one out in most cars. I've done it a few times myself. It's a P I T A. Uh, you know, but with the DC to DC converters in the hybrids and the electrics, it's a, it's a different set up on the hybrids. We have, you know, the known headroom that we've got experience with and we've seen, we understand the controllers and such that, that they have going on there and we feel safe and confident in recommending that current draw level as not putting you in a bad situation with, you know, an expensive car repair and uh, you know, not being able to get to work one morning, those kinds of things. And that number is 30 amps. Right to put that into context. That's if you put a massive like 1000 watt subwoofer amplifier, what you need, what like 80 amps of current to power a massive amplifier like that. So you're not going to put in a humongous, big beefy based system. You can do some stuff though. You can add a small and a small compact powered sub. In fact, we have an amplifier right here that the amplifier, the amp rating or the fuse rating on the, on this amp is a 30 amp fuse. So this is an example of an amp you could safely and reliably install into most hybrid vehicles without causing yourself a problem. And this one, they've got their power printed on the top 300 watts by one. So mono subwoofer amplifier you'd be looking at adding this in. And for example, if you were swapping out the head unit in a hybrid and you wanted to add on a nice subwoofer and this would be a great choice because the head unit itself, we consider that basically a one for one swap, we're not changing the current draw to any significant amount. Maybe the new head unit draws one or two more amps of current possibly than the factory guy did. But if we're physically able to swap the head unit out, awesome, Then you have a higher quality sound signal coming into your amplifier and your speakers so you can still use your head unit to drive the speakers. You can, even in most cases you can swap the speakers out relatively easily in these cars and the way the way we know this amp is okay. What I'm showing off here is it has two fuses on the side, each fuses, a 15 amp fuse, you combine the values together. You have 30 amps of curry. Exactly. Yeah, those, those two fuses are wired and parallel together on the circuit. If you've ever seen an under hood fuse holder for a lot of like from a lot of the amp kits that we carry, you'll see inside a lot of those we have, it has a too few set up and they're just connected in parallel in line. So the capacity doubles when we're recommending to customers what type of an amp to get and that's what we're looking at. When we see that note on a hybrid vehicle, 30 amp current draw, we're looking at subwoofer and amplifiers and whatever we can do to your car that won't exceed 30 amps of current draw. So correct. You're limited in what you can put in there, but that doesn't mean you can't make your car sound awesome. Oh no, there's lots of great choices. I mean this amp is wonderful. You can get a small, you know, eight or 10, maybe a 12 running off this nice efficient sub, the higher spl range subs uh, you know, put them in a box, that kind of thing. If you want an all in one solution, you could take a look at like some of our bazooka tubes, We've got a lot of those in the 100 152 100 watt range things of that nature. If you're able to swap the head unit out, that's fantastic too. But even if you're not, you're, there's lots of solutions for pulling signal off, like for example, this little key and here. Yeah, so that was a sub and that's a way to get more base, this kicker key and which I have heard installed. I first saw it at C. E. S in the kicker booth And we happen to know that kickers watching right now. By the way, this kicker said it's great. It's great to see Crutchfield putting out such fantastic content. Keep it up, knowledge is power right on kicker thank you. But the kicker key and is a great example of something you might want to put in a hybrid vehicle, it won't draw more than 30 amps of current. Uh it has this little microphone that you put in it, a fantastic little idea. A lot of people are just petrified of trying to tune a sound system. This makes it really easy. I've installed a couple of these in different cars and before and after the tuning versus not tuned. It's uh it well it helps keep me from having to walk through the entire set of equalizer and crossover settings for somebody's car with them. If they've got one of these, it's like plug it in and run it now. How does it sound? Oh wow, that's really good. And this kicker amp will be four channels around 45 50 watts per channel and will make your factory speakers sound significantly better if you replace your speakers of course it will make your even better speakers sound even better without really potentially damaging your charging system in your hybrid or causing you problems in that regard. So it's a safe way to get really great sound. Are you going to win a competition level system that's probably not that but no, you're not gonna win any spl competitions But you will enjoy your daily drive a lot better because the system will sound a lot better. And here's the fuse on that. So that is a 20 amp, that's a 2020 amp fuse on the amplifier, the wiring for the kicker key. So totally safe to run that in your hybrid. So we've, we've been dealing with hybrids Hook up your power cable from it to your positive post on your 12 volt battery and then ground the negative to the frame of the vehicle. It's still an amplifier and install. It will probably live inside your dash. Right? You can stash it behind the head unit is normally the best place for it. Uh so these are great options and for hybrid vehicles we've got a lot of those pretty well, we've been dealing with them for a while seeing a lot more electric vehicles and this changes the equation yet again. Right. Sure. Yeah, I was I was looking through our database actually this morning and I printed out for myself just to see, I've got 19.5 pages worth of hybrid vehicles here. We're now going to detail every single one of them. No no no no, no, not at all. I just I just wanted to see, I was thinking about it before the segment coming up today. I was like man, how many cars do we actually have? Because we've got thousands and thousands of vehicles research in the database and there are, I've got 19.5 pages, you know, um, of hybrids, but only 3.5 pages of E. V. S In the system so far. Um, but that's, and that we know is about to start growing. Uh, and you know, I've been doing this for 25 years. I have a feeling you've been doing it even longer than that. Uh, you've, you've seen over the years how things have changed in cars and you know, like for example, when data bus systems became a thing, right? The first year there was a computer in a car that sort of controlled and monitored everything. Uh, did we have an aftermarket solution right then and there we didn't and it's kind of a similar thing going on now with electric vehicles, right? All these, all these electric vehicles, there's not a, here you go, here's how to put a big awesome audio system and an electric vehicle because there's so many unknowns in them right now, correct? Yeah. Unfortunately, the aftermarket world, we have to actually get our hands on and take apart. And that's where we also have a lot going on with our partners in terms of, you know, the different manufacturers for the kids and everything. They've got to get their hands on them and find out, you know, the software that is involved in controlling the electrical systems, the level of control that they have these days. And what goes on with them unfortunately is an unknown because the manufacturers just don't tell anybody there, you know, Tesla is like, you know, lips are zipped, they're, they're, they're not talking And, and handing out specs, you know, and you can't just go call up, you know, AutoZone and go, hey, can I get a software controller reader for a 2020 Tesla? No, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. So, so we don't know what you can do without potentially causing your vehicle to stop working, right, throwing air codes maybe shutting down on you. Things of that nature. So erring on the side of caution and keeping with the Crutchfield noble purpose of trying to provide, you know, enriching experiences in your dealings with us. We don't want to put it out there to say, Hey, yeah, go ahead, add yourself this 600 watt amplifier or whatever that kind of thing without knowing it will really work and be of a benefit to you. What kind of effects it's gonna have on range. Um, you know, different folks have that range anxiety thing going on and if you add a larger electrical current draw to your system, it's possible you're going to. So, in an electric vehicle, especially these newer ones, most of them have like huge fancy touchscreens that are all integrated system themselves, right? Those things are no longer just head units, There are giant tablet with an operating system and you shouldn't even consider replacing that. There are no aftermarket solutions. We, we are a little gun shy to start adding big amps to them because of the way electrical vehicles work and we don't know enough about that yet. Yeah. And so is there anything you can do at all to make that factory system sound better? Well, at this point the options are pretty limited. Yeah, it's, it's speakers, you know, where possible to physically swap out speakers on the cars that we've literally gotten our hands on and taken apart and making the measurements. Um, you know, swapping out speakers is, is your best option at this point because depending upon the clarity and quality of your electronics, having better speakers is gonna make those things, you know, it's gonna make your sound system sound better. Uh, they're like cleaning your windows, you know, makes the view out to whatever is out there in your world better. So what you want to look for in a set of speakers since you're not adding a new radio or a new amplifier to power them, you want to look for the most efficient speakers that you can fit in there that will also have better, Better sound quality and efficiency and uh, speakers that just don't need a ton of power and that's what we've got right here on display, right? Yeah, spl ratings north of 89 or 90 is where I'd start, you know, that kind of thing up in that range 88 89 90. That would be my starting point in searching out. So we pulled this particular pair of speakers to put in this video because of their efficiency. These are the hurts, you know, 91 3. Almost more efficient than that. The hurts X 16 vibes are the model of speakers. These are $100 pair of 6.5 inch speakers with an efficient the rating of 93.5. D be nice. So what does that mean if a speaker is, let's say a 90 db efficiency, which is a very common efficiency rating on car speaker and these are 93 Okay, what does that make a difference? So the way that works technically quick tech lesson for you, the S. P. L. Rating of a speaker in D. B. Is determined by a test by the manufacturer and we know it as the one what? one m test. So they literally put a microphone out from the cone of the speaker, 39 inches, one m and they measure a particular tone. And give us a number. It's like how loud is it with one watt of power driving that tone out of that speaker as measured by a calibrated microphone and they give us that number. So we can predict how loud something will be because we know that every time we are able to double power into a speaker, starting at that one watt, we get three more decibels of sound out of it. So for the first watt hitting these guys, you're getting what you say, 93 3 93.593 point five. Okay, so if I double that to two watts of power, I'm gonna go up to 96.5, I double that again to four watts of power. Every time you double it. Every time you double the power you're at, you get three more DBS sound out of it. So how many watts do they handle? These? Can handle up to 55 watts of RMS, Power up to 55 watts. Okay, so now you're not gonna have 55 watts RMS power out of the factory head unit in anything. Um, very, very few cars that I've ever seen have more than about 14, 15 watts RMS. In fact, that's pretty comparable to like most actual pioneer head units that we've carried over the years rate at 14 real watts real RMS. So, so I'm just thinking about the math you were doing. And now, so basically we're three d be more efficient than my hypothetical pair of 90 DB speakers. Yeah, let's say your factory head unit does 16 watts of power. Right, that's four double wings. So I'm adding 12 DB to this. And he said 93. So I can get 100 and five DB out of these and 100 103 105 in that range. And compared to 90 DB speakers, you will have a noticeable not, it's not a subtle difference. It's a pretty big difference and you want to keep it efficient. So we're not taxing the electrical stuff in there in the vehicle. Anyway, we're talking about an electric vehicle. So this is something, it's something you can do in any electric vehicle. If we've got the research on it, we can help you pick out speakers that will fit and doing that isn't going to cause damage or error codes or anything like that for the rest of what you can do in an electric vehicle. There's a lot of people currently working on it are reads, our vehicle research team is constantly evolving and trying to find new ways and this is probably something they will have to figure out what do we need to measure and check on electric vehicles. After Mark integration companies like I data link and metro and Scottish and many others are probably looking at how can we figure out what can be done in these vehicles. Pro installers are figuring this stuff out. You don't have to look hard on Youtube to find really advanced level installation. Guys showing videos of how they've put in a massive system in a Tesla but there, this is like the pros go to these guys to figure it out because it's not theirs, they're adding extra stuff that most is not normally part of car, stereo installation. Right? We're doing, you know, the do it yourself or, or maybe you're gonna hire, you know, a local mechanical shop possibly to throw some stuff in for you out of what we sell. And we, we don't want to set anybody up for failure in terms of, you know, damaging their car, having a bad experience. Obviously being unhappy with us and we're fairly conservative in our recommendations because of those reasons, you know, there are plenty of things you can do in terms of improvement in your sound and we're getting there on what else we might be able to do. I've, I've found specs on some cars, uh, and the more I've dug and more I've dug and dug, it's just, you know, they're just not publishing the information like I can call up any Chevy dealership and go, hey, what size the alternator in this? You know, whatever car, the Silverado, whatever it might be. But you know, calling up Tesla and going, hey, what's your DC DC converter put out and, and must doesn't answer the phone and give you that spec. No, no, they won't answer. So if you've purchased an electric vehicle and it's not sounding as good as you wanted to and you wish you could do this stuff, we want to be there to help you and we, along with all the other people and organizations are certainly working on it. It's not gonna happen tomorrow, but it is going to happen. We will figure out a way to make sure you can have great sound in these cars, but there's a lot of unknowns and we're just not willing to recommend stuff until we know them. And chris here is going to have to deal with those calls and tech support if we start selling stuff, if we don't know what works in your car. So we're not doing that. Uh, and chris, thank you so much for joining me here today. Uh, and talking about electric vehicles. It is clearly a hot topic based on the pole and how many vehicles are out. And so we're working on it by this time next year. I anticipate we'll have a lot more information, but it's still gonna be, you know, companies like Tesla being as tight lipped as they are. We're gonna have to find real world data from people experimenting on stuff. Thing is we don't experiment on the cars so much as find what really works awesome. Thank you very much. We're gonna bring in one last special guest for today. Eric is coming in to talk about our demo days. Uh, and you know, we are regularly setting up stuff, speakers, stereos and stuff like that to listen to. Here's a, here's a speaker. Uh, there's a, this would be a wharf dale and uh, erIC, you were part of setting these up and getting a a demonstration of these speakers, how they sound for our sales advisors, right. And the, and as we discussed, I think on the first Crutchfield live that we did weeks ago, this used to be something that the people who make these things would come and do for us vendor training. Yeah, Normally this would happen twice a week throughout most of the year, as our vendor would bring in their Prada and give us time to get our hands on it, listen to their speakers, play their music and amplifiers and all that stuff. And that's not been happening for almost two years now. Right. And so we've started to do that ourselves. We, we always did it ourselves. The other problem is half of our, most of our employees have been at home. So even if we had these set up, they couldn't come in. Now, things are, you know, go seeming to trend in the right direction and more people can get into the office. So setting up speakers to listen to now really benefits people, right? And uh, the way that this particular demonstration started out was with a request, you know, chris was talking about how we want people to have a good experience and sometimes people will, that's just comes from us giving them the full information as much information as we can possibly give them. And these wharf dale speakers, a lot of people were getting them and saying, I'm not getting a lot of bass from these. Um, and they are generally designed to be very accurate. they don't offer a lot of bass, this is just like a you know like a five inch subwoofer here. It does it doesn't go play very deep. So we decided we wanted to set up a kind of a demonstration where we could show the difference between base you can hear and base you can really feel. So we set up these wharf dales and compare them. We also have these L. Ax which are a three way speaker with a 6.5 inch wide for in this slot port in the front, you can hear a lot more base with these. We hooked both of these up to a paris sound amplifier and parry sound is one of those vendors that came on while we were all in lockdown and we never got a chance to try their stuff out. So that was very exciting for us to be able to hook it up and really play around with it. Um And that para sound thing was a star, I can just tell you that. It it gives you 100 and 60 watts into eight ohm speakers, which is what these do, but it's also very versatile, it will go down to four. And L Ac likes to do this weird thing where there's are six homes, so the paris sound could play this and this just fine. We didn't have to mess around and get a different amp in there, it was ready to go, no matter what we hooked up to it. Um So so we did that. But then we said, I said, I wanted base. We could feel that's where this guy comes in. Subwoofer. Yeah, yeah, we added this subwoofer so that people could try these without, like let's hear how much base I can get without a subwoofer and then they can turn this on and really kick it into high gear. This sucker uh is an eight inch subwoofer with a nine by 11 down firing passive radiator. I wonder if we can see that sucker on the bottom. So that gives us a lot of extra when you do that. Um it's got 1000 watt class D amplifier and everything. And let's see that goes down to 18 hertz. So that yeah, yeah, that's like chest rumbling bass. You can really feel it and you can tell it's kind of an unusual shape as well. They don't go for those straight lines and that's part of their their philosophy of what makes it sound so great. Um so we had a lot of fun playing around with all of that. Uh and then true to kind of the crutchfield ethos, our Director of tech support said while we've got this amplifier here, I'm going to kind of play around and uh and see if I can make my own speakers. Yeah, did you get to hear those? I never heard them. Okay, I got to hear them. I actually did a little video about them. But yeah, those speakers that you're about to see in this short little video are are we powered them with the same amp that we used for these parents sound massive amplifier. These uh, these speakers that fill our Director of tech support built himself do not need anywhere near this much power but we gave it to him anyway. And are we ready to queue that up? Alright, que the video. Hey everybody. It's training manager JR here, I'm in our vendor training room and we have another demo days set up. We have a couple of pairs of really nice bookshelf speakers, pair of slacks and a pair of wharf dales. We're playing these for advisors so they can hear the diff. Uh but what I'm gonna do for you right now is something a little different. Instead, we've got another pair of speakers. I'd like to play for you. Our Director of Tech support got to doing some research and built some speakers of his own. They are right here and I'm gonna go ahead and hit play, we're playing my band on title on this ipad over Bluetooth into this really, really powerful amplifier back here and here. Here you go, bring that camera over here. The belief to see what's going on. Alright, here's what's going on here. These are two styrofoam panels on the back of them are two transducers which is basically the motor structure of a speaker without the diaphragm, the part that you see moving in and out, it's not there, it's just the magnet and the voice coil and there's a thing moving in and out creating vibrations when you play songs. It's basically a speaker without the diaphragm and it's attached to these styrofoam panels and it caused It basically excites them, it causes them to vibrate, they become the surface playing music. So the vibrations you're hearing are this styrofoam vibrating in response to those excite ear's uh you can make a pair of these speakers for under 100 bucks. Find a small amplifier and you're good to go uh they handle about 30 or 40 watts each. We happen to be driving them with a really, really powerful home amplifier. We could pump 200 watts into them if we wanted. But then our styrofoam would probably catch on fire. So we're not gonna do that. I just wanted to show you something fun that is happening here at Crutchfield today, thanks to our Director of tech support Phil, he just uh he's probably gonna set these up in some kind of Halloween display next year, knowing him, He's really into that. So anyway, just wanted you to see what's going on here. We'll do a separate video on these bookshelf speakers because they're deserving of their own video. Thanks for watching and we're back. So what? That was pretty fun Phil Phil from our tech support, created those speakers off of a video that he watched on Youtube. He said, this guy basically gives you all the tools you need to figure this out. Uh The stuff he was using technically was not styrofoam. I misquoted that in the video, It's unfazed, polystyrene foam panels, uh is what he actually used to make those speakers, I couldn't believe how much sound they made and they did sound a lot better with that subwoofer you had out there earlier. Another demo we did recently was we set up two turntables, one of them with a separate phono pre amp and the other one was using the built in phono pre amp same turntables. Uh and we wanted to kind of hear what the difference was. Once again, we took advantage of the paris sound amplifier, you can see it going on on the screen right now, those two turntables, one of them with the phono pre amp one of them with the built in phono pre amp, you didn't get to experience this one, did you? Or did no, I did not show up for that one in person. I will say that it's very common these days to have either. You're that's what you're seeing right now, that's the project, the phono pre amp with the tube, pre amps on it. And that makes a huge difference. Like it is nice for convenience to have that, that pre amp built into either your receiver, your turntable, even powered stereo speakers. You can, you can get it that way. But when you choose something like that, that project then that gives you a lot more flexibility and you were able to hear it and you said that the way it sounded was very different. Yeah, no, there was, it was like there was more sound to work with, like the amplifier had more to work with, which means it sounded a little fuller, a little richer uh and at the exact same volume level uh it you just got more out of it. Uh and you know, that's why a phono pre amp exists because you don't get a whole lot of sound from the needle in the groove. You need some something to, you know, boost that up and you want that thing that boost that up to do a really good job of that and that's what a dedicated separate phono pre empt does got a bunch to choose from. I'm here to tell you the one I heard made a difference, simple as that and your sales advisors that you'll be talking to on the phones. Many of them also got to hear that and see that as well so they can help you pick that pick out a phono pre empt if you're looking to enhance your turntable experience. We're almost done. Doug did say sup and that's been a few minutes ago so I apologize for not getting to you soon. I don't know if you're still watching Doug but I appreciate it. Sam online said excellent topic. Thank you. DJ theO 703 said hello from northern Virginia. So thank you guys for sticking with us. We're almost gonna wrap this up. But you may see the this thing behind us here that looks like a spaceship or something that might have been floating around in the movie Dune. It's not it's a new product that we are now selling from a new company called Sing. The product is called the Sing sell Alpha. And the company started and the design of this thing is done by chris Stringer. Do you know who that is? I do who's chris Stringer. He is a designer who worked for Apple and kind of created some of the designs that we have had become basically ubiquitous in our lives. Yeah, this phone, watch the ipods and Macbooks. Yeah, all that stuff. So he's obviously very design centric guy but and so he designed this something that doesn't look like any other speaker we've ever seen quite frankly but it also doesn't sound like anything else we've ever heard. So he's definitely got the chops when it comes to making music sound. It does. And we just recently picked it up. The web pages are now live at as of today, one of our most talented writers ever that works at Crutchfield wrote the pages to tell you all about what's going on in the saying speaker and so you can now see it and purchase it or well it's in stock. We got them in stock. I wasn't sure if that was gonna be the case now that I can see them online, They are actually in stock. Uh, do we have to give them this one? No, no, no, this one's gonna stay here in the video studio. There's, this thing is available in two flavors. It's the exact same speaker with two different stands. So there's the 6.5 inch table stand and then there's the tall floor stand, which you're seeing in the video now. Uh, and uh, but they're, they're, they're like basically a wireless home speaker. I would like to say that the reason, part of the reason I wrote this particular pages because I got a chance to hear them before we even ordered them. Uh, they sent some guys out here to demonstrate these for us and we have a house on the property here at crash field. Um, and they set up two of them on this floor stand and then one on the table stands, we had three going at the same time, You can play them in sync and it's incredible. It really filled the space around us. What I say, and on the page that I wrote is like with most speakers, you have to tow them around and then you sit in the sweet spot. The sweet spot is everywhere with this, that's kind of what it does. That is different than most other speakers. Uh Is there is no one, there's no left, there's no right, there's no front, there's no back. Its, its job is to basically fill your entire room with sound. And the app doesn't really need job of allowing you to move that focused sound. So you can make it sound better at your desk or at your couch or the entire room. The more you use the full or it will sound, you can use up to three and like one room and all controlled by the app. You can have four like all in your house. If you want to do multi room audio, you can do that. Uh and it looks great. We just actually just yesterday did a product spotlight video where we went over all the technical details. I'm not gonna bore you with all of them here. Suffice it to say there's two wolfers that make a lot of bass. There's three horn driver arrays with a midrange and tweeter in each one. And uh and it looks awesome. I love products, you can see into uh and uh it sounds awesome and I want to play it for you. You would, you would not like it if I tried to tell you how great this thing sounded and didn't play it for you. Uh So I'm gonna turn it up, I've got a song playing now. Now keep in mind, this is compressed, it's through youtube, right? How does it sound for you at your end versus here for me in the room with it. Uh And uh so it sounds different for me than it will for you, just simply because I'm in the room with it, but I'd like to point out, this does not come with the speaker on top. The most defining feature of this is how much base it's got. And you can't really hear how much base is actually happening, but you can see it. So these are crutchfield packing peanuts, uh that we have sitting on, just so you can see that wolf removing, I've got it turned up, not even to half volume yet, and you can see them rumbling a little bit, but this is a warning for our producer that I'm about to turn it up to full blast. So you can you maybe not hear the bass, but you'll be able to see the base. Here we go. So hopefully that was effective. They let me do that. I know it's it's uh DJ THEO 703. Still watching says it's omnidirectional. Absolutely. Omni in all directions. It's exactly what they're going for. So that's the cell Alpha by sing. It's available on our website, it's in stock. Uh 17 99 is the price on today for the one with the tabletop stand and the one with the floor stand, it's like like 1900 something, right? Almost almost 2000. Which sounds like a lot until you hear it. This thing really does do a nice job. Plus it's a conversation starter. Uh and that guy from Apple designed it, so it's not, you know, it's not gonna be cheap, but it is gonna be awesome. So I think we're gonna wrap this thing up. I don't see any more comments coming in. Thank you to all those who did comment and ask questions. You are, make this more fun. Uh talking about the stuff is great actually interacting with real people that are picking up what we're putting down is really where I have a lot of fun. Just a couple of things to wrap up. Check out Crutchfield the podcast, go to Crutchfield dot com slash podcast for all of season one. And season two bonus, we'll have our live videos going into the podcast now. Uh and we've got more live videos coming soon in a few weeks, probably the middle of december. We'll do this again. I don't know what we're gonna talk about yet. And so just keep an eye on our facebook, on our Youtube on our community page. We'll let you know when that that is going to happen again. I couldn't do it without all the wonderful support of the crew behind the scenes as well. I'm JR training manager here at Crutchfield signing off.