What is the Loud Setting on a Car Head Unit?

Hello everyone, Today I am going to be looking at the "loud" feature that is available on a lot of car head units. Firstly a little information on what it is usually used for.

The loud feature on a cars head unit is often used by people that don't know how to tune a head unit properly. A lot of the time it is used when the speakers in the car as the standard ones and without the "loud" setting turned on they sound terrible. Many people think that it is a good idea to use the "loud" setting but usually it just distorts of makes the audio quality lower. The volume increases but a lot of the time the quality is lost.

The loud feature usually works by turning up the bass and treble to make the speakers sound a lot louder than normal. Usually stock speakers are set to produce the best mid range performance so bass is usually lost and treble and sometimes be quite dull. When the "loud" feature is used because the bass and treble are boosted the mids sound more in line with everything.

The main problem with using the loud feature however is that because the speakers are being made to do stuff they weren't really designed for it can often make them distort. Specially in the cheaper makes of cars where the speakers are probably the last thing the company spent it's money on.

So overall basically Loud is just there to make the most of a bad situation. Usually when someone only bothers to replace the headunit and leaves the stock speakers in a car.

Now, Loud can be used so long as you don't go turning it up so much that the signal starts to clip "Distort" This can cause damage to the speakers as a clipped signal can be very harmful to the voice coils especially if your car has delicate tweeters.

When Should Loud not be used?

The loud feature should not be used when you have a proper audio setup. Basically if you have a sub and some door speakers with an amplifier and any other stuff then it is always best to not use the loud feature at all as it can cause a lot of distortion and clipping. Distorting a good quality amplifier and speakers can cause a lot of moneys worth of damage.

A lot of the time a decent setup will have the headunits loud feature turned off. You can use the Equalizer to get a much finer tuning and get the levels correct. It is always preferred that you do not boost the bass level on a headunit though as that will often distort the RCA's output as well as you turn the volume up. It is a lot better to set the gains on the amplifier to the correct levels instead so as to not increase the distortion from the headunit.