Tone Controls on Your Jeep Radio - Optimal Settings for Sound Quality
For optimal sound quality in any vehicle, we want to be directly connected to the source unit via either USB or USB-C. While Bluetooth streaming is convenient the dynamism simply isn’t there yet in most modern vehicles. Yes, your music will still sound amazing with our upgrade, but if you’re after peak performance you’ll want a direct physical connection to your device.
Part of the upgrade process in every audio environment is setting the tone controls (bass, treble, any sort of EQ or enhancement) to a flat level (in the middle if a visual representation is offered) and making sure that any Loudness controls are turned to OFF.
Beyond that, if you’re using your phone to stream music via most of the popular platforms, you’ll want to go into the device’s main settings and turn any Equalization to OFF on both the native music player and then within the streaming platform you’re using to make sure no additional sonic manipulation is activated (bass boost, etc). This is most important as you listen at higher volume levels, as distortion is the enemy of sound quality.
The key is to deliver a flat, unmolested signal to the amplifier in your system. This is how the music was recorded, and how we design our speakers for optimal performance. Sure, you can make subtle changes here and there based on individual recordings, channels, streaming rates, etc, but for the most part you can set these tone controls once and let our speakers reproduce the nuances of the music as the sound engineers intended.
You’ll be amazed at how much these little changes make in the listening experience. Try it across all of your devices and see how much clearer and natural sounding your music sounds. It’s the least expensive way to optimize sound quality and hear music the way it was meant to be heard.
We’ve also noticed the native UConnect codec seems to have a slightly more robust sound to it vs using the native iOs CarPlay or Android Auto in the newer generation Jeeps where you’re able to select/deselect the source.
Further, we’ve found both Tidal and Apple Music with Lossless Audio are superior to Spotify in terms of dynamism and responsiveness.
Experiment. Have fun. You can do this in all of your vehicles. For free. Rock on.