Our Approach
Car stereo is not that important – but enjoying music is experiencing art, and that’s very important.
Think about all the design that goes into a car. Our car may be the largest work of art we will ever own. Work done to your car should honor the original design.
Americans spend more than nine hours a week in their cars. That time shouldn’t suck.
While you’re in your car, we believe you should be able to listen to good music, well reproduced – and it should sound great even with the sunroof open and the windows down.
Speakers sound very different in cars than in displays. So get speakers made for cars.
A dirty little secret of the car stereo industry is that the speakers sold to big chain stores are designed for demo rooms, not for cars. If the speaker sounds great in a car (installed low and at ninety degrees to your ears) it will probably sound bad in a display room (installed up high, and pointing right at your ears).
But when the speakers at a big chain store sound bad in the display board, no one ever buys them – that’s a commercial failure, and no one wants to be part of a commercial failure. So those speakers are designed from the ground up to sound best in a display – not in your car. We use speakers which sound best in your car.
The midrange is most important part of the sound. So don’t just buy bass.
Bass and treble can be more impressive at first – but if the midrange isn’t right, nothing else matters. The human ear is most sensitive to the midrange notes, because that’s what our voices use. We are about detailed, accurate sound with linear low-bass extension.
Your car doesn’t need to be changed. So we won’t.
We think your car is fine the way it is – the speakers might be lousy, but the car itself is fine and doesn’t need big changes. Except when installing custom systems, cutting metal is not allowed, nothing we do will impede mechanics at work later, and everything functions the same way when we’re done as it did before. We are the West Coast’s experts in adding high-fidelity sound to factory source units.
Less can be more.
We don’t think you need more speakers – often we think you need fewer speakers. The best-sounding systems we’ve done have had 5 or 7 speakers total.
You’ll talk on your phone while driving no matter what we say. We’ll help make it safer.
We have Bluetooth handsfree kits for what we hope is safer driving. They mute the radio automatically, so you can enjoy your music without worrying about missing a call.
We all win, or there’s no deal.
Musicar Northwest exists to help people have better music systems in their car – affordably, profitably, and with our integrity intact. No sale is more important than your satisfaction or our integrity. Our business is a combination of gear sales and integration services, and our business model doesn’t work without both kinds of revenue. For this reason, we have different hourly labor rates for gear you purchase from us and for gear you bring in yourself – this isn’t intended as a punitive measure, we just need to make the business numbers work at the end of the day for everybody.
Things we don’t do.
– We don’t install in-dash video displays that can be watched by the driver when driving.
– We don’t sell equipment that we don’t like.
– And we don’t install equipment of dubious origin – i.e., with the serial numbers scratched off.
We could, we just don’t.
New cars come out every year. Wondering about using the stock in-dash head unit in a system in your car? We will test it for free!
If your car is of recent vintage, you may qualify for our free Vehicle Test Program. We measure the output, the speaker fitment, and decide on the amplifier location, and then we will email you a full report on what we found and a proposal on what we’d do to upgrade your sound.
Contact us for an appointment!
