Bimmer32

THX in a car? What will that do unless you are watching a movie, and currently, you can't do that in a factory spec Idrive system.

I was surprise to see the current L7 to have a "movie" mode. All that does is turn down the trebles, raise the mids and super the bass. :thumbsdown: It does injustice to all types of music except bass thumping ones.

ipp

In europe you can watch TV on your iDrive. I think it's some kind of legal thing.

jet190rs

THX is just a marketing gimick. It just means the system is approved by George Lucas. What he likes might not be what you like. Besides, THX is primarily for movies, and in order to get true THX certification, ppl build home theaters with specific wall shapes/sizes and even carpet thickness.

The best way to test out your L7 system is really to play an original well mastered CD. Mp3s are compressed and even copied CDs are never burned 100% accurately.

Geno

To approve the iteration of Logic 7 in my car, George Lucas would have to have as tin an ear for music these days as he has for dialogue. I'm betting the one that got the THX sounds better.

By the way, I always find the best test for audio equipment is to play a whole bunch of source material--well-recorded and poorly-recorded alike--and over a long period of time. The best system is the one that makes you want to keep putting more records on deep into the night.

jet190rs

Yeah what I meant above was that you should just grab a good CD that you know well, and play it in your L7 car and compare it to how it sounds in other cars or in your home system. Just to get a high quality source and can do an apples to apples comparision to see if L7 really is disappointing.

my530i

I wholeheartly agree with you on this. THX is good for watching movie in car. I'm not sure if it's good for music enjoyment.

To compare sound b/w L7 and other sound system in car with iPod is an unwise thing to do. The only way to compare is use original CD.
Using iPod has some limitations:
1. BMW or European cars seems to have gain suppression device such as cap/res or we can call low-pass filter in Electrical Engineer's term.
2. iPod is not as good as CD player

I don't know why Geno use iPod to compare L7 with other sound system Please use CD and let us know.
To me, L7 sounds a little muddy, but it's a good OEM system compared to standard system. However, for $1800, it does not meet our expectation.

Someone said GS and LS ML system does not sound good. You know why? Because of the distance between front speakers.

largeface

I recently got a gift from a cousin which was a High-Def CD recording of the beatles. WOW!! the sound quality was pretty impresive. Its a bummer that these high-def recordings are not available to every genre of music. The sound quality even came close to as playing an original LP with a MrkLevenson home stereo system.

ImolaRedM

Yep... play that CD on a portable CD player through the head phone port and use the AUX jack to have a proper compare.

I think most of the iPod bashing has to do with either use of the head phone port on the iPod (vs Dock line-out) or use of the filtered AUX input jack (or worse... both). The iPod is not a bad portable music player.

JeffNNJ

I love my Logic 7 and think that it was worth every penny. I recently had my V1 hotwired by a very high end audio shop. The owner told me that he couldn't come close to matching the sound for anywhere near $1800.

originalsnuffy

There is no "hi def" Beatles release. Unless the person making the post had a buddy that ripped their LPs to CD and is claiming that this is hi def. The closest is the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine and Let It Be (naked) which are more modern mastering jobs.

The Beatles catalog is currently being remastered. Apple announced this when they sued Apple computer--it was part of their announcement that they are preparing to sell music digitally--probably with their own unique DRM (ugh!).

The MP3 playback built into my 5 series sounds reasonable, especially at 160 kbps or 192, but for fidelity give me uncompressed wav files anyday.

My wife's Volvo has dolby digital processing; it can get tiresome pretty quickly. I assume L7 is similar. Sounds great at first, then probably an audiophile would turn it off.

I play the stereo in the old Lexus and the Volvo with flat settings. On the BMW, I keep the treble flat but turn up the bass a few notches. I do think that the standard US stereo is a bit bass poor, even with great recording sources.