I recently played around with the JBL sound system to check what settings fit best. I am a big bass fan, don't really car much about lyrics clarity but I found the bass to be lacking in JBL system. I was wondering if I should get door damping done to improve that but first decided to play around with different configurations first. Fortunately, I am happier than before and sharing my observations here. This is for 4x4 JBL sound system for people who prefer bass and all the 'boom boom' plus vibrations. For those who prefer clarity and instruments, the default settings are pretty good.
1. So the JBL system layout is as follows. Although this is for RAV4 the layout is similar, maybe the amp location is different but that doesn't concern us for now. So the key is focusing on the woofers in the front doors, that's where most of the bass comes from (apart from the subwoofer ofcourse)
2. In Toyota head unit sound settings, turn off volume normalization. In EQ push bass to max, you can keep mid and treble at default but I prefer reducing both of them a bit, more for treble for bass to take over.
3. Keep Fader/balance in the middle for now to give equal preference to both front and rear passengers.
4. Now comes the audio source. JBL hasn't designed to boost the bass by default like in many other cars, they have focused on clarity so audio source becomes very important to pump up the bass. Plus Toyota hasn't provided option to play around with different frequencies which is a downer. I tested the following sources,
- USB pen drive - Need to prepare manually, if you are indeed doing so then download high quality ones like FLAC format and not the compressed ones like mp3. I don't have time and patience to do this.
- Amazon Music - I have prime subscription so audio quality is at 256kbps, pretty good but the problem is it doesn't have EQ settings in the app atleast the iOS one. I don't have any android phones.
- Apple Music - It has EQ but you can only set predefined ones like bass booster. If I am not wrong, you can't set frequencies. Their upcoming lossless audio feature will be pretty good when released in India.
- Spotify - There are 2 nice things about this app. First it's free up to 160kbps audio quality and I had my doubts on it but second, it has inbuilt EQ where you can set frequencies. So this is what I ended up choosing after comparing with others.
5. Turn off volume normalization in Spotify. Change Spotify EQ settings as shown. Basically max out the low frequencies.
6. Next is either use bluetooth or CarPlay. I tried first with bluetooth.
7. Now test the songs from this link given by BMW
https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/be...-speakers.html
8. You can also search for best bass songs to test car audio like 'Boom Boom Pow from Black Eyed Peas' and try those tracks.
9. If you want the audio to be more driver focussed, then go to fader/balance and move the point towards the front. As mentioned before, woofers are in front. The bass comes alive even more when you tweak the fader/balance towards front but do it only at the cost of sacrificing rear passengers.
10. With all these setting the bass came alive. I got what I wanted in terms of heavy 'blasts' and car vibrations. There was a big difference compared to default settings. I still might get damping done in future but don't really feel it's required for now. There was hardly any difference to clarity at least to me. I prefer Spotify now over others just for the EQ settings option.
11. Next I tried with CarPlay, unfortunately the audio quality seems to have gone down. I tried to understand the cause online. It is either due to Spotify bug, the wire is faulty or it is standard behaviour where CarPlay compresses quality more. This is a problem when I want navigation along with audio as Fortuner doesn't have in built NAV. I will test more on this later.