Want Better Sound? Have an iPhone connected to your car audio?

[ELCID86]

Mine did play louder with the mono on, but I think you lose some of the mids, etc. I could not hear some of the instruments that I did when mono was off.

[Jon D]

Being a reformed audiophile, I've held back, in essence what happens when you go mono is loose all the stereo separation and imaging. When this occurs with a system that's not great it's easier to play music at what seems to be loader as all the speakers are playing the same signal. I do this at home with my Sonos speakers in party mode.

However you do loose a lot as mentioned above in detail and sound stage if your system is capable. Unfortunately to get really good audio in our cars requires a full custom system and that means loosing the factory radio. So it becomes a looks vs performance trade off. My system while a few years old now just blows away anything you can do with the factory radio as the head is much more capable, iPhone is direct USB with full control and that makes a huge difference. CD is better still. But the trade off is separate 5 channel amp, all new speakers with a subwoofer in a enclosure in the trunk.

FWIW

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

[RITmusic2k]

Mine did play louder with the mono on, but I think you lose some of the mids, etc. I could not hear some of the instruments that I did when mono was off.

This sounds like phase cancelation. My response above mentioned "summing" the channels... this does not actually imply that all results are additive. If you think of each channel of audio like a sine wave, you can visualize that if two peaks line up with each other, their sum will be a peak twice as high (read: loud) as either. But if they're offset such that a peak lines up with a valley, they sum to zero (e.g., 'silent').

If an instrument is panned slightly to one side in a stereo arrangement, it is definitely possible for its left- and right- channel components to be out of phase with each other, and when the signal is summed to mono, they cancel themselves out. It actually points to poor engineering on the part of the music producer - any audio engineer worth their salt would check for destructive interference to make sure this sort of thing wouldn't happen. Shawn, I'd suggest you try to play with it again, using different reference material. Pick another album and see if the same thing isn't happening.