My Perfect EQ Settings (Dynaudio)

[kalimon]

I personally found my 32GB Sandisk Sd to be a bit glitchy.
I've since bought a 32GB Kingston USB stick and that appears to be more stable.
Only problem is it uses up your one USB port

[Brenbo]

Does the MIB2 unit have 1 or 2 SD Card slots.  My current MIB1 unit has 2x SD Card slots. 

[kalimon]

It has two but one is used for the sat nav

[Brenbo]

Do you have Nav Pro or the standard Nav on your GTI? 

[kalimon]

Just the standard MIB II nav

[Brenbo]

Ahh, this is why i was confused.  Thought you had nav pro with sat nav data on hdd, which frees up second SD card port.

[iandjm]

I picked up my new R today.  Wow what a car!   The dynaudio system is massively different to my 2014MY Gti, with the 'identical' system.  I cannot begin to compare the two.  The bass response in my new car is 3x better at least.  What a difference

Ian

[Bubba Nutkin]

I've finally got round to copying my music onto an SD card (a 64GB Sandisk jobbie, £23 from Amazon).  The process was a bit of a faff, since you need to convert any iTunes music into MP3 format (iTunes uses a different file extension I believe), then copy the tracks to the SD card.  Trouble is, it imports the track number as well, so you get "06 Number Of The Beast" and then have to rename the file, e.g. to "Maiden, NOTB" or whatever.  Also, ripping CD's direct to the SD card takes quite a while.  Finally you have to reorganise the music into playlists since it imports them by artist.  So, yes, rather clunky but that may just be my incompetence.

The good news is that the sound quality over and above that of the iPod I was using is huge - we now have bass!  Music sounds far more punchy and realistic and I can at last hear what the Dynaudio can do.  I have formatted everything as 320 Kbps.  Given that iTunes is 256 Kbps, which surely isn't too inferior, I'm thinking that the VW system is doing something odd with the data from an iPod, which it does not do with the SD card.  Anyway, I'm delighted with the sound from the SD card, and thank you to those of you that told me it was the way forward.

Bubba.     

[Brenbo]

Glad to see you have sorted your music quality issue. When you get everything just right the Dynaudio system really does come in to it's own.  On the point of renaming files etc, I think this is something we have all done.  I went through my whole music library (which is around 40GB with many hundreds of files to ensure their metadata tags and filenames followed a file naming convention and looked correct on the Nav Pro screen. 

Just a side note if you have music files which are 256kbps then there may be no point in re-encoding them to be 320kbps.  If the original music file is of a lower quality than the target format you wish to encode to, the quality will not get better, only the file size will increase (i.e. less music files per SD card due to their size). 

In short you cannot improve the quality of the original file. So if the original file is 256kbps then that is the best quality the file will produce even when re-encoded to a higher kbps.   

Once again glad to see you have sorted your issue 

[Matt-GTi]

I had Harman Kardon in my F80 1 Series and it was soooo good so when I ordered my Golf I had to have up grade sound.

I'm so disappointed with the dynaudio as to how much setup etc it required!  I'm a sound engineer so know exactly how to tune eq's for best sound
I found they have relied on the door mids to produce much of the bass, big problem with that is the doors vibrate alot. Also to have a hard hitting mid speaker that produces lots of bass, you lose definition, and gain undefined midrange frequencies! Instead of putting in a capable sub to handle the bottom end they use that space saver thing! It augments the bass rather than being the bass, this makes for difficult bottom end tuning and a sub that bottoms out quickly

The BM also has auto EQ which worked very well on balancing different tracks as it's soo noticeable going from one track to another in the golf you want to reach for the EQ everytime! I really wonder if Dynaudio built this system for the golf or just supplied VW the parts as the difference to the HK is unreal (they built the system to suit the car)

Anyway, after hours of tinkering here are my settings

EQ:      Authentic
Bass:   -4 to -6 (so the door mids can handle high volumes)
Mid:     -7 to -8 (midrange frequencies are soo harsh and overpowering & make everything sound muddy! Really poor)
Treble: 0 to +3  (mostly 0 but some content needs a little lift, anything higher is just causing fatigue)
Sub:    +3 to +6 (get the sub to do the work but it has its limitations!)
Focus: Standard front + rear (haven't played about with this much, it's just balance & fader really)

The mid range is soo bad at 0 it really makes me wonder, as I said earlier did Dynaudio set the system up for the car?? Any audiophile would cut their ears off before listening to such an inbalance, It's soo bad!
The second biggest fail was using that space saving sub then trying to make up for the bass with the speakers in the doors!

VW prob insisted that the car kept its space saver or I'm sure Dynaudio would have used all this space and put in proper, capable sub, then they could have fitted a much more refined door speaker which would have sorted out the horrible mids and improved the system to no end.

Nite nite

Bump for some others who want to fine tune the system. This worked for me!