J&M 7.25 Speaker Review

VERY Good write-up. It really helps those of us that while not an expert in sound like you are, but do know what you are saying when you speak in "technize" make the decision on these speakers. I do believe I'll be ordering some on Monday for the 2010 SG. Thanks!
 
I found that the J&M's sounded great compared to the stock junk when playin the radio and a CD, but sounded like complete crap (well, that may be a little strong, but they did not sound good) when playing my iPhone tunes. I tried both purchased songs and pirated songs, and neither sounded that great. I would have bough them if there wasn't such a huge difference in sound quality. I suspect it's a combination of the crap audio quality Apple gives you (since it's intended for $2 earphones) and the way the HK head unit processes and amplifies the signal...

Do you have any suggestions as to how to improve it?
 
Well, yeah. It's VERY compressed, and sounds very "crunchy" in my opinion. I do not like the sound of MP3's, but that's what I've got.

It reminds me of my old bootleg Grateful Dead tapes. They sounded great on a cheap little boom box, but if you put 'em in a nice $10k stereo system, they sounded horrible (I used to sell mid to high-end audio and video). The same thing applies here I think. Try to amplify a crappy source with good electronics and speakers and you'll have bad results. All the flaws are amplified.

I'm sure JohnScrip understands where I'm coming from.

BTW, the best sound I EVER heard was a LP record playing on a $10k record player, a $20k preamp, $10k mono amps and $20k speakers. Dude played me the same song on a CD and then on the vinyl. Unbelievable. The sound was three-dimensional. You could see where the artists were in your mind. They were literally playing right there in the room with you. Never heard anything like it before...
 
Yeah, I remember having many similar experiences but finally decided to give up the drugs!

Seriously though, I too am interested to hear how the MP3 quality can be improved.
 
JCleary ,,,,,

plug your I-pod into the aux input on the front of the Harley radio ,,,,, then rotate the volume of the I-pod to minimum ,,,, then adjust the volume of the Harley radio on the handlebar to maximum ,,,, then rotate the volume of the i-pod to maximum BEFORE distortion only ,,, then leave the i-pod set that way, then turn your auto volume feature of the Harley radio to off ,,,,

please let me know how you do ,,,,,
 
That was one of the things that impressed me most on these speakers right off the bat... The "space monkeys" from badly converted MP3 data comes right out to the front.

What can you do? Use better conversion for one... Newer versions of iTunes actually lets you break the old 160/192kbps barrier (advanced settings allow you up to 320kbps). 256kbps and up, even with iTunes "so-so" encoder will give you pretty decent sound under most reasonable listening situations. 320kbps is a rather huge step up from that if you don't mind having fewer tunes available.

Dig into your MP3 player's preferences also - Many of them (including iPod/iPhones, etc.) have horrible sounding EQ presets, goofy dynamics-altering algorithms (SoundCheck, etc.), on top of rather crappy-sounding DA conversion in the first place.

THAT ALL SAID: I've not run tests on the line-input on the HK/HD head unit... It could be limited by frequency, it might have some sort of voltage buffer to avoid overloading the input stage - There are plenty of things some MFG's can do to screw things up on something that should be as simple as allowing a signal to pass unmolested...
 
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