the pioneer system in my LS is still like the best system i've used, great subwoofer as well

idk how it's able to be so loud while maintaining incredible clarity with only 215 watts

 

Harman International USA owned Harman Kardon, Mark Levinson, JBL, Infinity, and more including Germany's Becker and Bang & Olufsen.
A few years ago, Samsung bought Harman International.
Harman Kardon does amps.
Mark Levinson does high end amps.
JBL and Infintiy do speakers.
Bang & Olufsen does AV.

US Sound United owns Polk, Boston, Japanese Denon/Marantz [though Marantz was originally American], and now Classe.
Marantz do amps.
Denon amps further upmarket.
Classe amps further upmarket again.
Polk and Boston do speakers.


The Bowers & Wilkins Group owns British Bowers & Wilkins, Japanese Rotel, and Canadian Classe, but a few years ago, Classe was sold to Sound United above.
Rotel do amps.
Classe amps are further upmarket.
Bowers & Wilkins do speakers.
BMW, Volvo and Maserati use Bowers & Wilkins.

British NAD is now Canadian owned mainly specialize in amps, but they tend to specialize in modern compact & efficient Class D-type amps, which don't sound as warm and deep as the traditional big inefficient Class A/B amps.
Today, most motor vehicles use the compact energy efficient but colder sounding Class D-type amps, including Mark Levinson in Lexus.



Burmester is still German owned.
Elac does German speakers.



Norweigian Electrocompaniet makes very high end monobloc power amplifiers.
Electrocompaniet 600 W RMS monobloc power amps often power each main Bowers & Wilkins speaker in the living room.
Mark Levinson make nice high end monobloc power amps, but Electrocompaniet is on another level again.



Sony still does entry level aftermarket car audio.

Yamaha is still Yamaha especially professional live sound.

Onkyo also owns their high end division called Integra, as well as bread and butter Pioneer.

While JVC-Kenwood merger doesn't do much car audio anymore.
JVC was famous for inventing the VHS video tape which killed Sony's slightly superior quality Betamax.

Btw, Alpine & Clarion are still both doing very well as totally separate entities specializing in car audio.
Honda used to source from Alpine, while Mazda sourced from Clarion, but I haven't followed car audio for a while.

.

 

Thread went off the rails with all the talk about leasing. Last couple of dozen posts have been deleted. Bob04 in particular, take it elsewhere. That's not what this thread was started for.

 

Interesting. I have HK logic 7 in my 7 series, and it sounds terrible. The HK logic 7 in my Mercedes GL sounds great, all frequencies. The best I've heard was my B&W in my previous car, spoiled me. I haven't heard the high end S class Burmiester. I never liked the Nakamichi, and yes, it did appear that Lexus licensed the names of bankrupt companies who never even made speakers. Who would know? Similar to Acura ELS. ELS didn't make audio at all. It is just a recording engineer, making it even cheaper to license.

 

Acura ELS was garbage, had it in my TL. Nothing to write home about at all.

Base Pioneer in my LS is much better.

 

I believe for Nakamichi option, the head units and speakers were all still Pioneer, with the addition of the larger amp and sub for the Nakamichi branded. However, I am unsure who actually made that sub and amp. Sorry to go off topic.

 

I heard it in my parents TL and it was excellent, better then any of my standard GS's, similar to ML's but with less speakers. Did you try a DVD-Audio disc, that is where it really shines.

 

That format never took off, but I had a copy disk that came with the car. The imaging or whatever it did special was good but overall the stereo was weak. It's like they tried too hard and just ended up with a meh product.

We all seem to have very different ears on here, it's interesting. The Bose in my truck is the best I've ever had in my cars followed by the Bose in my 97 Maxima.

The Bose in my truck absolutely thunders (woofer in console) and is extremely clean, I need to get the CD player fixed so I can enjoy it. I've been meaning to for years now, lol.

 

there were so few DVD-A titles released, it was an epic failure, although great audio format for sure.
with people out there listening to music on phones, tablets, laptops and crappy PC speakers, i think the market bar is very low for car audio.
but i certainly love great clean audio.
the lexicon system in my g90 is amazing.