[cpj]

I got my S80 one week ago. I am sort of an audiophile, and ordered it with the best available audio. I used to have S60 with Premium Sound, and liked it very much. As for S80, I am rather disappointed with the Premium Sound + Dynaudio. Sounds very nasal, and front seats seem to lack highest frequencies. Violins sound like cardboard, brass lacks depth, and bass is not very disciplined, you can hear a lot of boomy noise but the notes of the lower scale seem generally to be indistinguishable.

I do not like very much what Dolby Prologic does to music, so I switched it off first thing(this of course is my personal preference).

I played for a while with the Sound Stage settings. I found that it worked best with the sound optimized for rear seats. I tried the equalizers as well, but as with all equalizers they do some damage to the sound (especially for any cross-over frequencies).

After a while, I decided to use spectrometer and played some white noise from a CD. With EQ set to linear, and the mic placed in the front seats, I got the following: a big resonance around 60Hz, decreased mid-low (around 200-300 Hz), very prominent peak around 3,000 Hz (probably resonance of one of the tweeters, responsible for the nasal sound), and 10dB decrease when you go above 10kHz.

The sound in the rear seats was much more linear, and I also felt the sound was subjectively much better there.

This is truly disappointing. I tried to play with the EQ, having balanced it as much as possible it sounds much better - but there are some phase problems at speaker cross-over frequencies. I used to have an S60 with Premium Sound until last week, and to me it did sound MUCH better.

I wish I could go for a decent post-market audio, unfortunately this is a leased company car and I am not allowed to modify it.

I anyone has had similar experience and managed to fix the sound, I would be veru much grateful if you could avice here.