How to Choose a Car Audio Installer (or Do It Yourself)
A car audio system is only as good as the people who fit and tune it. Peter Steinbacher of Pssound, a UK high-end installer, says most shops sell boxes, rush the work and cannot tune. His core idea: judge a shop by cars you can hear and work you can see, give a good installer time and trust, and treat a proper tune as what brings a system alive.
The short version
Peter says a poor install is close to the standard in many countries.
Judge a shop by a demo car you can sit in, not a wall of speakers.
Ask for photos or video of the hidden work, ideally daily.
Give a good installer your needs and budget, then let him work, because proper custom work takes days or weeks.
Most shops tune badly, so Peter offers his own tune with a pay-only-if-you-hear-it guarantee.
A patient owner who follows good guides can now beat many shop builds, but needs many hours and help with the final tune.
Why so many shop installs disappoint
Peter's view is that a botched install is close to the standard in the UK, France and most other places: make it look acceptable, let it sound however it sounds, get paid (watch). The trade also has no qualification, and Peter admits he has none himself.
He describes a typical upsell ladder. A shop sells a budget three-way set (a tweeter for high notes, a midrange for voices, a midbass for punch). When it disappoints, the customer is moved up to Hertz Mille and later Audison Thesis at many thousands (watch).
Tuning is the biggest gap. In 2021 he estimated that about 99.9% of shops do not know how to tune a DSP (the box that shapes the sound speaker by speaker) properly (watch). In 2024 he said about 90%, probably more, of systems leaving UK shops are not tuned properly.
Shops that play with the EQ or automated setups using a calibration microphone can make the sound much worse, often worse than factory.
He advises shops to build a door enclosure around a cheap speaker, not screw a very expensive one into a bare door. The bare-door sale helps the shop, not the customer.
Judge a shop by its demo cars, not its demo wall
Peter's stance has hardened. In 2020 he called a missing demo car a question mark, since a few top installers lack one. By 2022 he said to ask for a demo before leaving money with a shop. By 2025 he was blunt: "you can never trust any shop if they don't have a demo car" (watch).
A demo wall is no more than speakers in a glass cabinet, and they will not sound the same in your car. If a shop sends you to the wall to pick speakers, Peter suggests walking out, unless you only want something slightly better than factory. In a demo car, if any music sounds great, nobody can argue.
Listen, and ignore beautiful fabrication. You cannot see what is under the panels, how it is built acoustically or how the speakers are aimed. A non-expert can only judge whether he likes the sound (watch).
Ask to hear a real customer's car. Peter sends prospects to customers within an hour or two, which he says is better proof than pictures and YouTube (watch).
Get a reference. One owner had never heard what was possible, looked only at prices and got an entry-level system. Peter offers free, no-obligation demos of his Honda to anyone in or visiting the UK.
Ask to see the hidden work and get daily updates
A good reputation does not tell you who built your car, Peter says, because in a busy shop a careless employee may do the work. So ask for documentation, ideally daily. A couple of photos or videos should show how the door speaker was mounted (screwed to plastic, or fixed rigidly to the inner metal skin), how the sound deadening (mats that stop panels vibrating) was done, and where the amps are. He calls it a five-minute job at the end of the day.
Peter does this himself. Since at least 2018 he has sent each client a short private video at the end of every working day (watch). It avoids an unhappy customer at handover, because owners can ask for changes along the way.
Even if a shop shows lovely work online, ask for pictures of your own car. Everything Peter found wrong in the Audi RS6 could have been found from pictures or updates (watch).
Test the basics yourself: left is left, right is right, and each midbass is on the same side as its tweeter. In a VW Transporter a previous shop had wired the right midbass to the left tweeter and the reverse. Peter found it by pulling the balance to one side and hearing the other side keep playing (watch).
Think twice before posting parts away. A-pillars (the posts either side of the windscreen) made cheaply elsewhere carry a high risk of not fitting when they return. Peter takes no mail-in pillar jobs (watch).
Work with your installer: trust, time and cost
Peter says you get an installer's best work by giving him free hands (watch). A customer who dictates every step rarely gets the best result, and daily updates are for feedback on direction, not micro-instructions.
Trust also means listening. Peter says a good shop should tell customers what is right and wrong, not just build whatever they pay for. One installer abroad fitted a 6.5-inch midrange in an A-pillar because the customer asked, when a 4-inch would have done the same job, since that spot cannot reproduce about 100 Hz anyway (watch).
Phone first. Peter cannot quote from an email. He needs to know you, what you want and how far you can go in the car in terms of installation, not budget.
Expect a slow job. For a BMW M6 most shops would finish in a day. Pssound spent four days with three people, almost 10 days of work (2022). Many of its cars take 5–10 days, and its craziest project took more than 600 hours of labour. For budgets, see our costs guide.
Custom work cannot be timed exactly. Peter says not to get upset if a big job runs over: expect perhaps another week and possibly more cost.
Leave enough time for the install: a mistake there cannot be tuned out.
Tuning, handover and the no-pay guarantee
Peter sees tuning as the biggest limit in shops worldwide. Knowing how to open the software and hold a microphone is not the same as understanding tuning. Some cars reach him with safe crossover points set (the settings that decide which speaker plays which notes), yet the left and right speakers are not even in phase, meaning not moving in step. A bad install also eats tuning time: the RS6 ran to 10 pm, when a well-installed car would have been done by 2–3 pm. For the method itself, see our tuning guide.
His own offer is a guarantee he has repeated for years. If you do not hear the improvement or do not like the result, you do not pay: he deletes his preset and you drive home on the settings you arrived with. Nobody has ever taken him up on it. It covers cars he did not build, and he does about 20 of those sessions a year.
Try a tune before swapping speakers. Peter guaranteed a Focus owner better performance and more kick bass from a tune alone, and the owner called the first tune astonishing (watch).
Expect honesty. About 50–60% of customers leave a tuning session with slightly mixed feelings: they love the sound but also hear the limits of the car, the install and the gear.
Allow 3–4 hours for handover. It covers how the system works, troubleshooting and how every cable runs, and everything is colour-coded and labelled so you know which fuse to check.
Resale, warranty and leased cars
Owners often hold back over resale, warranty or a leased car. Peter understands that more than 99% of people would never cut into a car for a midbass install, because they worry about its value and structure.
Changing cars every three years? You still get a thousand days with the system, then another thousand in the next car.
Worried about resale? For one car with a cut carpet, he said the cut was lined up under the floor mat so the original piece can go back invisibly, and buyers check the engine, gearbox and chassis, not the carpet (watch).
A good first install makes moving easy: one Taycan system came out in 14 hours and went into the owner's new car in 50, against almost 250 hours to build the first time.
Warranty scares are common. A client's Ferrari 812 dealer said even changing the cigarette lighter would affect the warranty.
Doing it yourself
Peter says owner-built cars now often beat shop builds. In 2021 he said DIYers who followed his guides were bringing in better-sounding cars than an RS6 done by so-called professionals. By 2025 he said one owner-built, owner-tuned Mach-E sounded better than 90% of the cars reaching him from shops. His reason is hunger: DIYers put in the time and learn online, while shops have grown lazy.
What DIYers have achieved
A hobbyist built a Master Limited car for the 2022 Euro Finals, a sound-quality competition, in garages and outdoors in the snow. Peter said he could count on one hand the shops in Europe that could do the same.
A first-time builder with an early-1990s Mercedes E300 used a router and a jigsaw, and his car was widely called the most memorable at the 2024 US finals.
A realistic DIY plan
Learn first. Peter says to stop asking how to tune on Facebook groups and forums. Study the tuning videos and linked guides for a few hours, or else pay someone (watch).
Design around the builder. For that E300 builder, Pssound shaped the design around what he could build with a few power tools, and Peter would not push a novice into a kick-panel midbass build.
Count the hours. The E-Class glovebox front-sub enclosure took Pssound about 50 hours, and Peter would not advise it for inexperienced builders. See our fabrication guide.
Do not hoard gear. One owner bought for years without building and now has about 30 amplifiers. His advice: save up, get the car, and start with deadening and rattles.
Be realistic about tuning. Peter says many tuners can lift a car from 2 or 3 to 6 out of 10, but most people he sees struggling with their own tune sit at 4 or maybe 5. One owner's rule of thumb: DIY can get you a 6 or 7, and a professional tune brings 8s and 9s.
Common mistakes to avoid
Choosing speakers from a demo wall instead of listening to a demo car.
Trusting a reputation or a website, and never asking for photos of your own car's hidden work.
Dictating every step to the installer, or forcing in a speaker he says does not suit the location.
Buying on brand or a half-price deal without checking the part fits. One man bought a Focal KRX3 three-way at half price, and it could not be installed in his Mercedes.
Expecting a fixed price and finish date for custom work, or rushing the install and hoping the tune will fix it.
Buying a DSP and playing with it endlessly instead of learning a method or booking a tune.
Watch Peter explain it
This is an independent, plain-English summary of Peter Steinbacher's public YouTube videos, written by VA3 Car Studio. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Pssound. The links jump to the moment in each video where he makes the point.
Part of our series: Car audio lessons from Pssound, start here
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