I spent a few hours with a collaborating dealer test driving the car and listening to the sound system. The latter being a huge priority for my long trips I was quickly ticked off by the default settings and a sense of emptiness vs my latest Audi B&O premium. I played with the equalizer and the “usual” bell curve midrange lift that works well in many other cars was a fiasco. I since read many entries in this forum and others where it is established that the W205 Burmester system is in fact a rebadged entry level HK with some tweaks by the Burmester team to make it acceptable....shame on MB for this when the new E series gets real Burmester components. OK I am digressing....

Anyhow, after a few hours of trial and error equipped with a simple spectrometer and using Tidal master quality audio via Car Play, I managed to get a very decent yet unorthodox set up. Try it and tell me if it works for you or if I am totally deaf. I am known to be some sort of audiofool at home with pretty high end components but I am also getting old so....
Set up:
Surround: on
Sound focus: Rear seats (critical)
Equalizer: Bass:4-5 /Mids: 2/ Treble: -2 (yes minus 2)

The whole idea is to compensate for crappy midrange HK woofers, poor DSP, lack of lower mid bass and fatiguing upper mid by:
- reducing the mids as much as possible without sacrificing voice clarity and impact
- lift the bass to fake an extension over the lower mid...I don’t really like to do this as it makes the bass a tad wooly on some heavy recordings but it is an old trick to fake a frequency that is missing.
- cut off the treble to avoid sibilance in the upper mids (low range of the treble)

The best and easiest trick was to switch from the “intuitive” front focus to rear focus. High frequencies being quite directional, it takes it away from the drivers position. I sat behind driver seat as well and it is very acceptable as well. All tested at 70-75% volume.

Feedback welcome.

 

i have mine setup almost exactly the same excepth the sound focus to all seats. but same equilizer and such. but i will be swapping everything out to a full audison setup equilized and all.

 

is this just a C43 thing? i have the 'usual bell curve' setup on my C450 and it sounds pretty good to me. but i will give this a try to see if anything sounds better.
i do miss the good ol' days of when i had a custom made box for my two 12 inch subs in my old toyota pre runner. pretty sure i have some hearing loss in my right ear from that system.
for a factory audio system though, MB is probably the best ive personally experienced.

 

I guess this was on a pre-facelift?
Maybe they fixed something on the Facelift, but i'm used to 30k worth of components in my Music-Room (yes, a room dedicated to listening to Music) for 2 Speakers and an Amp. And i like the Burmester in the Facelift a LOT.

For me its the best sounding Car Hifi i've ever heard.
Better than what i heard already which is:
Audi RS4 Wagon B8
Audi RS4 Wagon B9
Audi RS6 4F
Audi RS6 4G
BMW M3 E90
BMW M4 F82
Nissan GTR R35
Nissan Z35 Nismo
Ford Raptor 2017
VW Golf R 7

These are where i actively tested the Sound System. Among these, i like the C43 the best.

 

I have a 2019 E450 wagon and agree the sound is not great. I listen to classic rock, hard rock, metal and jazz, mostly sourced from Spotify and occasionally Sirius. Right now I set the bass to a few notches below flat, the mid is flat and the treble a few notches above. Even with those settings the sound is too artificially bass heavy (it is especially bad with Sirius, but I blame them for that). I guess people like bass, so the system is tuned to (over) emphasize low end attack and exaggerate the decay. I am sure it sounds great to most people for a test drive, but extended listening is fatiguing.

 

I gave it a shot and I've got to say I agree that changing the sound focus to the Rear is a definite improvement.

My previous settings -
Sound Focus / All
Treble / +7
Mid / +2
Bass / Anywhere from +1 to +5 (depending upon what I was listening to)

My new settings -
Sound Focus / Rear
Treble / +7
Mid / +2
Bass / +1 (I don't feel like going any higher because the sound focus seems to add more bass)

 

I spent some time on this today. I found that turning surround off and a flat EQ sounded best to me. I guess I just don’t like what surround does to music. When I used surround mode, I had to fiddle with the EQ a lot. i agree setting the sound focus to rear sounded better than front, but surround off sounded best of them all.

At home I only listen to music in 2 channel (dual turntable, rega phono stage, peachtree nova used as a pre-amp, rotel power amp) so I guess that is how I like music to sound. Simple stereo with no digital theatrics

 

The surround mode has too much reverb for me, very artificial sounding reverb at that. The out-of-phasing is okay, but they should have chosen a better reverb model or made the signal less wet.

The C43 sound system continues to frustrate me. The sound system I have on my 9 year old Audi S5 B&O factory system is far better.