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I have to agree that time alignment is absolutely necessary in a car. In a home theater, moving 3 feet makes a relatively small angular change. But in a car, moving three feet has a huge impact on speaker dispersion and time alignment.
In my WRX I built a custom DSP that provides time alignment, minimum phase EQ and FIR filtering. Think of time alignment as focusing a lens on a camera. Can you hear 0.8ms? No. But try being 0.8ms off compared to being dead on. Accurate time alignment makes the speaker locations disappear. Your ear detects slight alterations in time to give the perception of location and depth. If your speakers are not aligned properly, you will always know where the sound is coming from. Considering a car never puts the speakers in the ideal location, some of the sound will be coming from in front of you and some from behind. If you time align them, you put them all in the same plane. It no longer matters where the speakers are located. As long as the highs and tweeters are properly positioned, the rest will fall in line.
I have a 5 way system with all the speakers located in the factory positions except for 2 stereo underseat mid-bass modules and a trunk mounted sub. Even with the low mids mounted in the rear doors of the WRX behind me, they sound as if coming from the front. Even the trunk mounted sub hits from in front and not behind.
In a home theater you can place your speakers ideally. If you get comb filtering of the highs, you can place curtains around the room to improve the imaging. The speakers are spread far apart and moving slightly makes little difference in the angle of approach. But in a car, none of this is possible. You can't position all of the speakers in the perfect spot. If you could they would all be outside the car at a 60 degrees apart. You can't hang curtains on your windshield to block reflections and moving slightly changes the imaging drastically. That's why you need digital signal processing and preferably with different user profiles. Since you can't fix many problems mechanically, you have to fix them digitally. No $10,000 speaker in a car is ever going to sound as good as a home theater without using DSP. The problem is not the speakers, it's the car.
I'm sure the OEM audio is a fine system. But it's plug and play. You can't tweak the DSP as far as I know. The listening position is preset, the EQ is preset with a house curve for the person who tuned it and I'm sure there are no linear phase crossovers. To me, it's a vast improvement over what the FR-S/BRZ came with but would in no way be a competition system. You can definitely build more with less money. However unless you want to become a sound engineer and spend hours tuning, OEM is probably the way to go.
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