Confused on the new school car audio quality lately?

If you're old school like me; then you know how the quality of a lot of car audio brands has taken a nosedive. I originally wanted some kicker solobaric or vega strokers, but couldn't afford em. So after a ton of researching i decided on a pair of SoundStream Tarantula 12" DVC T4-12 which were dual 1-Ohm--not like the newer T5-12 dual 2-Ohm. Got me a cheap prefab box off of ebay which the closest suggested air volume. Then i picked up a Soundstream Van Gogh 800.2 ran it 4-ohm mono for 800watts... unexpected.... outperformed every set of subs i've ever owned... the amp died recently... so i picked up a kicker kx1200.1 wired it up to 4-ohm mono and i can still pull 100+ amps from that... i cant wait to build a 2 spec box and take it to 1-ohm. These subs slam and have taken a lot of abuse of at least 2 years... still pumpin strong. I am not saying soundstream is all good cuz there isnt 1 car audio co. that make good amps, subs, mids, and decks... thats a fact. Actually i bought on of those soundstream digi-q thingies too.... junk. smoked it in a could of months... opened it to see what it was.... blown cap. i could even fix it... but if the components inside are that cheap its probably de-grading the signal to the amps.