Cars That Sing

Increasing numbers of luxury cars are being delivered equipped with sound systems from well known ‘proper’ hifi companies. Adam Rayner has listened to most but is still amazed at the latest collaboration between Jaguar Cars and Bowers & Wilkins in their new C-XF concept car seen at Detroit in January.
 
There is something almost magical about good sound in your car. Driving somewhere special while playing a tune that really stirs your soul, is an experience you simply have to try to know how good it can feel. More often than not, the song that lifts you up has been broadcast into your world by the radio. It doesn’t matter much if it’s normal FM radio or some sort of digital broadcast, as long as it’s clear and loud enough for you to be able to turn it up until you can feel it, there can be pure joy. Any music you own, unless you have downloaded MP3 files in great huge libraries, tends, of course, to be tracks you know, love and have played to death. You might have ripped the plastic from the CD with your teeth as you left the car park when you first bought it. Wobbling down the out ramp as you slid the disc into the slot while steering with your knees, but the delight in a new track only lasts for a few playings. Then, like a relationship, the heady honeymoon period is over, you are still in love with the track but a pleasant familiarity means that although you enjoy it heartily, that genuine small squeeze to your adrenal glands just doesn’t happen in quite the same way. This does of course have certain exceptions. Wagner is famously dangerous to drive to. , used in the classic Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now (when all the helicopters arrive) is deadly. Especially if you start ‘Dah Dah Dah-Dah-ing’ along to it.

However, there does have to be some quality in the machine for the effect to work. Even if you don’t read geek hifi magazines and if you don’t really care about the technology behind the volume knob, we can all tell the difference between a quality sound set up and a cheap one by our emotional response or lack of it. If it sounds good, you feel good. It’s simple. What can be difficult is spending extra cash on sounds after you have paid for your car. 

After all, more cars are coming with CD players and complicated controls for air-conditioning and so forth all built into one unit in the front. It takes determination, fiddly adaptors and clever installers to upgrade to better stuff or add extra toys like DVD decks. Most of the big companies that specialise in making top quality hifi for mobile use are investing a serious amount of effort into making products that can connect into the car’s original or OEM (Original Equipment by Manufacturer) entertainment electronics. Thus you can add that digital TV tuner, DVD player or games console to just about any car, with the right bits and pieces. You just have to want to enough. 

However, if you have a quality car, the chances of your daring to seriously upgrade the hifi are going to be vanishingly small if it means there is any risk of affecting your car’s resale value or warranty. But what if there were two luxury cars side by side of similar specification and one had an awesome, high quality entertainment system built in and the other had a boring ‘stock’ sound of cheap speakers and cheap CD player? The makers of prestige cars have long since realised that it is worth chasing the buyer who cares about such things and that adding value to the car with smart toys is a sales-enhancer. What’s changed has been the car makers’ opinions of what it’s worth spending on the toys. We’ve always had the likes of Clarion and other big Japanese brands making the cheaper, simpler radios for car makers as specially created OEM-grade items. This usually means easier to control, plainer to look at and as cheap as can be feasibly produced. Performance was not crucial, but the speaker count could always be boasted about. You get cars with speakers in all directions that sound just horrible. You get competition cars that sound like a top-price home hifi, with systems worth more than double the price of the car they are in and consist of just two speakers, two tweeters and a bass unit. So what matters is the quality of the stuff used and most importantly, just where it’s put and aimed.
 
Breaking the mould
I’ve been lucky enough to travel to the USA and also Japan as a hifi reviewer, and have heard some of the finest cars and home systems going. For the longest time, it was simply axiomatic that if you wanted to really enjoy your tunes, if you want any kind of decent experience above the dual functionality one (It fills the hole, it stops the wind coming through) in your car, then ‘stock’ simply wouldn’t do. It was safe to seriously disrespect factory-fit stuff in all its guises. That’s dangerous now. 

After years and years of fabulous massive-price tag car sound systems, I learned about two cars that were to break the mould. They were the Aston Martin Vantage and the Lexus SC430. In the Aston, the Alpine Electronics company, who make some of the very finest and most expensive car hifi in the world, had collaborated with Aston and Scottish high end home hifi manufacturers Linn. The latter actually have a ‘By Appointment’ tag as they provide the British royal family with hifi I think it’s Prince Charles. They had never made car audio products before and I was gripped with journalistic fervour. Plus, I might actually get a chance to get a drive of one of the cars of my schoolboy dreams an Aston! I was so excited I could taste it. The Lexus had a CD system made by well known niche top end company Nakamichi, who do a single-slot CD deck that will eat six discs, one after the other and speakers and amplification by American high end home audio company Mark Levinson. Levinson are better known for huge amplifiers the size of small chests and house-extension price tags. Like Linn, they had never made any car hifi kit before. I just had to go steal some playtime with each car. 

The truly ground breaking thing was not in the Aston Martin, but rather the Japanese car. The Lexus’ car designer had actually treated the audio designer as though he mattered. Throughout all the history of radios being put into cars by car makers, their speakers have always had to go where ever the car maker says they will, as a last thought after designing window mechanisms, switchgear and everything else. Traditionally, speakers ended up wherever they sounded worst. They designed the Lexus to take the sound system’s specialised speaker locations right down to the metal monocoque shell, for more solid, taut sound (like having good stands for hifi speakers) and even shaped the back seat around a bass speaker. Both metal and a special blow-moulded seat back serve to create a genuinely powerful subwoofer enclosure. It was amazing, rich and fat
. 

I recall, we were at the UK headquarters of Lexus cars and I had a short slot given to me to spend with the executive concerned with the car, as he had a meeting to attend to with people far more important than me. The only disc we had to play was a live recording of old UK Ska nutters Madness, featuring lots of well-mixed horns and clever vocals. What happened was that as soon as the sound system fired up in the car, we were both entranced by how good it made us feel. The executive man started telling me about how he used to go and see them live in a London concert venue – Camden Palace – and he was oblivious to the meeting he had to go to and just sat in the car with me, playing these tunes and showing off how the stuff automatically changed in sound character as the coupé roof retracted, to sound better for top-down motoring. I have heard a lot of winning car sound competition systems and was utterly astonished as well as slightly depressed for the aftermarket companies, as the exotic speakers in the Lexus, with their special magnets and cones of Neodymium and Kevlar sounded so high end. I suggested that the car should be entered into the car hifi competitions against aftermarket systems and that I felt it’d win. It transpired that one American SC430 owner had entered ‘Sound Off’ competitions in the US and had done just that. A clear half hour later, executive chap admitted sheepishly that he’d blown his meeting but had enjoyed our play with the car.
 

The Aston had these clever arrays of Linn speakers all designed to point better up and at the car’s occupants and a big old bass driver in the rear deck. The trouble was that the source was a cheap ‘parts bin’ CD changer from the OEM line up that was brilliant as a normal stock item, but suffered badly from low dynamics and overall sound quality when amplified with great purity and clarity by the Linn multi-channel power unit in the car. Plus, of course the speakers in the Aston still had to fit in the places the original monocoque designer had put them. There was only so much that could be done. It was capable and sweet and sounded like it should be in an Aston Martin, though. 

There are some superb factory-installed systems in other high end cars. The Lincoln car company released a THX approved sound system in one of their USA models at the CES show in Las Vegas last January, which should be awesomely loud and clear if it adheres to the THX standard. THX is the name of a whole set of performance standards for equipment, room design and potency in both loudness and directivity of speakers, overlaid over the normal surround sound specification. It was about making movie theatres sound better for George Lucas’ films. The standard has rolled out in home hifi and now, for the first time, in-car. There’s a joke about how powerful a THX sound system is in the animated film Over the Hedge. A porcupine treads on a remote control in a new suburban house and nearly looses his quills in the blast of sound from the THX-logo-showing screen and speakers as they play the speaker-bursting THX fanfare.  

There’s also the well known hifi company Harman Kardon (the same outfit that owns the JBL and Infinity brands) have also got in on the act, supplying branded H-K surround sound systems to such cars as the new Range Rover and the gorgeous Mercedes S-Class, both of which I have had the joy of driving. They are good and clear sounding but are really about everyone getting a decent ‘bubble’ of sound around their head, rather than absolute fidelity.
 
No Compromise
The latest story to cross my desk really is bad news for the aftermarket suppliers as the speakers come from the most important speaker maker on the planet. Yes, there are lots of super-mad price home hifi loudspeakers to be bought from companies in the USA, Japan and Europe, but if you are lucky enough to go and visit research and development sanctums within speaker companies pretty much anywhere on the planet, their anechoic test chambers all have one thing in common. As well as whatever they are working on, they need a set of ‘known good’ or ‘target performance’ speakers to try to work towards. A gold standard to be inspired by, something to try to emulate for quality at whatever price point they are fighting to achieve and it’s always a set of Bowers & Wilkins speakers. B&W have been making speakers since 1966 and have sellers in sixty-two countries around the world. They even use them at the famous Abbey Road studios in London. (I used to have to drive home along this road and never, ever got to drive over the famous zebra crossing outside the studios without being held up by people taking their own version of the Beatles album cover. It happens all the time) 

For the very first time, in collaboration with Jaguar, who produce some of the most quintessentially British super-luxury executive chariots, B&W have entered the automotive field. Initially with a system to show off what they can do in a concept car (The C-XF seen in Detroit last January) but now also in a production car, the XKR. Long associated with Alpine, Jaguar now have B&W speakers in their cars and have used some top technologies to do so. 

Their approach has been to take a no-compromise view on what’s needed. The screen in the concept car is an Alpine design that can actually show two different images at the same time. The driver can see a navigation screen running while the passenger is watching a film via the DVD. It uses a sort of splitting system to look different from the two different angles. The sound equipment bar the speakers is integrated by the Alpine people. 

Bowers & Wilkins have recognised that we sit very close to our speakers in the car and that we need wide-dispersion speakers and have also realised that most times, the bass in car systems comes from behind the occupants and so sounds wrong. They have used their top end technology like diamond-crystal vapour-deposited tweeter diaphragms and have adapted their famous snail-shell ‘Nautilus’ technology to make the rear waves of these tweeters stay under control with a cute looking (but hidden) swirled bit and have even devised a way to make the bass come from the front doors with a revolutionary long drive unit called a Bass Beam. This has three drive coils inside and a long bellows-mounted diaphragm all along its length, driven by all three coils at once. Said to make the sound field more realistic, there is also a wide-dispersion driver to go with the bass and treble units made with the latest composite materials and a special array of bass units and wide dispersion drivers for the traditional back shelf position but made so as not to be direct-radiating. The result is, I gather, stunning and has led to the B&W brand being in the new production XKR models seen at Geneva. The XKR is a bit more real world at present and doesn’t have tweeters made of diamonds, they are aluminium metal which is still high end but they do use the B&W Kevlar cones. Kevlar is most well known for being used in bullet-proof vests. 

The difference as ever is in the emotional response. It just sounds better, clearer, more potent and best of all, in proper stereo, with a sound field laid out across the dashboard of the car in question. In future, when you buy a prestige car, there really will be no need to upgrade the toys at all. So if you see a smug merchant sat at the lights in his Jaguar, you know he’s weeping because it sounds so lovely. That, or how much the repayments on finance are costing