AUDI A7 Sportback. Bang & Olufsen’s best OEM Audio Yet

I have written about HiFi and car audio for nigh on twenty years. and have gone from being a ‘mere’ perceived bass head, to actually getting accepted by the UK high end audio community and was even invited to join the BADA. In that event, I felt there might be conflict of interests as a reviewer but I was thrilled rotten to be asked to join the club.
For HiFi and audio makers have hierarchies of audio excellence, perceived brand values and approaches. Sounds pompous? How about Cerwin-Vega being made mostly to break your bones with bass, or Morel only making super-duper posh-audio stuff? Or Caliber offering more shizzle for less, even if at a slightly less sparkly SQ level versus a top dollar competition unit from Pioneer Alpine, Clarion or the like.
Anyway, my mama and papa wanted a dead advanced thing, right back at the dawn of multi-room audio. They wanted a full remote, whole-house control audio system and for it to be based in the living room.
A Bang & Olufsen Beosystem 5000 was bought and installed by the local specialist.
That was a bizarre length of time ago in this context. For my mum used the system all the time and if it failed then the Rex Radio boys would pop around. Now, a good engineer keeps bits he knows can be useful and incredibly, it was the same dude who had installed the system in the Eighties as a lad who came around to fix the system in our house – a little before we lost my mum.
But she had her music. And that really mattered.
And you know what? I researched the brand and the kit to death before I got and ordered it and found out that while their Danish flavour of design just appeared timeless – no item of theirs ever looks anything but classic from when it is made to thirty years later – their solid aluminium speakers were solid as rocks, damped as hell and were just bloody LOVELY. We had some nice big ones in the living room and I installed the rest, all smaller pairs, in the kitchen, study and main bedroom, saving a good few hours of labour. Hell, I was doing the same job in West End theatres at the time, I figured I could do it prettier for my folks. (bloody MUST get my Adam doodah dot thing website populatedsorry, I digress for bloody change)
For B&O have some real HiFi chops, to do with cartridge design and technology for record players. And yet they got stick for looking pretty But I always rated them. And these days, I get some sexy press releases sending to me via the Digital Radio UK folks – our chums with the posh New Oxford Street address and monster mainstream remit to tell us all about digital radio. I think you may have seen my Soul Brother From Another Mother, D Love?
DRUK sent me a release via Audi about how all Audi motor cars are now going to be fitted with digital radios as standard.
I published it. The release went on a little about the motor’s B&O sound system and how it was fettled in Ingoldstadt at improbable levels of science and electro-acoustical research and design with their own Tefal-heads, having been specified by the Vikings and my pointy ears pricked up. (I used to cover them with a haircut at school to avoid ‘Spock’ or ‘Fat Elf’ piss taking&;)
I climbed up the poor PR dude’s contacts upon his e-mail and papered him with just how jolly fabulous I was.
He called back and I did my best to charm, entertain and woo we got on like a burning barn. I thought I was definitely in with at least a month’s fuel-paid-for press loan of a fire breathing S-Line brute of an Audi. I was chuffed.
I heard absolutely nothing else.
For weeks.
Then, the phone rings and I could actually hear professional bravery going on. It’s young Alex Fisk, PR chap with Audi at VAG in MK and he is daring to ask me if I was interested in coming up to see them, as in fact I had said I really didn’t absolutely have to drive a car to mark the system’s SQ. (Damn, I SAID that?) He sounded pink around the gills to my professional bothering-to-listen ear ‘oles and yet of course, I was delighted to say, ‘Yes, tomorrow? Absolutely! Love to&;!’ and so off I drove to park the single shittiest car that may ever have parked in the VAG guest parking, ever, right outside their lovely atrium.
I was just boggling at the splittie, in A1 nick, the ‘OMG it isn’t? Yes it IS! A real actual minter QuattroMurrrr!!’ then Mr. Fisk appeared and off I was whisked&;

To a car park, where an A7 sportback was parked. With strict instructions NOT to drive it an inch, I was allowed to play with the toys and listen, whilst we awaited the portion of time I was able to get of the more technical fellow (Alex is a PR chap, rather than tech.) Grant O’ Hara.

Grant may well die of embarrassment when he sees himself on video, as I reckon that bit might go viral. ‘Top Audi chap admits the A7 was just perfect to fit between the A6 and the er, A8’ poor soul, he was put on the spot. We were not able to drive it, so with luck I may try to swag a ride in one to video the Google images overlaid atop the navigation that I read about in the blurb.
But I was there to report on the system’s audio and so I shall.
Audi Multi Media Interface  – The Latest Iteration


Now, I won’t go off into one all about the bonkers speaker-array research that Audi have been doing in a big old dummy Q7 at Ingoldstadt but the new Q7 is going to have an awfully large speaker count and unlike us lot who just care only about ourselves, the car’s manufacturer must care about good stereo for every seat in the house.
Just like not being allowed to let you play a movie to your passenger from the front screen, while you drive like a grown-up, not watching the damn thing, car makers have to take the every-occupant approach. In the A7, it is pretty damn cool, though, as Audi can fit blow moulded speaker enclosures to fit into ALL the doors, which is beyond our real world cost constraints in the after market installation field.
That said, these boxes would make the most awesome starting point to cut open, rigidise with GRP and Dynamat and add a thousand-pound a pair set of speaker drivers in there instead! (blokes at Audi wince as Rayner ‘goes off message!’) The very pretty steel drilled grilles are angular in the direction of their through-drilling, such that some degree of directionality is added to the immediate output of the drivers behind these very Bang & Olufsen shiny metal speaker grille covers.

The woofer in the boot next to the space saver spare (UGH!) gets a cunningy shaped enclosure using cubic no-one else ever had to eat, which is clever and is shown in the pics as best I could.
First, I nagged the PR exec fellow Mr Fisk to make like a mechanic for me&;


Then, the subwoofer enclosure was thus revealed…


Other speakers are placed in a fairly stock locations about the car but seriously, this next one thing, will, I bloody swear, actually sell whole cars or else be responsible for that last tipping-over-decision making thing. The motorised bits, in particular, the tweeters.


And that lovely, whizzy, uppey-downy screen, which is NOT a touch screen but shows big sexy Graphic User Interface stuff. The little black nondescript panel at the bottom right of the flat console control surface is the ‘touch’ part – just like the sensor on a laptop’s built-in mousey system.
Here again, is where all the bits live in the car. Note the fan aperture atop the multi-channel amplifier assembly in the nearside rear wing.

Then, we hooked my iPod Touch 4th gen up by Bluetooth, just ‘cos we couldin the video you will see it ‘properly’ connected via a wire.

But the main display is on that motorised sexy 8in screen front and centre&;

And after a bit of playing with the stuff, here come my Audi executives, Alex Fisk & Grant O’Hara, to explain anything I may have missed, like say the iPod 30-pin connector wire fitted in the glovebox that Mr. Fisk knew not of. I teased the poor fellow in the video, too.

Grant O’ Hara pointed out that the dash screen replicates main screen’s details.

Alex Fisk, rear seat, Grant O’Hara front.

I wanted the car’s tech spec but REALLY didn’t want to type it or copy and paste per actual field, so I tried piratical methods and well, it was a Piratically Moral Victory, as I screen grabbed the spec’s ass but the pixel limit will out.
The Audi A7 sportback’s top speed is ‘limited’ to 155mph, so who knows how it’d go if some hoolie were to crack the thing’s ECU? BWA HAHAH!
I also know I frightened Grant O’ Hara with the rather too sincere tone of voice I used in my last comment about coveting (stealing) that lovely car, all £68,005.00 worth!

And my video odyssey to VAG that day, with outtake, whizzy tweeters filmed twice and the iPad Audi coffee machine.
http://youtu.be/p4Chy-SfYXo
So, what did it sound like to these ears that have been protected from monstrous audio with fingers and personal abstinence (to save my damn hearing) and heard so very many really, and I mean really expensive sound systems down the years? A reviewer approved for ‘getting it’ by the likes of KEF, Monitor Audio and Bowers & Wilkins? Who has heard seven European champion winning sound off cars, as well as twenty years of SQ league winners?
Well, like so many things, the system made to play to everyone must try to please all, right from the box. So it won’t be a ridiculous ‘how loud will it go’ thing as the idiotic folks at Fifth Gear reckon is how you judge. It will be about music power and the absolute stereo image but for everyone.
And as soon as I fired up the trusty old Talk Audio review sources that I have so worked to death, I admit I was impressed. The detail and imagery were good if not sound-off contest grade and the impact of the midband was a tad softer than an ‘A’ pillar install but the sheer madness was that I was immediately thinking about just that sort of level of audio. Not is it like a radio in an hotel room? Or is it just rubbish, as it always used to be, with only a few exceptions but to compare it with high end audio was startling. And it did go pretty muscular if you asked the woofer to wake up a bit.
The acoustic was beautifully damped and you could hear a world of clever tuning has gone on, to use the drivers that were cost effective, yet get a lovely rich and detailed response from the cabin. I’d love to see what an oscilloscope and analyser would make of the EQ or sound shaping in the car but it feels as tailored to the cabin as a Saville Row suit.
It’s the sort of thing that Harman are doing in the aftermarket as an add-on for cars without the sexy Digital Signal Processing available, with their MS8 as well as Alpine, who, with their TuneIt app, have tuning equalisation settings for aftermarket system users of all sorts of cars, having run full acoustical analyses of a lot of real world car cabins.
But this one was as good as say a decent-ish home HiFi from a good maker – not BIG power but capable, rich and involving and as I say, a tad sadly in the video, with all the cunning deep integration of the controls and multiple display options, along with the trio of motorisations (yes the tweeters do count as two) then the aftermarket installer, no matter how loving, could not beat it for the six grand this set adds to the car’s price.
They might beat the sound for SPL but not quality and never, obviously, for factory integration. I would be gripped to see how well one did if it were to enter a sound-off. Think I need to borrow one.
But yes, while a record producer or serious music business person may wish to upgrade the speakers, or even use a cunning SHARC 32 bit processor equipped, super-duper special DSP from Audison in Italy to iron out the sound signal before feeding it to Thesis amplifiers that cost eight grand each, most Audi buyers will be bloody blown away.
It’d be nice to build up a set of OEM look-see articles on Talk Audio magazine of the ‘high end’ ‘factory’ systems from different folks and I have mates at Jaguar Landover as well, these days. So the folks who want to know what ‘real car HiFi’ aficionados think of their possible choice of purchase, could find out if the ‘experts’ experts’ are impressed or not. I especially want to hear the Alpine sub bas system in the Landrover&;
We could be of some real value to the mainstream as well as our very own true audio fanatics and experts.
After all, you lot are what’s called an ‘informed and opinion-forming audience’. If YOU are impressed, then ‘normal’ people will be too.. and hate to say it, I can see why Big Mick, with his Über-Posh new Audi, never in the end, wanted its wood veneer messed with.