Brand New 2017 Maserati Levante – Bowers & Wilkins Audio

When it comes to the seven deadly sins, I fail in several directions. Whilst I have never coveted another man’s ass, I most certainly have coveted another man’s wife. You can take one look I know that greed exists in my life and I’m pretty damn good at pure sloth. In this feature, I have used covetousness, greed and sloth all at once.
No red blooded motorist could fail to covet every single vehicle at Maranello’s in Egham. That is the delightfully Art Deco building on the A30 bypass, with the Ferrari and Maserati motorcars parked at the front. Currently there are a couple of Rolls Royces on the forecourt as well. Having hooked up via Ferrari North Europe and organising an audition of the Lusso GT4, I figured it would be a good (greedy) move to make the most of my visit and listen to a Maserati as well as a Ferrari. Efficient in time and effort or lazy? You decide.
After Jaguar, Maserati has I think got the longest association with Bowers and Wilkins of any automotive brand. I first reported upon their system in the Ghibli, a couple of years back. However, this vehicle, marketed as the Maserati of SUV’s, has a newer system with the digital enhancement called Clari-Fi. Unlike the systems seen in the Volvos, the loudspeaker array in the Levante (named after a seasonal wind in the Mediterranean) does not use the tube-on-top type tweeter. That is when there is a long tapered tube extending behind the dome. That tube is coiled up a bit like a snail in the door speakers in the Volvo whereas there is no mention of that in the Maserati. That said, I would suggest that the differences in immediacy between the system in the Maserati I am listening to here, and the Volvo ones, are very small. The sound quality is entirely commensurate with the awesome engineering of the car. I found it clear, crisp, rich and full range. Although I do not mention it in the video below I truly was startled by how good, Claire de Lune, electronically rendered by Isao Tomita sounded from my telephone’s Bluetooth feed of a downloaded track. This was not a high definition download but sounded richly textured and superbly well-detailed in the car.


The really excellent thing with Bowers and Wilkins car sound systems is that they let the same golden eared engineering team who design and voice their most top end products, tune the final result inside this car. Being a bit of an idiot, I asked the man selling this Italian car if the Bowers and Wilkins sound system in here featured a Swedish concert Hall DSP, like Volvo do. What a twerp Italy has the world’s most famous concert halls of all. Opera houses with real legends. So that would be pronounced La Scala were they to do that in a Maserati.
It was a delight to discover that this awesome SUV can be equipped with an audio system of this quality. The Watt count of well over one thousand, two hundred makes most OEM systems look weedy, and make no mistake, the audio in the Levante is perfectly able and potent enough to reach into what I call the excitement zone. And that is about the threshold of feeling and goose bumps!
Another win for Bowers and Wilkins,. It is fascinating to hear the different iterations of carefully application-designed audio systems for different cars from one top brand in what is now my fourth high-end automotive cabin environment. A major thank you to Maranello for allowing me access to this beautiful car. In a world of high-performance SUVs, the Maserati Levante is a breath of fresh air.
Here is the maker’s promo video for the Maserati of SUVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSlwh32WrDU

If you want to go shop for one, then this is a good place to start. link
MORE ABOUT CLARI-FI
To quote myself: Clari-Fi is the leading digital signal processing algorithm for ‘˜listening’ to music and recalculating the wave form to make it brighter, wider and more open. Not just a ‘˜boom tizz’ EQ to give you fat bass and ear-hurting highs but rather an overall decompression that makes the sound a lot better and reckons to call itself a digital domain restoration rather than an enhancement. Try putting on some headphones and listening to what Clari-Fi does to music from an iPod, on their website, here. link