KIA KX-5 SPORTAGE CRDi WITH 320 WATTS OF JBL SPEAKERS DRIVEN BY CLARI-FI

Did you ever see the Peter Jackson rendition of The Hobbit? At one point, the Goblin King and Gandalf have a battle. That Goblin King looks uncommonly like me, so I apologise for the self-inclusion in the video I made about this car. I have never really exploited my wonderful Manfrotto camera-mount window-sucker and figured it was time. For yes, I was given the loan of a Kia Sportage CRDi 2.0, in their latest KX-5 level of awesomeness, to check out the vehicle of course but more crucially for me, to get the low down on the infotainment and binnacle, as that is going to be my increasing career focus.
With car makers spending ever yet more on the toys inside as well as their ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) or the beginnings of autonomous driving, we see plenty of bragging about the new ways they install audio in their cars. Yet there has been all but nil coverage of any knowledgeable depth in modern press outlets. These are CAR journalists, after all and I am a car AUDIO journalist. They are about the oily bits I find so scary and alien. I ain’t phobic. though, like the plainclothes policeman I accosted at a garage. I had broken down and his unmarked 160mph Vauxhall VXR Vectra police car was on the next pump and could jump start me. He said ‘˜yes’ but that I would have to do the connecting, as while he could pursuit-drive at 140mph with one hand and use the radio with the other, he was literally oleophobic! Funny thing is, for being full of opinions, firmly put, with no cursing, I am actually in the barrel as a BBC Motoring Journalist on the ‘˜pundit’ list. I may not by any means be the first they call but I do my homework and get called by researchers from time to time and hit up national and local wireless like a pro, oily bits and all. But yes, ‘˜motoring journalist’ is the easy way to describe the gig.
I saw a YouTube video from a big ‘˜HiFi’ media brand. Their main summation of the Naim for Bentley system. (complete with sensate moving-mass tactile transducers – developed by Aura Dynamics for the aftermarket as a ‘˜Bass Shaker’ or Butt Kicker’ in the USA and used as monitor thuds to stick the drum beats up the bottom of live drummers’ seating!) He said it was ‘˜loud’. Sigh. funnily enough, that audio company went into liquidation but not before selling some product into OEM car manufacture and having them appear next to posh UK hifi branded audio in Bentleys. Now that’s next level stuff
So enough rampant showing off. This is a review of an SUV as well as the equipment within it but that’s just because I couldn’t not play at being a pukka car writer. It was just too much fun not to pretend to be a real oneSo, first, here is the video I made about the KIA SPORTAGE KX-5 CRDi, in brand spanking new 2017 audio equipage. Below that, for the audiophillic and keen, I will explain what the JBL sound system does that’s a bit more hectic than you expected. Not just 320 watts – but ones that tickle you in the music glands a bit firmer than most.
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Right, so you can see I was impressed in general. I called up a chum at one of the companies I deal with and forgot he owned a shiny Sportage himself. I told him about the spec of this one and I could feel that it was not a kindness. He would have loved the one I had loan of, for the KX-5 CRDi was dripping in toys and stuff.

The provision of multiple 12V sockets and multiple USB charge points, 3.5mm input aux jack socket and NO CD PLAYER at all, are all testimony to why my add-a-USB-and-Aux-to-your-car-easily video has gone viral. (2.3m and rising) Nobody uses CD in a car any more unless they are a bit special and afflicted like I am. There are even devices on sale – lumps of plastic – made to enable the use of the CD slot to make it into a bunged-up-but-now-useful toe-hold for a phone bracket. But the coolest feature of all is one so new that it isn’t talked about much. It is used as a pure-glam feature to include in some savagely posh cars and Kia have cheekily flung it in here in a class-disrupting fashion. I am talking about wireless electricity.
At its most bonkers, it is a three-phase system that pours juice from a floor installation into a Rolls-Royce hybrid but at its most ‘˜normal’ it is a device from your phone maker and a facility built into only the newest phones, whereby you simply place the thing, (in my instance, even inside a moron proof rubbery case) upon the ‘˜wireless charger’ – for it does itself have to have power connection – and the phone starts to charge. I swear I found this by accident inside the Kia KX-5 Sportage CRDi. I plopped my heavily protected Galaxy S7 in the front cubby and the screen went ‘˜ping’ and the little lamp above the ‘˜wireless charging’ symbol in the cubbyhole (ahhhh) now lit up in green.
So really, as promised, the last thing is that JBL sound system. And it reveals a brilliant approach by KIA that is about using known Good Brands for things like the Sat Nav. Unafraid to give away branding to Tom Tom, they actually garner points of acceptance because these days, most people know that a Tom Tom system will be easier and cheaper to keep up to date -as evidenced by the SD card slot right in the front, where you can get at it. Built-in Sat Navs are notoriously ruinously expensive to keep up to date and become whole-platform-obsolete at model changes and are hated for it. This is clever stuff. But JBL are a cool brand too, if not quite as high falutin’ as Mark Levinson and Infinity, both of which are also owned by the same parent company – Harman.
And what’s been done is breathtakingly simple and AWFULLY as if Kia just went to a good installer and got an aftermarket system in concept. They say ‘˜eight’ speakers but it’s actually NINE, if you look at the video (possibly ten!) You have a speaker in each corner, with the rear doors being a simple full range. Then add two more to the count as the fronts’ tweeters get called a speaker, too. Then the single enclosed woofer in the offside boot flank in a box makes seven, with the ‘˜eighth’ being a centre speaker in the top of the dash. If you look at the video at 14:05 and onwards, you will see three grilles. With smaller real estate in space and speaker box volume potential on the top of the dash as against in the doors, that centre speaker array looks like it uses two midbassers to get the required level of basso punch to keep up with the rest of the system. Finally, a six-channel amp (I reckon) of some 320 watts in total, is sited under the boot floor according to this graphic below. That bass channel will have an ‘˜active’ crossover or a circuit to send ONLY basso tones to the woofer but the tweeters on the three front channels will have ‘˜traffic cops’ or sound dividers called ‘˜passive’ crossovers, made of capacitors and coils, to feed the two sizes of driver from one wire or channel of the amplifier.

So why does it need a centre speaker at all? Well, there is a feature of the JBL offering here that takes massive advantage of being part of Harman. For the dyed-in-the-wool super specialist speaker maker that is JBL could never have worked out the Clari-Fi system alone. This is about digital restoration of compressed music files, because JBL knew that most folks would be playing MP3, or apple AAC files or some other streamed thing that is always a ‘˜lossy’ compression system. Clari-Fi processing helps fix the inherent dullness of digital compression. And the centre speaker array, with cunning steering and subtle processing, makes the sound alive, vital and play as if up across the screen like ‘˜proper’ hifi but more meaty and exhilarating than most ‘˜British’ audio signatures. This is Yankee and kicks ass!
Clari-Fi is the leading 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 fatty bum bass and ear-hurty highs but rather an overall decompression that makes the sound a lot better and reckons to call itself a restoration rather than an enhancement.

Couple that with the simple but bloody excellent transducers in here (and definitely at least 2dB more power for the fabby ally JBL badges I so adored) the overall potency, bandwidth and dynamics are all proof of why the JBL brand is so respected.
So overall, I couldn’t help but smile at the strap line. ‘The Power To Surprise.’ for I was a bit startled by the Kia KX-5 Sportage CRDi.
A massive thanks to the folks at Kia for letting me have the drive and to JBL’s UK pr for the picture and stuff the Kia guys didn’t show off about. Now, put on some headphones and go and listen to what Clari-Fi does to music from an iPod, on their website here. link
If you want to go drool and shop for Kias, then this is a good place to start. link
Their Twitter account link
If you buy one, tell them ‘The Fat Man Sent Me.’.. and get absolutely NO extra discount at all.