Car Sound Part 3

…./ and try we do.

Enter damned Audi Stage Right. A circa 2014 estate to be more or less imprecise.

In all honesty I had heard this car before, about a year ago in fact. It blew me away at the time but last week things were somewhat different. Instead of doing music listening it was time to do technical listening.

In Part 2 I mentioned how incredibly harsh the sonic climate is within a car and how DSP attempts to fool our ears into hearing what is believable.

I do NOT want to get into what is defined as ‘believable’ to begin with. That is a whole can of worms down a rabbit hole that will need column kilometres but let me sum it up as largely very difficult to define within the world of music.

What the Audi presents is reference quality music reproduction. In other words it serves to provide a reference quality sound against which determinations can be made both subjectively and objectively.

Objectively if a recording has a bass note in it that is absent one can say that the system is not providing an accurate reference for that particular note.

Subjectively one might be of the opinion that the performance is better off without it.

As a reviewer the mix between the two is easy to merge into a coherent mess. By way of example, vinyl is objectively inferior to digital as a source material – it’s bandwidth constrained and physically compromised. Subjectively it sounds better, or so I am told and that can be for any number of reasons not least of which is our own brains input biases.

I don’t enjoy vinyl because I prefer the more open detail that digital is able to afford thanks to what amounts to limitless accuracy to an original recording (before DSP!). Can I hear the difference? Yes. I like to think so.

In the case of the Audi the original lossless digital source is processed via DSP to build a sonic interpretation of the recording as best fits the car.

The lossless digital source by the way is something we all have access to at unprecedented levels in human history via the better streaming platforms (Tidal, Spotify, Deezer etc). Almost every song ever recorded aside from the album Spooky Weirdness by Hydra is online. Try find anything that you can think of that isn’t online – I’m quite pleased with the fact that I managed to…

In the process of the sound fields being constructed via DSP all the actual reproduction equipment – amplifiers and speakers primarily also need to be taken into consideration. Sending a high frequency signal to the amplifier driving one of the dual 12″ subs for example isn’t going to work.

As I think I have said, it’s complicated. And one of the ways in which complications can be dealt with is to be ruthless with the recordings. I have never, ever experienced a system that is quite so clinically dispassionate with music and as rigidly unforgiving as a consequence. Recordings that I know well, and love, were eviscerated to the point where my enjoyment of them has been taken away from me, perhaps forever.

It wasn’t pleasant having my music treated with such disdain and contempt. In particular a track I know really well has a crack snap and popple in it that I listen out for. Tidal has “fixed” it, or so I thought – on the Audi an entirely new distortion I heard for the first time. On my home system which is no slouch, I picked it up where it’s impact is so subtle you need to really have to know it’s there to hear it. Yet in the car it’s amplified.

Aha! What about headphones I hear you ask?

What about them? On them I was able to pick up this new information, again, only just. Hence my conclusion is that DSP is doing something and showing it up in more detail which is why you can hear it more clearly.

That’s objective. Subjectively it detracts from my enjoyment of the track because now I know there is something there. It’s going to become part of my listening criteria now!

The upside to the Audi is that it is the closest thing I have heard to a reference (stereo hi-fi room based) system that’s not a reference system. DSP is able to get to a point where depth and instrument positioning, let me remind you, in a car! is at the point of believability. The control of the music is outrageous and if you think there is going to be oodles of bass as is associated with “traditional” car sound, then I have bad news for you.

Music is so clean (distortion free) and effortless that driving the system into distortion levels of power deployment happens in an instant. You run the risk of listening o music at head imploding levels (which I enjoy) without realising it and that only happens in Serious Setups with typically massive power and massive presence (there are of course rare exceptions). Bass is so deep, so controlled and so effective that you keep wanting more – the slam is deceptively fast. This ain’t no over driven Faithless concert in the Dome…

I could go on but I’m not. I think that the point has been made and it is this. DSP is a thing, it works, and in the hands of a specialist it can be made to work wonders. You just might not want it to because down this rabbit hole lies many exposures that you may not have been expecting and for me losing a few of my reference tracks was… emotional…