Outside of our own home, the car is where we tend to listen to music the most. It’s become an essential part of the modern driving experience - whether we’re setting off for a family holiday with our favourite album on in the background or we’re stuck in traffic with the radio on - and so it’s only natural that we want the in-car sound system to sound as good as possible.
But achieving great sound in such a small, complicated space is tricky business, and that’s something that Patrick Putzolu, Mirko Girschewski and Yasunari Niiro (or Nick, as he’s known to everyone else) know all too well. The three of them helped to engineer Sony’s new premium in-car audio system - which includes up to 12 speakers, can provide up to 500 watts of power and is now available as an upgrade in Ford cars - and they’ve spent months personally optimising the system for each different car model.
Patrick, Mirko and Nick are constantly overcoming challenges as part of their job, the most common of which being the unconventional structure of a car’s interior. All of the different shapes and materials can make it a very challenging environment to make sonically pleasing, yet they need to ensure that the music sounds perfect from every seat.
Mirko measures the distance between the front speaker and the position of the driver’s head. This helps define time-delay on EQ parameters. (Photo: Marion C. Schmidt)
“When you have in mind a home audio system, you would ideally have your chair creating a triangle with the two speakers,” Mirko says. “You would sit in the so-called ‘sweet spot’ and the speakers would be angled towards your ears. However, in a vehicle this is completely different. You’re either sitting on the left or the right-hand side of the car and the distance from your ears to each speaker is different. To overcome this, you will have a time delay so the information coming from the left-hand side speaker is [received] at the same time as the right-hand speaker.”
Nick adds: “Once the sweet spot within the car is determined, the unconventional structure of the car in fact renders a certain advantage. The passenger’s position is fixed in relation to the speaker position, whereas in a living room setting, the listener moves around and it is not known where they will position the speakers.”
This list of items to consider is just one small step in the overall tuning process, and when you continue to break it down like this you start to get an idea of just how long each car takes. Patrick says: “We spend roughly 4 weeks for each [car] body type, because for any change of interior we need to do separate testing. We have 4-doors, 5-doors, wagons, we have models with and without subwoofers...all of these body types will have different features.”
Patrick sets up his workstation inside the Ford Mondeo and explains his initial sound setting to Mirko before getting started. (Photo: Marion C. Schmidt)
The audio control panel of the Sony sound system in the Ford Mondeo. The system consists of the panel, 12 speakers and an amplifier. (Photo: Marion C. Schmidt)
Patrick continues: “We can easily say that it’s more - far more - than 100 hours of work per body type.”
We all have different music tastes, and so Patrick, Mirko and Nick have to make sure that every system sounds just as good when playing bass-heavy dance music as it does for more dynamic jazz tracks. To make things a little bit easier, the team have compiled their very own eclectic playlists, with each track being chosen for specific reasons.
“We use all kinds of genres,” Patrick says. “We have some classical music, we have some classic rock, acoustic music, and we’ve also added some modern pop to see if the music which is currently around will also perform well.
“Playlists are necessary because to have a correct reference we need some repetition. It’s also important that you have a decent number of tracks that you can rely on and which give you information about various sonic aspects. Sometimes it’s just the deep bass and mid-range, then you need to focus on the differences of male and female voices.”
Mirko, Nick and Patrick discuss EQ results in a quest for optimised sound performance in the Ford Mondeo. (Photo: Marion C. Schmidt)
So, having spent so much time with the system itself, what do they think it is that makes TUNED stand out amongst the rest of the crowd? Patrick says: “My personal opinion on what makes every Sony audio system so special is that we are so oriented on the original recording procedure, and this is our way of extending respect to the artists and the engineers that originally did the job. From a [more] technical point of view, we have a lot of technologies that we can use to improve our own work - things like Clear Phase and Live Acoustics.”
Mirko concludes: “At the end of the day, the Sony philosophy is to create a system that can play back any kind of content - whether it’s music or just someone talking - as it was intended by the artist.”
Sony’s premium in-car audio system is now available as an upgrade for all Ford Fiesta, B-MAX, C-MAX, Focus, Kuga, Mondeo and Mondeo Vignale models.
