April 2, 2020 • 19 mins
Step into audiophile nirvana at the headquarters for Mark Levinson audio systems. In speaking to their experts--or boffins, if you will--Malcolm learns that replicating the performance of a $300,000 audio system inside a vehicle is no small task, especially for a brand unwilling to compromise.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin In Northridge, California, just north of Los Angeles, off
the four or five Freeway, surrounded by a series of
strip malls, there is what looks like a very ordinary
office park, like for lawyers and accounting firms, or the
West Coast distributor of some obscure German housewears brand that
(00:38):
kind of thing, very stealth. But then you see a
little sign it says Harmon Cardon, and you step inside
and you're like, Oh, Harmon Cardon manufacturers of high end
audio systems, home to JBL Infinity, Banganolfsson, Oh and a
(00:59):
brand called Mark Levins and their flagship product one of
the most serious names of all for true audiophiles. Imagine
long corridors, feel with ideas for speakers, prototype speakers, random components,
things that make you feel like you're at Los Alamos,
in the middle of the Manhattan Project. And deep inside
(01:20):
Harmon Cardon is a place called the John Urgel Theater. Plush, dark, hushed,
everything in soft sound, absorbent fabric. All right, I'm going
to give you a little about what we have in
this room. We have a total of I think thirty
(01:40):
three loudspeakers in this room. It's a full immersive experience.
I think we're talking about probably half a million dollars
worth of equipment. We're going to do immersive as good
as it yet sound wise, this is probably an overkill.
It's more than as good as it gets. Yes, Yes,
(02:04):
you basically ruined every listening experience I'm going to have
after this. Yes you're listening to go and see from
Lexus and Pushkin Industries, our podcast about all things obsessively
and perfectionistically Lexus. I'm Malcolm Godwell. In this episode, we're
(02:30):
going to talk about the sound system on the Lexus
LS and why it sounds so amazing because it does.
Lexus loaned my producer Jacob Smith, and me and LUs
for a few days, and we proceeded to drive it
the length of La County in violation of as many
known traffic laws as possible, and every time we cranked
the music, all we could think of was WHOA why
(02:56):
does this sound like no other car stereo we have
ever cranked before. So we had to go to the source,
the company that makes the sound systems for Lexus cars,
Harmon's Mark Levinson, to get some answers and too geekap
if you've been listening to this series, you'll know that
the inner workings of cars are a lot more complex
(03:18):
than people think they are. But car stereos I had
no idea. It may take me more than one episode
to get to the bottom of this one. Does this
room have a name? Yes, it's called the MLL, says
we're multi Channel Listening Lab. Okay, the multi Channel Listening Lab,
(03:38):
a room just as ridiculously tricked out as the John
Urgell Theater, where the people up Mark Levinson put us
through a drill so hilariously complicated that I can't even Basically,
we were played a song on a series of different
sets of twenty thousand dollars speakers, all arrayed on a
complex trolley system. They're swapped out behind a black curtain,
(03:59):
and after each playback, the audio geeks asked us which
version we thought was better, when in fact all were
equally absurdly ridiculously amazing. It's they were taunting us with
how good their sound was. So let's start with speaker A.
It could happen to you by Dinah Crawl, Hide your
(04:20):
heart from sight, Lock your dreams at night. It could
happen to be Hide your Heart from Sight, lock your
(04:46):
dreams at night, it could happen to all right, so
we're so good. Yeah, First of all, all of them
(05:08):
are so many orders of magnitude better than any sound
I've ever heard that. I well, you're right about that,
and you will see why. I mean, when we lift
up the curtain, you will see why you said. I
want to say, I like be the best. The Mark
Levinson of the Mark Levinson brand, was and is a
jazz trumpeter who's played with Sonny Rollins and stand Getz,
(05:31):
John Coltrane, Chick Career, and Keith Jared. In the nineteen seventies,
he founded a high end audio company which ended up
being acquired by Harmon Carton. Levinson's Mother's name was Hurts.
Her uncle was the great German physicist Heinrich Hurts, who
proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, which is why the
unit of sound frequency to this day is called Hurts.
(05:55):
The point is Mark Levinson has some serious sound pedigree.
Mark Levinson components are at the highest of the high end,
tens of thousands of dollars. And there was a story
that it kind of I think might be folklore, because
no one can really confirm this. There's a great bit
of British slang for someone who has mastered an incredibly
(06:16):
arcane subject. Boffin, I'm quizzing two of the senior Mark
Levinson's sound. Boffin's first up, Jonathan Pierce John is very smooth,
very California. The story that I've heard time and time
again is mister Mark Levinson refused to allow a company
to take his brand into a vehicle right because the
(06:36):
vehicle is not a good environment for acoustics. These are
people who construct elaborate listening rooms with thirty three speakers
and components where cost is no object. Now someone comes
to them and says, would you shrink all that down
and put it in a car? I mean, that's like
asking Morimoto to do airline food. Wait, so I'm just
I'm just trying to capture Mark Levinson's angst when presented
(07:00):
with a car manufacturer. So he's someone's basically comes to
him and says, you've got to shrink it all down,
stuff it inside a car cabin at a fraction of
the price, and make it sound good. Yes, and then
you have to add two more things which are crazy.
One has to be automotive grade. That's the second buffin
bread Home chiming in Brads from Michigan Bushy Beard. He's
(07:23):
in the metal and he's a serious car guy. So
this room is always going to stay pretty much in
the same temperature. When we test an automotive realm, you've
got to go down to negative eighty five C all
the way up to potentially eighty five C. So you
want to make sure that the amp, the hardware, everything
absorbs through. All of that tell me about I hadn't
(07:43):
thought about temperature before. So what happens at very low
and very high temperatures to a stands to a sound
system if it's not been properly prepared for that Sure,
So when non automotive speaker, if you put it into
a car park, the car in Arizona in the desert,
not to pick on the state, just temperature and climate.
(08:03):
You might measure on the dash one hundred and fifty
degrees fahrenheit. Well, that means the components that you built
us with have to withstand one hundred and fifty degrees
without changing shape, and the talances are so tight that
they can't even start to melt or move any Their
expansion has to be measured tight enough. So that that
is not contacting. Speakers have copper wire. Copper expands in
(08:25):
the heat, shrinks in the cold. If your car is
sitting outside in that Arizona sun, your speaker is going
to get all messed up. So an automotive, we have
to make sure that as that grows or shrinks with temperature,
it's not shrinking and contracting and breaking or expanding and
then sticking to the walls of what we're trying to hit.
You basically have to start from the ground up. You
(08:45):
have to rethink the construction of the speaker itself. Then
there's weight. A high end Levens and speaker can weigh
as much as one hundred and fifty pounds. A serious
Levenson amplifier weighs over one hundred pounds. Some people might
want two hundred and fifty pounds of sound equipment blasting
in their car, but not many. But wait, approach. Give
(09:07):
me a rough bull pat. If I took all of
the stereo components in an lys and put them on
a scale, what am I talking about? Very roughly? Very roughly,
I'll give you very rough if anybody else can correct me.
But it's well under twenty pounds. I would say, including
the sub wilfer and enclosure, the amplifier speakers. Yeah, probably
right around fifteen twenty pounds at most. They must give
(09:31):
you a cost constraint too, Yes, can you tell me
what it is? I don't think so, I mean, but
we can guess. If you didn't rain in the audio
files up Mark Levinson, lexuses would cost three hundred thousand dollars.
They would become the equivalent of a massive, hushed sound
(09:52):
stage floating down the road. We just did three episodes
on the engine note of the Lexus Elsie sports car.
A car is not supposed to be a sound stage.
So of course Mark Levinson said no to every car
company that approached them. But then Lexus came call, and
the boffins said, well, if there was ever a time
to say yes, this is it, because these people are
(10:15):
crazy perfectionists like us. I don't need to remind you
that Lexus is the company where their master level driver Osakisan,
spent two years convincing the engineers back of Toyota City
to tilt the steering wheel on the LC forward two degrees.
Lexis were the windows on the LS slow imperceptibly as
(10:36):
they reach their Apex, American boffins meet Japanese boffins, and besides,
sooner or later, even the world's most dedicated audio file
has to face up to the reality that most people
do not listen to music in half a million dollars
sound rooms in their basement. They listen in their cars,
(10:56):
for better or worse. For all I know, you're listening
to this in your car. So if you have a
company devoted did better ways of listening to music, you
kind of have to say yes eventually to the car,
which is why we ended up in Northridge. Here is
(11:19):
the car stereo problem at its most basic. So when
acoustic energy comes off of a speaker, it obviously doesn't
just hit our ears. It hits everything else in the room.
This is Levinson's John Pierce again. And if it's absorbed
into carpet or absorbed into treatment in the wall, it
isn't stuck inside of that material. It doesn't then come
to your ears in the same manner. But bouncing off
(11:41):
a hard surface as dry wall, hardwood, floors, even certain
pictures on the wall glass that's going to cause reflections.
Reflections are what happens to sound in any enclosed space
in a space like the Urgel Theater. You can manage
those reflections perfectly. The walls are made of soft absorbent material,
the speakers are placed evenly. Everything is set up so
(12:03):
that the sound reflects and reverberates exactly the way people
at Levinson wanted it to be reflected and reverse berated.
But a car is about as far from the Urgle
Theater as is humanly possible. I mean, duh. It moves,
but also it's a lot of metal and glass. It
has an engine, a thing that makes its own noise
in vibration, tires over pavement, and sometimes it has one
(12:24):
person inside, and sometimes it has four or five people inside.
It's a reflection nightmare, and you can't solve that just
by turning up the volume. So the sheet metal in
a car is becoming thinner to make vehicles more efficient.
This is brad. When it's thinner, they move more so
as we have a speaker in there, such as adorable
(12:45):
for vibrating a lot. Now the sheet metal can buzz
and it can almost start to sound like a steel drum.
We're going to start hearing these what we call BSR
in the industry. Buzz, squeak and rattles that come out
of the interior or exterior of the car. Brad got
his start in the industry putting massive sound systems in
muscle cars driven. I'm going to guess by young men
(13:06):
Jonathan Loos to make fun of me because I started
in the aftermarket world, and I was the guy from
a flea market with the forty three gigawatt amplifier and
sixty three thousand subwoffers in the back, and my poor
forward Escort didn't really survive what I did to it,
So that was a BSR nightmare. I shook the absolute
living daylights out of that car. In the act of
(13:29):
putting in this high powered sound system, you created so
much additional vibration and such in the car that it
obscured the music of the sound obscured, as a polite
way to put how bad it was. I could only
hear bass. But I had moved into then sound quality competition,
where the goal was to be the loudest that you could.
(13:50):
And at that point you're designing a system to play
a single frequency, a base frequency, and that gets challenging
because you can dent your roof, the roof panel will
start to flex and you can actually start to get
indentations in the sheet metal. You know, there's all sorts
of crazy stories when it gets into that. Yeah, you
can do that just with a high powered sound system
instead of a guy. Yeah. If you look at the
(14:11):
people doing the intense sound competitions, they actually are pouring
concrete in the doors to try to keep that sound
and integrity in there because the sound pressure is so
hard that it'll move these panels. They have external clamps
on doors to keep the door shut, to keep the
interior sealed, like replace the glass with bulletproof glass, because
you can get to a point where you can overdrive
(14:31):
the stability of that. It's pretty intense. Wow. This is
an extreme example, of course, but you see the problem.
And it's not any different for parents driving minivans who
want to listen to the soundtrack from Frozen. The automobile
is inherently hostile to good sound. You can put the
best set of speakers you want inside a car, but
(14:52):
that's not going to solve your problem. Your problem is
not the equipment, it's the room you're playing it in.
Brad gave us a simple demonstration. So what I've done
is taken a well recorded song, then applied what it
would sound like for the uncute speed here to be
in there, and then play the reference, which would be
back to how it should sound. This isn't doped in
(15:15):
any way. This is actually how much power we have
in the vehicle. Sounds good. Yeah, this is a pop
(15:36):
song played to a high end Mark Levinson speaker that
Brad has just randomly placed inside a car so we
can hear. We're missing a lot of what should be there.
There's a lot of imbalances that really high trouble. You
still hear that sparkle at the top of the symbol,
but the mid range is really dulled. Right, So back
to reference so that you guys don't leave with a
better taste in your range changes. So we just understand
(16:12):
the reference was the way the song was intended to
be played in an ideal sound environment. The first one
was if you simply played it through a set of
anyone's car speakers, your car speakers. Before you do, how
do you get the first Where did the first one
exactly come from? Sure? So what I did was I
(16:32):
took one of our speakers, we put it into a vehicle,
and without any adjustments made, we just measured it from
both seating positions in the car that first recording. The
muddy sound, the dull mid range. That's what I've been
hearing in every car I've ever driven, and I'm going
to guess it's very close to what you here as well.
That's what I've always believed a car stereo sounded like.
(16:56):
But that was before Jacob and I cruised the freeways
of Los Angeles in a tricked out Lexus LS with
the music blasting. Next week, we're gonna sit down inside
our Lexus with the boffins at Mark Levinson and figure
out how they did it. One last thing. At Levinson,
they have a series of what are called an echoic rooms,
(17:19):
which are rooms designed to have no sound, reverberations or reflection,
completely dead rooms, perfect for testing new equipment. They took
us in one. Yeah, doesn't some sound. We're not getting
locked in here. They're just like, oh no, no, they'll
be pure out there. Unless they hate us, they should
let us out like a horror movie. Yeah. We stood
(17:41):
on a platform in a small square room. Above, around
and below us were pyramid shaped wedges of something yellow
and soft wrapped in mesh. Dozens of them. There was
no harm, no echo, nothing, Every single iota of sound
was soaked up by the yellow wedges. Yeah, can we
(18:03):
have can we have like thirty seconds of sounds? Because
I wanted, I'll write everyone listening silence. We almost we're
almost never in Think about it. It's unnatural, completely unnatural.
Nothing in nature exists like this, whatsoever. Yeah, it sounds
like hears you're plugged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think
(18:24):
if you stay in here long enough, your brain would
probably go crazy, just just a little bit. The place
was creepy. This is all like styrophone. It's fiberglass, fiber,
it's just sucking up everybody sucks up everything. Absolutely, But
there's enough metal in here to give you a little
bit more ambiance. The one upstairs doesn't have that. Yeah.
You if you put someone in here like an under
insultary confinement, they would lose their mind. They would absolutely.
(18:48):
It would be a very cruel and unusual twicture for sure. Yes,
what is this? Where you where you where you discipline
wayward employees? Of Then I thought about it. It's not
where they send wayward employees. I think the end of
cook rooms are where the boffins go and scream when
the stress of making a decent sounding car system proves
(19:10):
too overwhelming. If a boffin screams in an anachoic room,
does it make a sound? Go and See is produced
by Jacob Smith with Emily Rostek and Carl Nigliari, Edited
by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and
(19:32):
mixed and mastered our episodes special thanks to Jacob Weisberg
had a Fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and
all the Lexus executives, engineers and designers who participated in
our recordings. Go and See is a production of Lexus
and Pushkin Industries. I'm Mountain Gradlin
Pushkin In Northridge, California, just north of Los Angeles, off
the four or five Freeway, surrounded by a series of
strip malls, there is what looks like a very ordinary
office park, like for lawyers and accounting firms, or the
West Coast distributor of some obscure German housewears brand that
(00:38):
kind of thing, very stealth. But then you see a
little sign it says Harmon Cardon, and you step inside
and you're like, Oh, Harmon Cardon manufacturers of high end
audio systems, home to JBL Infinity, Banganolfsson, Oh and a
(00:59):
brand called Mark Levins and their flagship product one of
the most serious names of all for true audiophiles. Imagine
long corridors, feel with ideas for speakers, prototype speakers, random components,
things that make you feel like you're at Los Alamos,
in the middle of the Manhattan Project. And deep inside
(01:20):
Harmon Cardon is a place called the John Urgel Theater. Plush, dark, hushed,
everything in soft sound, absorbent fabric. All right, I'm going
to give you a little about what we have in
this room. We have a total of I think thirty
(01:40):
three loudspeakers in this room. It's a full immersive experience.
I think we're talking about probably half a million dollars
worth of equipment. We're going to do immersive as good
as it yet sound wise, this is probably an overkill.
It's more than as good as it gets. Yes, Yes,
(02:04):
you basically ruined every listening experience I'm going to have
after this. Yes you're listening to go and see from
Lexus and Pushkin Industries, our podcast about all things obsessively
and perfectionistically Lexus. I'm Malcolm Godwell. In this episode, we're
(02:30):
going to talk about the sound system on the Lexus
LS and why it sounds so amazing because it does.
Lexus loaned my producer Jacob Smith, and me and LUs
for a few days, and we proceeded to drive it
the length of La County in violation of as many
known traffic laws as possible, and every time we cranked
the music, all we could think of was WHOA why
(02:56):
does this sound like no other car stereo we have
ever cranked before. So we had to go to the source,
the company that makes the sound systems for Lexus cars,
Harmon's Mark Levinson, to get some answers and too geekap
if you've been listening to this series, you'll know that
the inner workings of cars are a lot more complex
(03:18):
than people think they are. But car stereos I had
no idea. It may take me more than one episode
to get to the bottom of this one. Does this
room have a name? Yes, it's called the MLL, says
we're multi Channel Listening Lab. Okay, the multi Channel Listening Lab,
(03:38):
a room just as ridiculously tricked out as the John
Urgell Theater, where the people up Mark Levinson put us
through a drill so hilariously complicated that I can't even Basically,
we were played a song on a series of different
sets of twenty thousand dollars speakers, all arrayed on a
complex trolley system. They're swapped out behind a black curtain,
(03:59):
and after each playback, the audio geeks asked us which
version we thought was better, when in fact all were
equally absurdly ridiculously amazing. It's they were taunting us with
how good their sound was. So let's start with speaker A.
It could happen to you by Dinah Crawl, Hide your
(04:20):
heart from sight, Lock your dreams at night. It could
happen to be Hide your Heart from Sight, lock your
(04:46):
dreams at night, it could happen to all right, so
we're so good. Yeah, First of all, all of them
(05:08):
are so many orders of magnitude better than any sound
I've ever heard that. I well, you're right about that,
and you will see why. I mean, when we lift
up the curtain, you will see why you said. I
want to say, I like be the best. The Mark
Levinson of the Mark Levinson brand, was and is a
jazz trumpeter who's played with Sonny Rollins and stand Getz,
(05:31):
John Coltrane, Chick Career, and Keith Jared. In the nineteen seventies,
he founded a high end audio company which ended up
being acquired by Harmon Carton. Levinson's Mother's name was Hurts.
Her uncle was the great German physicist Heinrich Hurts, who
proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, which is why the
unit of sound frequency to this day is called Hurts.
(05:55):
The point is Mark Levinson has some serious sound pedigree.
Mark Levinson components are at the highest of the high end,
tens of thousands of dollars. And there was a story
that it kind of I think might be folklore, because
no one can really confirm this. There's a great bit
of British slang for someone who has mastered an incredibly
(06:16):
arcane subject. Boffin, I'm quizzing two of the senior Mark
Levinson's sound. Boffin's first up, Jonathan Pierce John is very smooth,
very California. The story that I've heard time and time
again is mister Mark Levinson refused to allow a company
to take his brand into a vehicle right because the
(06:36):
vehicle is not a good environment for acoustics. These are
people who construct elaborate listening rooms with thirty three speakers
and components where cost is no object. Now someone comes
to them and says, would you shrink all that down
and put it in a car? I mean, that's like
asking Morimoto to do airline food. Wait, so I'm just
I'm just trying to capture Mark Levinson's angst when presented
(07:00):
with a car manufacturer. So he's someone's basically comes to
him and says, you've got to shrink it all down,
stuff it inside a car cabin at a fraction of
the price, and make it sound good. Yes, and then
you have to add two more things which are crazy.
One has to be automotive grade. That's the second buffin
bread Home chiming in Brads from Michigan Bushy Beard. He's
(07:23):
in the metal and he's a serious car guy. So
this room is always going to stay pretty much in
the same temperature. When we test an automotive realm, you've
got to go down to negative eighty five C all
the way up to potentially eighty five C. So you
want to make sure that the amp, the hardware, everything
absorbs through. All of that tell me about I hadn't
(07:43):
thought about temperature before. So what happens at very low
and very high temperatures to a stands to a sound
system if it's not been properly prepared for that Sure,
So when non automotive speaker, if you put it into
a car park, the car in Arizona in the desert,
not to pick on the state, just temperature and climate.
(08:03):
You might measure on the dash one hundred and fifty
degrees fahrenheit. Well, that means the components that you built
us with have to withstand one hundred and fifty degrees
without changing shape, and the talances are so tight that
they can't even start to melt or move any Their
expansion has to be measured tight enough. So that that
is not contacting. Speakers have copper wire. Copper expands in
(08:25):
the heat, shrinks in the cold. If your car is
sitting outside in that Arizona sun, your speaker is going
to get all messed up. So an automotive, we have
to make sure that as that grows or shrinks with temperature,
it's not shrinking and contracting and breaking or expanding and
then sticking to the walls of what we're trying to hit.
You basically have to start from the ground up. You
(08:45):
have to rethink the construction of the speaker itself. Then
there's weight. A high end Levens and speaker can weigh
as much as one hundred and fifty pounds. A serious
Levenson amplifier weighs over one hundred pounds. Some people might
want two hundred and fifty pounds of sound equipment blasting
in their car, but not many. But wait, approach. Give
(09:07):
me a rough bull pat. If I took all of
the stereo components in an lys and put them on
a scale, what am I talking about? Very roughly? Very roughly,
I'll give you very rough if anybody else can correct me.
But it's well under twenty pounds. I would say, including
the sub wilfer and enclosure, the amplifier speakers. Yeah, probably
right around fifteen twenty pounds at most. They must give
(09:31):
you a cost constraint too, Yes, can you tell me
what it is? I don't think so, I mean, but
we can guess. If you didn't rain in the audio
files up Mark Levinson, lexuses would cost three hundred thousand dollars.
They would become the equivalent of a massive, hushed sound
(09:52):
stage floating down the road. We just did three episodes
on the engine note of the Lexus Elsie sports car.
A car is not supposed to be a sound stage.
So of course Mark Levinson said no to every car
company that approached them. But then Lexus came call, and
the boffins said, well, if there was ever a time
to say yes, this is it, because these people are
(10:15):
crazy perfectionists like us. I don't need to remind you
that Lexus is the company where their master level driver Osakisan,
spent two years convincing the engineers back of Toyota City
to tilt the steering wheel on the LC forward two degrees.
Lexis were the windows on the LS slow imperceptibly as
(10:36):
they reach their Apex, American boffins meet Japanese boffins, and besides,
sooner or later, even the world's most dedicated audio file
has to face up to the reality that most people
do not listen to music in half a million dollars
sound rooms in their basement. They listen in their cars,
(10:56):
for better or worse. For all I know, you're listening
to this in your car. So if you have a
company devoted did better ways of listening to music, you
kind of have to say yes eventually to the car,
which is why we ended up in Northridge. Here is
(11:19):
the car stereo problem at its most basic. So when
acoustic energy comes off of a speaker, it obviously doesn't
just hit our ears. It hits everything else in the room.
This is Levinson's John Pierce again. And if it's absorbed
into carpet or absorbed into treatment in the wall, it
isn't stuck inside of that material. It doesn't then come
to your ears in the same manner. But bouncing off
(11:41):
a hard surface as dry wall, hardwood, floors, even certain
pictures on the wall glass that's going to cause reflections.
Reflections are what happens to sound in any enclosed space
in a space like the Urgel Theater. You can manage
those reflections perfectly. The walls are made of soft absorbent material,
the speakers are placed evenly. Everything is set up so
(12:03):
that the sound reflects and reverberates exactly the way people
at Levinson wanted it to be reflected and reverse berated.
But a car is about as far from the Urgle
Theater as is humanly possible. I mean, duh. It moves,
but also it's a lot of metal and glass. It
has an engine, a thing that makes its own noise
in vibration, tires over pavement, and sometimes it has one
(12:24):
person inside, and sometimes it has four or five people inside.
It's a reflection nightmare, and you can't solve that just
by turning up the volume. So the sheet metal in
a car is becoming thinner to make vehicles more efficient.
This is brad. When it's thinner, they move more so
as we have a speaker in there, such as adorable
(12:45):
for vibrating a lot. Now the sheet metal can buzz
and it can almost start to sound like a steel drum.
We're going to start hearing these what we call BSR
in the industry. Buzz, squeak and rattles that come out
of the interior or exterior of the car. Brad got
his start in the industry putting massive sound systems in
muscle cars driven. I'm going to guess by young men
(13:06):
Jonathan Loos to make fun of me because I started
in the aftermarket world, and I was the guy from
a flea market with the forty three gigawatt amplifier and
sixty three thousand subwoffers in the back, and my poor
forward Escort didn't really survive what I did to it,
So that was a BSR nightmare. I shook the absolute
living daylights out of that car. In the act of
(13:29):
putting in this high powered sound system, you created so
much additional vibration and such in the car that it
obscured the music of the sound obscured, as a polite
way to put how bad it was. I could only
hear bass. But I had moved into then sound quality competition,
where the goal was to be the loudest that you could.
(13:50):
And at that point you're designing a system to play
a single frequency, a base frequency, and that gets challenging
because you can dent your roof, the roof panel will
start to flex and you can actually start to get
indentations in the sheet metal. You know, there's all sorts
of crazy stories when it gets into that. Yeah, you
can do that just with a high powered sound system
instead of a guy. Yeah. If you look at the
(14:11):
people doing the intense sound competitions, they actually are pouring
concrete in the doors to try to keep that sound
and integrity in there because the sound pressure is so
hard that it'll move these panels. They have external clamps
on doors to keep the door shut, to keep the
interior sealed, like replace the glass with bulletproof glass, because
you can get to a point where you can overdrive
(14:31):
the stability of that. It's pretty intense. Wow. This is
an extreme example, of course, but you see the problem.
And it's not any different for parents driving minivans who
want to listen to the soundtrack from Frozen. The automobile
is inherently hostile to good sound. You can put the
best set of speakers you want inside a car, but
(14:52):
that's not going to solve your problem. Your problem is
not the equipment, it's the room you're playing it in.
Brad gave us a simple demonstration. So what I've done
is taken a well recorded song, then applied what it
would sound like for the uncute speed here to be
in there, and then play the reference, which would be
back to how it should sound. This isn't doped in
(15:15):
any way. This is actually how much power we have
in the vehicle. Sounds good. Yeah, this is a pop
(15:36):
song played to a high end Mark Levinson speaker that
Brad has just randomly placed inside a car so we
can hear. We're missing a lot of what should be there.
There's a lot of imbalances that really high trouble. You
still hear that sparkle at the top of the symbol,
but the mid range is really dulled. Right, So back
to reference so that you guys don't leave with a
better taste in your range changes. So we just understand
(16:12):
the reference was the way the song was intended to
be played in an ideal sound environment. The first one
was if you simply played it through a set of
anyone's car speakers, your car speakers. Before you do, how
do you get the first Where did the first one
exactly come from? Sure? So what I did was I
(16:32):
took one of our speakers, we put it into a vehicle,
and without any adjustments made, we just measured it from
both seating positions in the car that first recording. The
muddy sound, the dull mid range. That's what I've been
hearing in every car I've ever driven, and I'm going
to guess it's very close to what you here as well.
That's what I've always believed a car stereo sounded like.
(16:56):
But that was before Jacob and I cruised the freeways
of Los Angeles in a tricked out Lexus LS with
the music blasting. Next week, we're gonna sit down inside
our Lexus with the boffins at Mark Levinson and figure
out how they did it. One last thing. At Levinson,
they have a series of what are called an echoic rooms,
(17:19):
which are rooms designed to have no sound, reverberations or reflection,
completely dead rooms, perfect for testing new equipment. They took
us in one. Yeah, doesn't some sound. We're not getting
locked in here. They're just like, oh no, no, they'll
be pure out there. Unless they hate us, they should
let us out like a horror movie. Yeah. We stood
(17:41):
on a platform in a small square room. Above, around
and below us were pyramid shaped wedges of something yellow
and soft wrapped in mesh. Dozens of them. There was
no harm, no echo, nothing, Every single iota of sound
was soaked up by the yellow wedges. Yeah, can we
(18:03):
have can we have like thirty seconds of sounds? Because
I wanted, I'll write everyone listening silence. We almost we're
almost never in Think about it. It's unnatural, completely unnatural.
Nothing in nature exists like this, whatsoever. Yeah, it sounds
like hears you're plugged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think
(18:24):
if you stay in here long enough, your brain would
probably go crazy, just just a little bit. The place
was creepy. This is all like styrophone. It's fiberglass, fiber,
it's just sucking up everybody sucks up everything. Absolutely, But
there's enough metal in here to give you a little
bit more ambiance. The one upstairs doesn't have that. Yeah.
You if you put someone in here like an under
insultary confinement, they would lose their mind. They would absolutely.
(18:48):
It would be a very cruel and unusual twicture for sure. Yes,
what is this? Where you where you where you discipline
wayward employees? Of Then I thought about it. It's not
where they send wayward employees. I think the end of
cook rooms are where the boffins go and scream when
the stress of making a decent sounding car system proves
(19:10):
too overwhelming. If a boffin screams in an anachoic room,
does it make a sound? Go and See is produced
by Jacob Smith with Emily Rostek and Carl Nigliari, Edited
by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and
(19:32):
mixed and mastered our episodes special thanks to Jacob Weisberg
had a Fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and
all the Lexus executives, engineers and designers who participated in
our recordings. Go and See is a production of Lexus
and Pushkin Industries. I'm Mountain Gradlin
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