Audi wishes to woo the audiophiles with its “Audi Sound Concept”

Audi, the makers of the godlike R8 V10 that I can only dream of owning, is in the funky Einstein lab again. They have been setting standards for in-car audio systems with collaborations from premium audio companies like Bang & Olufsen and Bose. The engineers have been tinkering some magic yet again, with the Audi Sound Concept, which they hope will bring “wave field synthesis” to the ICE (In Car Entertainment) world. How crazy does putting 62 speakers into a mammoth Audi Q7 sounds to you?

That’s 5 woofers, 5 tweeters, with 52 mid-range speakers. By synthesizing “artificial” wave sounds driven by large numbers of speakers, the engineers hope to produce wave field synthesis.



“One of the driving forces in the field of wave field synthesis is the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) in Ilmenau, which first demonstrated that wave field synthesis can be made to work in a real-world application at the Linden Lichtspiele Cinema. Each of the 192 individual speakers at the movie theater is driven separately by a fast computer – at the precise moment in which the virtual wave front would pass through its point in space. Some signals are delayed by milliseconds, depending on the location of the speaker. The result is that each moviegoer experiences perfect audio spatialization in optimal sound.”



“Looking to bring wave field synthesis technology to its automobiles, Audi began its development work in collaboration with IDMT five years ago. The current status of the project is the Q7 prototype, which is parked in a workshop.

Most of the Q7’s luggage compartment is taken up with a powerful amplifier and thick cables that connect it to three PCs. The 62 speakers installed in the car include five woofers and five tweeters plus 52 mid-range speakers in the instrument panel beneath the windshield, in the roof pillars and in the doors. Five units are integrated into each door sill, with specialists needing to make cutouts in the sheet metal, fabricate new bezels and lower the interior door release handles to fit them all in.

As with the Iosono cinema system, Audi can only enjoy the full potential of the system using specially created wave field audio media because there is no corresponding audio media available on the market. The media used to demonstrate the system comprises up to 32 tracks, with specific spatial information for each of those tracks. Although a few film studios are already producing films using wave field synthesis says head engineer of the Audi Sound Concept, Peter Gleim.

When Gleim plays the sample a sound like a thunderhead issues from the speakers – a mix of music, traffic noise and animal sounds. A female narrator guides the listener through the acoustic hubbub, dancing past the listener on the right and at other times on the left. The whole time the listener’s ears are surrounded by the sounds of driving cars and roaring lions. A marching band seems to march from side to side through the Q7 before finally a helicopter flies a lap around the cabin below the headliner.”