I friend of mine's son works for Disney as an audio engineer. If you've seen a Disney movie made in the past 10-years, you have heard his work. He was one of the first people to buy a B&O equipped Audi A8 when Audi and B&O teamed up. He has owned several A8s since, all equipped the B&O system.
http://www.bang-olufsen.com/en/car-audio/car-models/audi
Scroll down and watch the video
The Bang & Olufsen Advanced Sound System takes the state of the art Bang & Olufsen Sound System a step further. The customized speakers and the proprietary Bang & Olufsen technologies – Acoustic Lens Technology and the unique ICEpower technology – make it the best acoustic experience ever created for the car.
- Active loudspeaker technology
- Up to 19 high-performance loudspeakers
- Two moving tweeters on the dashboard (Acoustic Lens Technology)
- Sealed loudspeaker boxes
- Fully aluminum loudspeaker cover
- ICEpower amplifier
- Up to 1400 Watt of amplification power
- Advanced Vehicle Noise Compensation
- 5.1 Surround Sound technology (in connection with MMI Navigation Plus)
- Dedicated sound tuning
I've never heard one, did you get a chance to listen to it?
Awesome video! Love the footage of B&O’s proto labs. Wouldn’t it be great to be involved in that level of engineering & system development? Almost as cool as being an audio engineer for Disney. Those guys are definitely ‘bleeding edge’. Hard to imagine the budgets & equipment they get to play with. Nirvana!
I did get a quick listen to the A7 system, although the source was HD FM and the material wasn't familiar, it sounded damned fine. With no time to assess the spatial qualities of the system, what I’ll point out is B&O focuses on the surround aspects of audio reproduction, basically trashing the idea of the "front stage" concept favored elsewhere. I happen to agree with that design philosophy for reasons mentioned in other threads. From the brief listen, it was immersive, solid, balanced and all around you, with convincing L/R F/R separation and very deep, smooth bass. I'm sure a high quality digital source would have been even more engaging, wish there was an hour or two to dink around with it.
My daughter drives a 2015 Jetta TDI with the premium audio system engineered by Fender. A friend has a new VW with the Dynaudio premium system. Both those systems employ full range front and rear speakers, they approach some of the best custom systems in terms of pure SPL. And both have unquestionably fine frequency balance, easily among the best to be heard in any mobile application. "Effortless" is the single word that describes well-engineered systems like these.
In the B&O video, they reference an anechoic chamber. A quick aside about them: for those not familiar, an anechoic chamber is a totally non reflective, acoustically dead environment. What makes this interesting is that kind of environment does not exist in nature.
Virtually every space our brains are accustomed to has reflective qualities influencing the way we perceive sound. Even in the middle of a barren desert, the earth itself is a reflective surface contributing to what we hear. When standing in a room or in an outdoor space speaking to another person, the sound of our voices are a complex mix of vocal cords moving air directly from our mouths, vibrations of those sounds resonating in our chests and reflections bouncing around the room or outdoor surfaces of any physical environment. Speaker designers use anechoic chambers for the expressed purpose of eliminating external influences of sound emanating from a raw driver or an assembled speaker system. Near field mic techniques are used at varying angles and distances to assess dispersion characteristics – which is how axis graphs are (mostly) created.
Because early & late reflections are a part of the natural environment we come to know - when they are removed from our surroundings, things get really weird in the human mind.
A while back, I was invited by the Electro Voice product development team to visit their labs and test facilities. During that visit, they allowed me to step inside one of several different anechoic chambers they have on site. The memory of that experience is as fresh today as it was in the moment. Standing inside one of their larger chambers, the first thing that happens is awareness of utter silence, which is not something we experience in nature. The next thing that happens is, in the absence of other sounds, you become aware of your heart beat, not the feeling or vibration of your heart beat but the sound of it. Like listening through a stethoscope, you can hear valve flaps opening and closing. That is followed closely by what I can only describe as the sound of blood moving through veins. A sound I had never heard before, and don’t care to again. Because sound is part and parcel of the human experience, when levels are reduced to absolute minimums, our brains seek out the familiar. A sound, any sound to fill the void left by total silence. And your own body is the only thing producing sound inside an anechoic chamber.
If someone is in the chamber with you standing within arm’s reach, when they speak, the experience is even weirder than the sounds of your own body. Their voice seems to fall short of your ears, oddly dropping to the floor. Like witnessing a bizarre special effect in a movie, it’s surreal and unnatural. Your eyes see their mouth moving but the output level and sound they make is totally foreign. You strain for a normal sonic experience just trying to communicate with someone standing right in front of you. It’s almost like a trip to another dimension, one your eyes see but your ears tell you can’t be happening. It is, without a doubt the strangest physical and psychological experience I’ve ever had. Peyote and LSD have nothing on this! Those sonic experiences cannot be duplicated elsewhere. To call it eerie, creepy, uncanny or unnerving doesn’t do it justice. The guys at Electro Voice had a standing joke about making someone crazy in less than an hour. Simply lock them in an anechoic chamber and leave them to listen to themselves, they won’t survive for long. And I believe it.