I've often thought that a car is the ideal place for multichannel music. Headphones have to fake it because they are attached to your head, and surround systems in the home are usually pointed at a TV. If you look in any other direction the effect is broken.
But in a car you are guaranteed to be facing forwards all the time. The "rear" speakers will always be behind you.
Yeah, when I'm parked and enjoying some music, that's great.
When I'm driving, I want my ears to alert me to spatial happenings where I can't see them. I force the audio to the front speakers only, specifically to prevent it from sounding too "real". I also hate it when the music has sirens in it.
So, this is spiffy, but I hope there's a way to turn it off.
This. People are already greatly distracted by phones, music and beverage holders—comforts of the limousine and you still have the responsibility to drive your 2000-4000 lbs vehicle at speed.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. The consequences are drastic, and the bad behaviors creep.
Well if one should judge by general sound quality of few pieces from them I had displeasure to listen to, that's not a praise. Brands costing half produced much better sound.
They know noise cancelling though, at least knew better than most few years ago. It seems other players have caught up on this though
Same here. When I see these ads (x speakers, Dolby whatever for cars) I always think that's for people without a decent home. I use cars to drive and listen to hifi at home ...
Ugh why always this anti-everything sentiment on HN. I'll take nice sound in my car, thank you. I'm sure you'll still be able to drive your car, and listen to music at home, so don't worry...
It's not an "anti-everything" sentiment, it's based on the idea that drivers should concentrate primarily on driving and watching other traffic. Especially in cities. And road noise isn't the best "add-on" for hifi, or is it?
Last but not least: I prefer to not paying for stuff that I don't need, but car hifi is one of the (many) "features" you cannot opt-out easily.
No car manufacturer I know is giving away premium hifi in their car. Specifically for Mercedes, the Burmester "premium" sound systems cost thousands of dollars.
Why is Apple spending hundreds of millions of dollars advertising Apple Music on places like the upcoming Super Bowl when the streaming service is running on such shaky ground? They need to rewrite the entire backend of the service but for some reason, they don't allocate resources to do so. If we compare it to Spotify, everything loads slower and the search fuction is awful.
I've had the same complaint about Spotify search, sometimes nothing will be returned from my search, despite me having put in the name of the song I know exists on the platform.
It has Windows 7 Media Player vibes but honestly I'm tired of everything being flat so if the interface structure is designed right, has consistency and is snappy, I won't hate it.
That said, I'm skeptical that it's designed well because there's a menu for climate control. These things should have physical buttons that blend with the digital UI.
In my experience, the majority of tracks that are "mastered for spatial audio" sound absolutely terrible when played on actual surround speakers. Most of the sound is on the center and the two front channels, it's probably similar to the stereo mix except with vocals on the center. The other channels get a slight reverb that sounds completely automatically generated.
This sounds okay when mixed back down to stereo for headphones; there's a certain airiness that can be pleasing, but that's it.
In an expensive Mercedes, I'd expect proper spatial audio with separate speakers for separate channels and it to sound maybe not quite as bad as in a home theater setting, but nearly.
Unless these masters get significantly better I'll just stick to the stereo mix duplicated on other channels. The one exception to the rule above that I've experienced was some song by Billie Eilish. I didn't enjoy the music, but the mastering was excellent: they took care to actually move the location of sounds around that didn't interfer with the music.
An absolute coup that Apple might be able to pull off is if they're able to replace control electronics for Daimler with their A-Series (Or other custom ASIC) chips.
When Sandy Munroe tore down the Tesla Model 3, a remark he made hit hard. That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.
That's not a compliment to Tesla alone, that's a criticism of the state of the art in the car industry where miniaturization has not kept pace with the leading edge phone generations that Apple spits out every year.
Imagine that, a common platform that Apple could upsell to ALL vehicle manufacturers with custom enterprise apps written by the companies themselves for vehicle electronics.
> That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.
Part of this is that a car contains quite a lot of electronics (there are a lot of things to control!), but cars are super cost sensitive. That pretty much means the car industry is barred from using any remotely modern tech, because they need to be buying CPU's and microprocessors that are in the $1 range, not the $100 range.
Obviously, the other half of it is just that the car industry is now very conservative with designs - today a big innovation is something like having an app, whereas back in the 60's, a big innovation would be adding a jet engine or making a flying car.
They recently showed a video of some vaporware where their car software powers every screen in a car, including the speedo and stuff like that. So they might be thinking along the same lines.
Why do you consider it vaporware? It's not like Apple is some sort of Nikola that uses smokes and mirrors to obfuscate its abilities, CarPlay is in millions of cars and will only grow as people trade in older cars.
I wasn’t really trying to imply anything to be honest, I just consider all demos vapourware until they ship. I would say that Apple aren’t immune, eg with AirPower - that demo looked at least as real as the car one. But I do agree that Apple tend to ship their stuff and probably will ship something like what they demoed.
The cars will presumably fallback to native clusters when the phone stops responding. It’s still too early to tell though, but they are a very safety conscious company so I assume that people have thought about contingencies before making themselves liable.
At the least it likely won’t be worse than the multitude of cars that have moved to digital clusters anyway and may freeze themselves.
The claim of Carplay not working without Siri is also incorrect. A quick Google search shows you can disable Siri but will be limited in what you can do https://stereoupgrade.com/how-to-use-carplay-without-siri/ since the goal is hands free use.
Lastly most newer iPhones do on device Siri processing for common commands so it’s not really a privacy issue.
2. Siri is activated by user input (holding a button / pressing a button in-car) with a side feature for hot mic (hey siri) that’s disabled by default
3. Maybe there’s car implementation solely driven by Siri? Hondas is touch screen and Mazda is button/knob based (and touch screen but only when idle).
I think it's more important that we have tried and tested technology in safety critical devices than be experimented on at the bleeding edge.
Imagine a vehicle that was just a vehicle and not another platform to upsell shit on until the vendors get fed up with it because that's what you're asking for.
Absolutely 100% in the case of vehicles, less is more. Less intelligence, less nondeterminism and definitely less space age.
It would be pretty nice for a group call to have each voice from a different direction...
It would also be nice for a callers voice and other sounds in the call, like for example music or background sound, to be audibly separated - the fact they aren't separated is part of what makes background sounds on voice calls so annoying compared to say background sounds when talking to someone on the street..
I have an odd but carefully considered opposition to this:
We process speech differently depending on where it comes from, and so someone could be given an “edge” by coming from a specific “spot” while others could be downplayed by being placed in a “lesser spot”.
I know it sounds completely out there, but I got this awareness years ago from a scientific study (what to even look up to find it again I don’t know. Hopefully a fellow HN user knows what I’m talking about and can cite) and I have noticed the effect is actually quite drastic once you know what to look for.
To a lesser extent: Clubhouse brought in spatial audio and it caused more chaos because of the way it was implemented: Some speakers were behind others which made their voices noticeably louder, and because multiple speakers could talk at once and be understood there was less respect for the person who’s turn it was. (Before that if someone talked over it just became an unintelligible clump of sound and moderators would bring things back to the single speaker)
For anyone who has ever worked in a conference center, you will know that by adjusting microphone volumes up and down just a little, you can have a big impact on the outcome of any on-stage debate.
Specifically, if someone thinks they're being talked over and their voice drowned out, they'll normally stop speaking. By making one person's voice sound louder to the other, you determine which person will stop speaking when both start to say something at the same time.
In a car I assume all distractions are possible dangers and I don't want to confuse background noise in the call for actual dangers on the road. Also, I do not want to visualise the call, as that will be a major distraction from driving. To be fair, driving and having a group call is a bad idea in itself.
I think there's two questions here -- one for audio processing, and one for communications.
In terms of audio, the speaker locations in the car for a specific model are all fixed and can be known. So it seems like Spotify could probably add it if they had not only all of that speaker data, but also acoustic modeling to see how each speaker's frequency sweep was transmitted and reflected to each passenger's ears. So they'd want to get their hands on an actual car and spend a lot of time making a lot of microphone measurements inside of dummy ears. And then the spatial audio algorithms aren't trivial to write, but that kind of thing has been around for a while now so it's definitely doable.
But as for communicating that sound to the car -- the problem is that there are 31 speakers requiring 31 sound channels, and you certainly can't play that over Bluetooth. So I assume there has to be some custom audio stream format happening here over CarPlay? That's where the vertical integration is going to come into play. I also can't help but wonder if the Mercedes come with a dedicated audio-processing chip to handle it all. Because while a phone's chip is definitely capable enough to calculate 31 streams, I'm not sure if a Lightning port has enough bandwidth to output that uncompressed, and I'm also not sure if it would slow down the phone enough to affect the performance of other apps like Maps. So you'd probably want the phone to just output the compressed 5.1 stream, and have the car do all the fancy spatial audio processing.
In any case, if this works like AirPods, the Spotify stereo audio stream will be "spatialized" so it'll work just fine. It will be inferred stereo spatial rather than 5.1 mastered, but that's still awfully effective. And a group audio call could similarly be spatialized from a stereo stream that merely panned participants left-to-right.
The simple description of how this likely works is:
- the tracks are encoded with Dolby atmos that allows encoding positional data for sources. These don’t match up to channels on an audio system in anyway because it gives them flexibility
- the audio apps simply provide the atmos encoded stream which is pulled into the cars own audio system. The audio app needs no knowledge of the target playback device.
- the cars audio system knows where the speakers are so can then playback sounds on each relative to where the atmos sources are positioned.
- this isn’t done over Bluetooth. In this case the Apple Music app is running natively on the cars MBUC system. If it weren’t native, it would use CarPlay which isn’t using Bluetooth for either its wired or wireless mode.
Good god that UI is such a waste of space with tiny buttons and half the screen used for background mountains. Why are the skip track buttons down next to the home button? What does the plus symbol do? What are the icons on the black bar for? Why does the whole thing look like Windows Vista? The auto industry does not truly understand how to build an interface.
Edit: If I spent that much on a car I would be furious to turn it on and find that interface.
Almost nothing in “spatial audio” is actually mastered for spatial audio. The fake surround filter absolutely destroys stereo mixes, it’s really despicable how this is being pushed.
Well it's mastered for 5.1. True there aren't usually Atmos objects, but sometimes there are, but also there don't usually need to be. Are you taking issue with "5.1" being called spatial?
I couldn't disagree more about the "fake surround filter" though -- I love surround sound on my AirPods Pro, even when "spatialized" from stereo. It simply makes music and movies/TV so much clearer to listen to. Everything becomes more distinct and intelligible.
I understand how people rail against the "purity" of the original stereo mix's "intentions", but the reality is that when you listen to music on speakers, the amount of reflection and absorption in any room is already destroying that "purity". Spatial audio filters aren't "destroying" the audio anymore than speakers in a room already do -- the difference is that they're increasing clarity rather than muddying it all up.
I can't ever imagine going back to listening to flat stereo again, where the sound on headphones feels stuck inside of my skull instead of coming from outside.
Headphone fatigue is a real thing, coming from the fact that our brains aren't meant to process audio without all of the associated spatial cues. (Sound isn't supposed to feel like it's emanating from inside our skulls.) Modern surround filters do an awfully good job at restoring those cues. No more headphone fatigue.
Not the parent, but find myself agreeing with both of you, in a way. No matter if it's 5.1 or "proper Atmos", those mixes sound fine - or maybe even good, depending on your preferences - on headphones. I also have a fake surround upmix on an audio interface that I occasionally use.
But I almost always detest how these mixes sound on my actual 5.1.2 setup. The surround channels mostly consist of a bit of reverb that adds nothing to the experience in my opinion. In a car where there are physically separate channels, I'm not optimistic for the result.
A properly mixed Binaural sound sounds so good even on Stereo channels, lookup virtual barber shop on youtube, it always gives me goosebumps.
Also afaik tracks are never mixed for stereo/mono. They start as multi channel, if ogg ever gains I think it has multi channel support. It must bring some spatial audio into masses, with smaller downloads and quality streaming.
Also its very good for cinematic audio in videos.
I must be the only person who seems to think Apple's DSP stuff falls into massive uncanny valley (it makes the music feel lifeless and flat and boring). Never mind I don't understand what the point of hearing music from some other point in the digitally manufactured "room" is, it's certainly not what the artist intended.
