Recently, I keep coming across stuff that I have never imagined anyone would consider doing, and one of them is the concept to the left. That is the sketch of Audi's Sound Concept, which comes to make 7.1- and 9.1-channel sound so tiny and unimpressive. I tried counting them myself, but I gave up after the first ten - mind you - Audi seems to be thinking of building a custom surround sound system using no less than 62 speakers.

Sadly, for the likes of you bassheads out there, there's only one subwoofer in the diagram, but then again - this is a car environment. As you might know, in-car space brings many benefits to audio sound systems, as it does bring problems. The benefits would be the completely irregular shape, as compared to parallel walls in home environments that make up for breaking the odd reflections and reverberations, while the problems, paradoxically, are brought by the same thing.

What one needs to do when installing a sound system in a car and wants to have the sound experience as accurate as possible, is to measure each of the driver's parameters, and how it behaves regarding the frequency response in the specific environment. After having all of the data summed up, one should have a (very, very expensive!) microphone that is capable of delivering an accurate readout of all the speakers' response, as to fine tune each of them into creating a uniform soundscape.

Now, just imagine what Audi is trying to do here, by having five tweeters throughout the length of the dash and doors, four woofers in the doors and a surreal number of 52 mid-range drivers that physically surround the seats of the car. This, my friends, just got on my secret list of sound systems that I have to listen to, no matter when, where or how old I will be.


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