UNDER THE SKIN JESSE CROSSE
SOUND QUALITY IS something we may not notice until it’s not so good. Audio system manufacturers, and especially those making high-end systems, have faced difficulties in achieving decent-quality sound inside cars for years. In-car acoustics aren’t great, there are background noises too and the audio system designer has no control over the position, size and objects inside the space.
It may seem as though a shift to electric drivetrains would make their lives easier but actually it doesn’t. UK manufacturer Meridian Audio, which supplies the likes of Land Rover, Jaguar and Kia, has produced a digital processing suite called Intelli-Q, designed to deal with the completely different challenges an EV poses compared with ICE.
According to Meridian’s engineers, one of the challenges in producing quality sound inside a car is less about volume and more about the characteristics and detail of what we hear.
The structure of the sound an engine produces is predictable and can be dealt with using noise cancellation technology. So even if it isn’t quietened down, what Meridian calls “the acoustic environment” can be managed to produce high-quality sound from the audio system. The background noise an engine produces is also good at masking other background sounds such as rattles and noise from the road, transmission and wind.
The sounds produced by an EV are generally random and higher in frequency, making that acoustic environment difficult to manage using traditional active noise cancellation techniques. Intelli-Q is a suite of customised digital signal processing (DSP) technologies designed to tackle that.
By taking data from the car’s communications
