Car audio 100 years after it first appeared, car audio now rivals enthusiast hi-fi for sound. Getting this far has been quite a journey. The thrum of tyres on hot tarmac. The wind in your hair. Escape. Freedom. Adventure. That, or perhaps you’re stuck next to a truck in a traffic jam in the city. Wherever you are, you already know that any car journey is made better by a good soundtrack. But car audio is tricky. Most of the rules of hi-fi design go out the window when you’re working in a metal box dotted with speakers just centimetres from the listener’s ear. And that’s before you think about reflections from hard windows, absorption by soft seats, road vibrations, wind noise and extreme, unpredictable changes in climate. Despite all that, we’ve worked out how to do it – and then some. Dynaudio has set new benchmarks in car audio technology, combining our deep knowledge of acoustic design with our expertise in digital sound processing to ensure that what you hear in Volkswagen’s cars is as good as any other hi-fi experience you have. Like everything we do, it’s truly high end. Not that the pioneers of car audio were concerned about the very best sound experience. Their big problem was getting it working. At all. Any sound will do The car audio systems of the early 1920s weren’t built by emerging audio companies. They weren’t made by car manufacturers. They were created by garage enthusiasts and tinkerers who spent their free time working out how to fasten battery-powered radios to their dashboards. To be clear, ‘battery-powered’ here does not mean ‘portable’. Such radios were often huge tins containing hot-running vacuum tubes that demanded high voltages and big, heavy batteries to run. They weren’t installed so much as heaved. From crackly AM radio, through tape and CD, and right up to world-class digital reproduction, we’ve always loved listening to music in our cars. In fact, in-car audio has been around almost as long as the car itself… Development was going on in earnest to find a more appropriate solution. There’s fuzziness in the historical record as to which manufacturer first offered bespoke car radio installs – some say Chevrolet did as far back as 1922, others suggest the first dedicated car radio was 1925’s Airtone 3D – but all agree that the breakthrough came from the US-based Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1930. Its product was the Motorola* Model 5T71, and its greatest achievement was not what it added to car audio, but what it took away. At the time, in-car sound was a mass of static, plagued with interference from other vehicle components. Founder Paul Galvin’s challenge was to isolate his radio’s innards to provide an audio experience free of electrical noise. By all reports he succeeded. What’s more, the Motorola was elegant for the time, with a dash-mounted remote control and speaker and those huge batteries hidden beneath passengers’ feet. What it provided – the ability to drive to the unsullied sounds of Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington on monophonic AM radio – was enough to spark a revolution. ► *Yes, that Motorola – Galvin adopted its product’s name later in the decade. Issue 02 27
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