Boffins

kind of thing, very stealth. But then you see a little sign it says Harmon Cardon, and you step inside and you're like, Oh, Harmon Cardon manufacturers of high end audio systems, home to JBL Infinity, Banganolfsson, Oh and a brand called Mark Levins and their flagship product one of the most serious names of all for true audiophiles. Imagine long corridors, feel with ideas for speakers, prototype speakers, random components, things that make you feel like you're at Los Alamos,

in the middle of the Manhattan Project. And deep inside Harmon Cardon is a place called the John Urgel Theater. Plush, dark, hushed, everything in soft sound, absorbent fabric. All right, I'm going to give you a little about what we have in this room. We have a total of I think thirty three loudspeakers in this room. It's a full immersive experience. I think we're talking about probably half a million dollars

worth of equipment. We're going to do immersive as good as it yet sound wise, this is probably an overkill. It's more than as good as it gets. Yes, Yes, you basically ruined every listening experience I'm going to have after this. Yes you're listening to go and see from Lexus and Pushkin Industries, our podcast about all things obsessively

and perfectionistically Lexus. I'm Malcolm Godwell. In this episode, we're going to talk about the sound system on the Lexus LS and why it sounds so amazing because it does. Lexus loaned my producer Jacob Smith, and me and LUs for a few days, and we proceeded to drive it the length of La County in violation of as many known traffic laws as possible, and every time we cranked the music, all we could think of was WHOA why does this sound like no other car stereo we have

ever cranked before. So we had to go to the source, the company that makes the sound systems for Lexus cars, Harmon's Mark Levinson, to get some answers and too geekap if you've been listening to this series, you'll know that the inner workings of cars are a lot more complex than people think they are. But car stereos I had no idea. It may take me more than one episode to get to the bottom of this one. Does this room have a name? Yes, it's called the MLL, says

we're multi Channel Listening Lab. Okay, the multi Channel Listening Lab, a room just as ridiculously tricked out as the John Urgell Theater, where the people up Mark Levinson put us through a drill so hilariously complicated that I can't even Basically, we were played a song on a series of different sets of twenty thousand dollars speakers, all arrayed on a

complex trolley system. They're swapped out behind a black curtain, and after each playback, the audio geeks asked us which version we thought was better, when in fact all were equally absurdly ridiculously amazing. It's they were taunting us with how good their sound was. So let's start with speaker A. It could happen to you by Dinah Crawl, Hide your

heart from sight, Lock your dreams at night. It could happen to be Hide your Heart from Sight, lock your dreams at night, it could happen to all right, so we're so good. Yeah, First of all, all of them are so many orders of magnitude better than any sound I've ever heard that. I well, you're right about that, and you will see why. I mean, when we lift up the curtain, you will see why you said. I

want to say, I like be the best. The Mark Levinson of the Mark Levinson brand, was and is a jazz trumpeter who's played with Sonny Rollins and stand Getz, John Coltrane, Chick Career, and Keith Jared. In the nineteen seventies, he founded a high end audio company which ended up being acquired by Harmon Carton. Levinson's Mother's name was Hurts.

Her uncle was the great German physicist Heinrich Hurts, who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, which is why the unit of sound frequency to this day is called Hurts. The point is Mark Levinson has some serious sound pedigree. Mark Levinson components are at the highest of the high end, tens of thousands of dollars. And there was a story that it kind of I think might be folklore, because

no one can really confirm this. There's a great bit of British slang for someone who has mastered an incredibly arcane subject. Boffin, I'm quizzing two of the senior Mark Levinson's sound. Boffin's first up, Jonathan Pierce John is very smooth, very California. The story that I've heard time and time again is mister Mark Levinson refused to allow a company to take his brand into a vehicle right because the

vehicle is not a good environment for acoustics. These are people who construct elaborate listening rooms with thirty three speakers and components where cost is no object. Now someone comes to them and says, would you shrink all that down and put it in a car? I mean, that's like asking Morimoto to do airline food. Wait, so I'm just I'm just trying to capture Mark Levinson's angst when presented

with a car manufacturer. So he's someone's basically comes to him and says, you've got to shrink it all down, stuff it inside a car cabin at a fraction of the price, and make it sound good. Yes, and then you have to add two more things which are crazy. One has to be automotive grade. That's the second buffin bread Home chiming in Brads from Michigan Bushy Beard. He's in the metal and he's a serious car guy. So this room is always going to stay pretty much in

the same temperature. When we test an automotive realm, you've got to go down to negative eighty five C all the way up to potentially eighty five C. So you want to make sure that the amp, the hardware, everything absorbs through. All of that tell me about I hadn't

thought about temperature before. So what happens at very low and very high temperatures to a stands to a sound system if it's not been properly prepared for that Sure, So when non automotive speaker, if you put it into a car park, the car in Arizona in the desert, not to pick on the state, just temperature and climate. You might measure on the dash one hundred and fifty

degrees fahrenheit. Well, that means the components that you built us with have to withstand one hundred and fifty degrees without changing shape, and the talances are so tight that they can't even start to melt or move any Their expansion has to be measured tight enough. So that that is not contacting. Speakers have copper wire. Copper expands in the heat, shrinks in the cold. If your car is sitting outside in that Arizona sun, your speaker is going

to get all messed up. So an automotive, we have to make sure that as that grows or shrinks with temperature, it's not shrinking and contracting and breaking or expanding and then sticking to the walls of what we're trying to hit. You basically have to start from the ground up. You have to rethink the construction of the speaker itself. Then there's weight. A high end Levens and speaker can weigh as much as one hundred and fifty pounds. A serious

Levenson amplifier weighs over one hundred pounds. Some people might want two hundred and fifty pounds of sound equipment blasting in their car, but not many. But wait, approach. Give me a rough bull pat. If I took all of the stereo components in an lys and put them on a scale, what am I talking about? Very roughly? Very roughly, I'll give you very rough if anybody else can correct me. But it's well under twenty pounds. I would say, including

the sub wilfer and enclosure, the amplifier speakers. Yeah, probably right around fifteen twenty pounds at most. They must give you a cost constraint too, Yes, can you tell me what it is? I don't think so, I mean, but we can guess. If you didn't rain in the audio files up Mark Levinson, lexuses would cost three hundred thousand dollars. They would become the equivalent of a massive, hushed sound

stage floating down the road. We just did three episodes on the engine note of the Lexus Elsie sports car. A car is not supposed to be a sound stage. So of course Mark Levinson said no to every car company that approached them. But then Lexus came call, and the boffins said, well, if there was ever a time to say yes, this is it, because these people are

crazy perfectionists like us. I don't need to remind you that Lexus is the company where their master level driver Osakisan, spent two years convincing the engineers back of Toyota City to tilt the steering wheel on the LC forward two degrees.

Lexis were the windows on the LS slow imperceptibly as they reach their Apex, American boffins meet Japanese boffins, and besides, sooner or later, even the world's most dedicated audio file has to face up to the reality that most people do not listen to music in half a million dollars sound rooms in their basement. They listen in their cars, for better or worse. For all I know, you're listening

to this in your car. So if you have a company devoted did better ways of listening to music, you kind of have to say yes eventually to the car, which is why we ended up in Northridge. Here is the car stereo problem at its most basic. So when acoustic energy comes off of a speaker, it obviously doesn't just hit our ears. It hits everything else in the room. This is Levinson's John Pierce again. And if it's absorbed into carpet or absorbed into treatment in the wall, it

isn't stuck inside of that material. It doesn't then come to your ears in the same manner. But bouncing off a hard surface as dry wall, hardwood, floors, even certain pictures on the wall glass that's going to cause reflections. Reflections are what happens to sound in any enclosed space in a space like the Urgel Theater. You can manage those reflections perfectly. The walls are made of soft absorbent material,

the speakers are placed evenly. Everything is set up so that the sound reflects and reverberates exactly the way people at Levinson wanted it to be reflected and reverse berated. But a car is about as far from the Urgle Theater as is humanly possible. I mean, duh. It moves, but also it's a lot of metal and glass. It has an engine, a thing that makes its own noise in vibration, tires over pavement, and sometimes it has one person inside, and sometimes it has four or five people inside.

It's a reflection nightmare, and you can't solve that just by turning up the volume. So the sheet metal in a car is becoming thinner to make vehicles more efficient. This is brad. When it's thinner, they move more so as we have a speaker in there, such as adorable for vibrating a lot. Now the sheet metal can buzz and it can almost start to sound like a steel drum. We're going to start hearing these what we call BSR in the industry. Buzz, squeak and rattles that come out

of the interior or exterior of the car. Brad got his start in the industry putting massive sound systems in muscle cars driven. I'm going to guess by young men Jonathan Loos to make fun of me because I started in the aftermarket world, and I was the guy from a flea market with the forty three gigawatt amplifier and sixty three thousand subwoffers in the back, and my poor forward Escort didn't really survive what I did to it, So that was a BSR nightmare. I shook the absolute

living daylights out of that car. In the act of putting in this high powered sound system, you created so much additional vibration and such in the car that it obscured the music of the sound obscured, as a polite way to put how bad it was. I could only hear bass. But I had moved into then sound quality competition, where the goal was to be the loudest that you could.

And at that point you're designing a system to play a single frequency, a base frequency, and that gets challenging because you can dent your roof, the roof panel will start to flex and you can actually start to get indentations in the sheet metal. You know, there's all sorts of crazy stories when it gets into that. Yeah, you can do that just with a high powered sound system

instead of a guy. Yeah. If you look at the people doing the intense sound competitions, they actually are pouring concrete in the doors to try to keep that sound and integrity in there because the sound pressure is so hard that it'll move these panels. They have external clamps on doors to keep the door shut, to keep the interior sealed, like replace the glass with bulletproof glass, because you can get to a point where you can overdrive

the stability of that. It's pretty intense. Wow. This is an extreme example, of course, but you see the problem. And it's not any different for parents driving minivans who want to listen to the soundtrack from Frozen. The automobile is inherently hostile to good sound. You can put the best set of speakers you want inside a car, but that's not going to solve your problem. Your problem is not the equipment, it's the room you're playing it in.

Brad gave us a simple demonstration. So what I've done is taken a well recorded song, then applied what it would sound like for the uncute speed here to be in there, and then play the reference, which would be back to how it should sound. This isn't doped in any way. This is actually how much power we have in the vehicle. Sounds good. Yeah, this is a pop song played to a high end Mark Levinson speaker that Brad has just randomly placed inside a car so we

can hear. We're missing a lot of what should be there. There's a lot of imbalances that really high trouble. You still hear that sparkle at the top of the symbol, but the mid range is really dulled. Right, So back to reference so that you guys don't leave with a better taste in your range changes. So we just understand the reference was the way the song was intended to be played in an ideal sound environment. The first one was if you simply played it through a set of

anyone's car speakers, your car speakers. Before you do, how do you get the first Where did the first one exactly come from? Sure? So what I did was I took one of our speakers, we put it into a vehicle, and without any adjustments made, we just measured it from both seating positions in the car that first recording. The muddy sound, the dull mid range. That's what I've been hearing in every car I've ever driven, and I'm going to guess it's very close to what you here as well.

That's what I've always believed a car stereo sounded like. But that was before Jacob and I cruised the freeways of Los Angeles in a tricked out Lexus LS with the music blasting. Next week, we're gonna sit down inside our Lexus with the boffins at Mark Levinson and figure out how they did it. One last thing. At Levinson, they have a series of what are called an echoic rooms, which are rooms designed to have no sound, reverberations or reflection,

completely dead rooms, perfect for testing new equipment. They took us in one. Yeah, doesn't some sound. We're not getting locked in here. They're just like, oh no, no, they'll be pure out there. Unless they hate us, they should let us out like a horror movie. Yeah. We stood on a platform in a small square room. Above, around and below us were pyramid shaped wedges of something yellow and soft wrapped in mesh. Dozens of them. There was no harm, no echo, nothing, Every single iota of sound

was soaked up by the yellow wedges. Yeah, can we have can we have like thirty seconds of sounds? Because I wanted, I'll write everyone listening silence. We almost we're almost never in Think about it. It's unnatural, completely unnatural. Nothing in nature exists like this, whatsoever. Yeah, it sounds like hears you're plugged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think if you stay in here long enough, your brain would probably go crazy, just just a little bit. The place

was creepy. This is all like styrophone. It's fiberglass, fiber, it's just sucking up everybody sucks up everything. Absolutely, But there's enough metal in here to give you a little bit more ambiance. The one upstairs doesn't have that. Yeah. You if you put someone in here like an under insultary confinement, they would lose their mind. They would absolutely. It would be a very cruel and unusual twicture for sure. Yes, what is this? Where you where you where you discipline

wayward employees? Of Then I thought about it. It's not where they send wayward employees. I think the end of cook rooms are where the boffins go and scream when the stress of making a decent sounding car system proves too overwhelming. If a boffin screams in an anachoic room, does it make a sound? Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily Rostek and Carl Nigliari, Edited

by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes special thanks to Jacob Weisberg had a Fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, engineers and designers who participated in our recordings. Go and See is a production of Lexus and Pushkin Industries. I'm Mountain Gradlin