Pushkin. This podcast began with me remembering when I had Alexis ten years or so ago. I liked it, but also thought naively that it was like a German car, only from Japan. And then I went to Japan and realized, oh no, these cars are Japanese. And once you realize that, you can sit in one and be driven in one, even blindfolded, and know just where you are, even down to the sound system. You know, if I put you, if I blindfolded you, and I put you in an AA seven series, an S S class and an LS
and I said, tell me turn on music. I said, can you? Can you tell me when you're in the LS? Could you? I met Mark levin Sin's operations outside of Los Angeles. This is the place where Alexis sound System was created. Brett Home is one of the systems designers. And just as I thought, he could ide the car blindfolded, the LA specifically, guess what would be the cube? In other words, what song would he use to be absolutely sure he was sitting in Alexis. So I have worked
with the car for years. Yeah, so when I'm checking, like I've listened to probably twenty different cars, I know where on certain songs I play things should be I know that. Would you priss? You could take one song into reach you do all four cars? What's the song going to set this up? Now? I'm right? I want I want the diagnostic song. So I want what's the
sign that helps you distinguish between those four systems? The best answer actually, yeah, cool, Just the one that will help you identify the elis with one hundred percent certainty from Alexis and Pushkin Industries. This is go and see our podcast about what makes Alexis Alexis. This is our
final episode, number six out of six. We have explored why the windows on the LS slow as they reach their apex, why the LC sports car accelerates in perfect intervals, what it takes to make an engine sound amazing, and countless other things, all in service of something I have to admit I did not fully appreciate until I went to Japan, which is that behind even the simplest details lies a mountain of thought and research and experimentation, expertise
in service not just of the machine itself, in service of the driver. So, in the Sonic Temple of Mark Levinson, I asked Brad for his signature song, because by this point, at the end of my Lexus immersion, I know he has one. Okay, so the song that I would use just hit me. It's a recording of Sanctus. I forget the composer. I'm sorry. It's classical. There's two choirs. There's a female and a male choir on the stage, and there's a pipe organ that plays down to twenty eight
ish hurts. So what's going to exercise low frequency extension that has to be even throughout the choirs are separated. You still need the reverb. But when you go into three D, the roof of that car seems to almost kind of disappear a little bit. And that experience was phenomenal for me. And so when I go to these different manufacturers, ours isn't overdone to be like, look at
our technology. It's the next level of polish to deliver reference. Yeah, so you play that song Sanctus in an LS it is qualitatively different from the way it would sounded the other automobiles and you would be able to pick it out. Yes,
trust me, we will play some Sanctus. When we were in Japan just a few weeks earlier, my producers Jacob Smith and Carlie Migliori went to one of the crown jewels of the Lexus operation, the driving simulator, And I want to talk about the simulator just for a moment, to make a point about perfectionism, about what perfectionism looks like.
The Higashi facility is high security. You check in in an unassuming office building, hand over your phones and computers, then take a van up a long and winding road past the manufactured strip of ice Toyota uses for bad weather testing. You come to a second building in gray glass, up a flight of stairs, and then oh wow, this is it. I mean it looks like something for like spaceflight testing. Personally very comfortable concept. Yes, imagine a white
dome fifteen to twenty feet high. The floor is a massive turntable and in the middle, on a set of tracks is a car alexis LS. Of course, when you quote unquote drive in this simulator, it's meant to feel incredibly real, like you're actually driving down the roads projected on the dome. The car can tilt, actually tilt, turn speed up. The projector creates a virtual reality version of the road and passing scenery. There's road noise. I don't
even want to know what a gadget like this costs. Basically, take the kid who drives those risk car video games at the mall, give him a couple hundred million dollars when he grows up, and this is what you get. First, we're are all going to go into the unit. So we're going fifty six kilometers an hour driving straight towards Mountain Fuji. We just learned write through a van. The point of the simulator is that it records everything the driver does in there, every move, every decision, and your
vital signs too, how fast your heart is racing. Everything is all recorded in real time and relayed to the control room where teams of engineers sit behind computer screens and try to make sense of it. Like your eyes, what exactly are you looking at? Yeah, so this white circle is tracking my eyeline. What are those multi colors? So that's your eye side? Yeah, that's the end. The oval is my face. Yes. I have two thoughts about the simulator. First, can you build a car without a
multimillion dollars simulator? Course you can, people did for years. The simulator isn't really about the car, It's about the driver, or to put it more precisely. It's not really about making better cars, it's about making better drivers. This came up again and again at our time with Lexus, whether we were discussing engines or windows or suspension systems. We think of the engineer as someone obsessed with the object, with its design and operation and manufacture, and not the
user of the object. But in so many cases with Lexus it was the other way round. I mean, what was the point of putting Jacob in that multimillion dollar contraption to learn about Jacob? To figure out how can we study him under controlled circumstances so the car can help make him into a better driver. All right, we got a pedestrian. I'm the word. Everyone straight, Let's see beautiful lady. Yes for me? Oh, the beautiful lady is a distraction. You looked at her. Got to be aware
of what's around you. You cannot look. Oh, oh my goodness. Oh a little kid just fell should I I don't trust this person? Yeah? Thank you? Defensive driving, right, So I didn't kill anyone, No, almost that little kids that I saw that kid coming from. How did you do? Was he good? Good driver? Very? Thank you? Ye? Maybe some some people, um, HiT's a with the studio. Yeah, well,
HiT's a bike. Lexus has run thousands of people through that simulator, recorded and analyzed oceans of data, created an unimaginably finely grained portrait of what drivers do and how they behave. Can you make a car without that data? Sure? But not, Alexis. This is what perfectionism is, isn't it? The ability to focus on more than the object in question and the commitment to something beyond what is merely sufficient. Which brings us back to Mark Levinson and Brad Hom's
signature song. What was Brad's motivation? I'm pretty sure that at the core he didn't have some elaborate technical agenda. Wait, I want to go back to something. Actually, when you're talking about that song Sanctis, you were saying, if the sensation of the roof being lifted off, what did you mean by that? So, if your eyes are closed, yeah, and you're in the church that it was recorded in and you're just sitting there, you hear the reverb, you can tell that this is a huge sense of space
in a car. You don't get that often because the top of the car is sound absorbing. So for us to reproduce that it's kind of this concept with your eyes closed of no, there's a roof to the car. It's right here. I can sense that. And then all of a sudden their sound from about me and it's echoing, and I've got the sense of space above me. And so that's kind of like the tearing the roof off, where in a non George Clinton p Fund kind of way, what you're doing is feeling that you're getting this extra
space in a vehicle that's not actually there. Lay see. So what the LS manages to do, the reason you picked that song is because what the LS has managed to do is to give you the sensation of listening to it in a church. It gives you where you
were originally recorded, where that song was. But it also tests the four attributes that Jonathan was talking about, spectral e going from twenty eight hurts on an organ note which is very deep, all the way up to the twenty k that we're listening to, from spatial having the understanding of where everything is dynamics. It starts off very quiet, just choir, but then it moves to the full orchestra and that gets builds and builds, and the passion that
comes out of that. For me, I love getting to this. It's a minute and a half clip that I use and by the end of it, everybody's in and I'm just like, you know, it's an amazing experience when it happens correctly. Like I said, we're going to place him Sanctus. At the end of our day at Mark Levinson, Jacob, Brad and I went into the parking lot. Lexus had loaned us an LS for a few days, which we had parked outside, and we wanted Brad to explain how
he solved the problem of its sound system. So right off the bat we have you could see this stoor speaker here that's going to be our main wolfer and that plays a lot of upper base and lower mid range for us. We then pair that with a mid range. As I explained in the room, you can hear low frequency and you can put that almost anywhere in the car physically to help out. So in this case we're using low frequency in the corners because then we get loading in the car, so we can actually maximize the
output low frequencies. Bass notes can come from virtually anywhere. Boom boom. You have a lot of freedom and where you put that in a car, but not high frequency sounds. Those are directional. If you want to properly hear someone's trends, senden soprano, it has to be aimed directly at your ear. That's what's so hard about setting up a car stereo. You need to tweeter up high. But up high in
a car is all roof pillars in glass. Then we put our mid range in trouble together up across the instrument panel, so that we have left, center and right in a nice array like you'd see in a room. Speakers across the front of the dashboard. Then another set in the passenger door. So I'll open the rear door and what you'll see is the farthest forward upper corner of this door panel. Brad talked us through every speaker
in the car. Where's the subwoffer? So the subwoffer is actually right in the center of the package tray here on the rear shelf. Yeah, it's packaged underneath this grow. Yeah. And then there's surround speakers that are on either side. Oh, so this whole back part here is all speaker here, there's five speakers, three locations in the back. Yesd yeah, he popped open the trunk or speakers. So this car has how many speakers in total? Twenty three? Twenty three?
Twenty three? Do you really need twenty three? Well, if you want the roof to come off while Sanctus is playing, Yes, you do, and you need them all in exactly the right place, tuned exactly the right way. And in order to do that, you have to design the sound system at the same time as you design the car itself. You can't tack it on afterwards. When did Brad and his colleagues start working on the LS stereo five years before the car came out? Great, hul we listeners to music? Yeah,
if you want to jump in the driver's seat. Brad sat in the passenger seat and configured the settings on the sound system for three D. If it's too loud for you, I apologize, okay, So I'll start the track over and now we're going to go three D. Before you go into that, what does three D mean? So it means three dimensional surround sound. So these speakers that are above your face in the location, these are going to turn on and give you the reverb that that
room should have. And this is where I was talking about the room coming or the roof being peeled off. Yeah, this is the technology that allows that. So we got a little more that allows you to know with your if your eyes would close, it's your nanlos. So let's switch over to an so you could tell him that dynamics part as it goes from the quiet and the builds, say I'm going to car. The roof came off, just like Brad said it would. Brad had another meaning to
go to, but we just wanted to stall him. He had a thumb drive in his hand, loaded up with a number of songs. It couldn't all be classical, couldn't What else could he play for us? We were thinking of the long drive back. He wouldn't do to drive down Sunset Boulevard blasting a sixteenth century him. I do have a polar opposite, I throw on. I kind of
anticipated such a question, so let's see, I forget. I just had a couple of seconds to put on here, so instead of hip hop, just something Yeah, so I've got heavy metal, Okay, oh yay metal day metal. Absolutely, So we talked about dynamics. This piece starts off with kind of a electrified flamenco style and then the whole band comes in and rips her round off, and if
you don't jump in your seat, I'll be impressed. Six episodes, A long trip to Japan, a simulator, a day at the track, deep dives with some of the world's best automobile engineers. And there we were at the end listening to Lamb of God at very high volume in a parking lot in the valley, in order to discover that Lexis makes perfect things for everyone, even metal heads. Go
and See. We went and we saw. Let me point this out, even though it's a metal you'll it's far pand but then center vocal I'll shut so you can hear world. Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily Rosteck and Carl Migliori, edited by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, chief
engineers and designers who participated in our recordings. Also thank you too, Jess Merrill, Mary Jane Kroll, Amanda Abrams, Joel Dons, Tyler, dupay, Craig Crawford, and Riley Go and See is a production of Lexis and Pushkin Industries him Mountain Glaco