Burmester’s Porsche Taycan Turbo Cross Turismo

Over the years, the car interior has moved from one of the worst places to experience good sound to one of the best. Once again, DSP has played a major role in this, creating a digitally controlled environment to compensate for all those pesky glass surfaces you need in a car for trivial things like seeing where you are going and oncoming traffic. But it also helps that forward-thinking car designers are now working in harmony with audio engineers to make the interior of a car a more audio-designed area. This takes advantage of the predictability of a car’s interior; you know the volume of the listening space almost down to the square centimetre, the number and position of listeners is extremely predictable and even road noise can be compensated for in this context. Granted, no one wants to completely rid themselves of road noise (you might want to be able to hear that truck-driver’s horn blaring at you in an emergency), and the concentration required of the driver should detract from a fully immersive listening experience… for them at least.

All of which we know well, and none of which prepares you for just how far the audio system in the Taycan has come over the years. In fairness, the Porsche in-car experience of old was pretty good to begin with, but it was competing with a lot of engine noise and many of us in the audio press can remember sitting in a car with the late Dieter Burmester playing music at ear-splitting levels with truly gut-punching bass. That powerful experience can still be realised within the Taycan, but the years of co-development from both Porsche and Burmester and the reduction of engine noise from loud exhaust to space-ship like whirring means there is so much more on tap.

More refined

This is a more refined, more integrated experience now. It’s very much in line with the changes to the car itself (in the widest context). The user experience is now far more geared toward interaction with your music both in car and in the smartphone that we all have. It’s also even more geared toward the individual user experience. Where this has changed over previous models is that combination of improved DSP and better driver placement within the environment means the jump from when the DSP was directed at your seat in the car is not so marked. Yes, the ultimate experience is tailoring the sound to a specific seat in the cabin, but when that tailoring is set broader (or even when it’s tailored to someone else in the car) the sonic experience is still excellent.

In the past, there were always caveats and excuses why in-car does ‘almost’ everything the home audio system can muster. Now, those caveats stop at ‘well, it won’t play LPs!’ The experience is not dissimilar from the home listening experience now, just with more customisation to suit your listening style.

The phone connection is more seamless than ever too. Listeners can cast to the system with ease and the performance is good enough to be contingent upon the source rather than the system. Listeners are presented with a stereo stage that can be shaped but typically sits slightly in front of them, with excellent central presence and articulation. This is surprisingly precise too; not quite the soundfield generated by carefully placed electrostatics in a well-maintained listening room, but an order of magnitude better than the amorphous blob of sound that drenches the listener that used to be the best you could get from an in-car experience of just a few years ago.