Burmester’s Porsche Taycan Turbo Cross Turismo

Rhythm is an interesting aside for most in-car audio systems. First, there’s a lot of competition, as much road noise has its own metre and this is perfectly designed to undermine the pace and timing of an in-car system. What’s more, you don’t want too ‘pacy’ an in-car experience, as anyone who wondered where their driving license went after driving along to The Prodigy or Infected Mushroom will attest. You want it ‘rhythmic’ but not too ‘rhythmic’ in car, and the performance of the Burmester system does that well. It has a good rhythm without exaggeration. It’s also energetic and exciting at the treble, natural and lithe in the mid and powerful in the bass. These standards can be shaped slightly to taste but the fundamentals of the system are good regardless of DSP adjustment.

Get ahead of the curve

It’s also worth discussing the changes to the control surfaces, especially if your experience with modern in-car entertainment is a few years behind the curve. The choice of words there is deliberate; where once there was a tiny screen to augment the hard buttons on the centre console, there’s now a curved touchscreen that extends across the length of the front of the cabin. This allows the listener in the passenger seat to have as much control over the in-car entertainment as the driver; more in fact, as the driver’s panels are tuned toward driving for obvious reasons.

In fact, perhaps the only downside to this new user experience is the right foot of the driver. If you are reaching for the touch-panel in front of you as the driver decides to unleash electric mayhem, sheer G-force will pin you into your seat and that outstretched finger will slap you in your own face. A second or two later when you have stopped groaning and swearing, and your sight returns, play with that panel control.

We didn’t spend too long in Burmester’s Porsche Taycan Turbo Cross Turismo, but in a way we didn’t need to. A few seconds on the street shows just how far we’ve come and it makes you think what’s next. As discussed earlier, Dolby Atmos is a likely future inclusion, possibly depending on uptake. My guess beyond that is individual DSP-controlled pseudo anechoic anti-noise ‘privacy chambers’ for the passengers; theoretically, you could have four people in a car listening to four different musical pieces with no bleed-through between them, without need for headphones. I think that’s still some generations of DSP away now, but the level of improvement in performance and just sheer effortless integration that Burmester’s system in the Porsche Taycan suggests anything is possible!

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