The competition of smart cars has been upgraded from the competition of endurance to the showdown of smart cockpits, and many new power electric vehicle brands have begun to "finely craft", no longer simply compete with those big screens, and create cinema-level enjoyment for users has become the focus. With the idea of building a new energy car, please remember that the car we drive is not a car, it is lonely. Then again, like the Q&A M5, Ideal L9, and NIO ET7 all use a very gimmicky car audio, so will smart cars usher in an "audio" competition?
In the traditional fuel vehicle products, the general high-end models equipped with the audio we are more familiar with, such as B&O, BOSE, Baohua Weijian, the Voice of Berlin, Danner, Harman Kardon, British treasure, etc., these brand audio with the increase in the number of high-end cars at the same time, the assembly volume is also greatly improved, the popularity in the hearts of consumers is also gradually improved. In the face of the era of smart cars, people have a higher standard for audiovisual enjoyment, and traditional brand audio seems to be not valued...
What brand of audio will be used in the new power models?
In response to this, we need to look at it differently. Previously, the new car-making forces will use the brand's audio, such as the Danna audio used by Xiaopeng, the ideal ONE uses the Japanese TEAC, also known as the first audio, and the domestic audio used by the Nio ES6 is the audio produced by Suzhou Shangsheng.
Let's look at the latest models launched by various brands. Xiaopeng P5 does not use brand audio, Weilai all series use Suzhou Shangsheng audio, while ET5, ET7 models mainly play 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos, using 23 speakers, the power reached 1000W.
The M5 adopts HUAWEI SOUND sound system, 4 headrest sound, providing independent personalized control, while HUAWEI SOUND supports 7.1 channel immersive soundstage and active three-way technology, and the theater-level music listening experience is its main feature.
The ideal L9 will use a self-developed audio system, the whole car has 23 speakers, to create 7.3.4 Dolby Atmos stereo sound, external power of 2160W. For this power data many people have no concept, from the current audio power amplifier data of all models, the ideal L9 set of audio power amplifier data is in the third place level of all models on the market.
What are the criteria for judging car audio?
For the good or bad of car audio, many people can directly think of the amplifier, sound field, sound quality. But in fact, in addition to the relatively subjective judgment, the final sound quality performance of car audio still relies on the single speaker. Therefore, many factors such as interior, NVH performance, and active noise reduction will also affect the audiovisual experience of car audio.
Regarding the sound quality of the car audio, due to the large number of channels, there is frequency masking and time masking effect, which depends largely on the way that professional sound rooms and trained tuning engineers are tuned, and the effect of sound transmission to the human ear is also different according to the position and angle of the driver.
However, from the current development trend of car audio, the difficulty lies in the algorithm. The matching problem between the tuning and various systems is the key to the final effect display, the simple stacking material currently has no meaning from the development trend, and the large and small power amplifier data can intuitively increase the listener's favorability, but from a professional point of view, tuning and algorithm matching is the key to the future, and it is also the highland that more and more intelligent cars can occupy.
Why can new energy vehicles match better in-car audio systems?
First of all, fuel vehicles have several drawbacks. The first is that the interior material and NVH level will have an impact on the sound, multi-speaker sound needs to be tuned by a professional technical team, in order to reduce trouble, most of them use brand sets. Second, in the past, the on-board battery capacity of fuel vehicles was relatively small, and high-power amplifiers were more difficult to achieve.
The above two problems, for the "rich" and "electric" intelligent electric vehicles, are just a very good problem to solve. At present, the main networked intelligent car can provide a good platform in the choice of sound source quality, signal transmission can be integrated in the entertainment information control module, and compared with the complex transmission structure of multiple signal controllers of fuel vehicles, new energy vehicles can "theoretically" provide better audio-visual enjoyment of sound quality.
How does the smart speaker of the new force sound?
In the two production cars featuring the main audio, we referred to the WEIO ET7 and the Q&I M5. Both models, whether hardware or software, are self-developed sound systems, both focus on Dolby Atmos stereo effects, and both have amplifiers of 1000W, which is also one of the few models with better sound quality in independent brand models.
Judging from the audition effect, the soundstage creation effect of the two cars is simply too similar. To put it bluntly, under the scene of exclusive sound source playback, what is deliberately created is a theater-style sound field mode, the feeling of the sound field is quite three-dimensional, the level of the middle and high notes is obviously stronger, and the first experience will surprise people.
Another more embarrassing fact is that if it is converted to QQ music, NetEase Cloud Music and other sound source software that we often use, the effect of the songs played is very general. In other words, there are only a few audio sources that support Dolby Atmos sound, and Apple Music, the sound source of massive Dolby sound, has not yet established cooperation with these brands, so it can listen less and the effect of wanting to listen is not as good as that of big brand audio.
For smart cars, the future needs to cooperate with third-party applications on massive sound sources, not just in the number of speakers and the sound field mode of publicity.
Therefore, smart cars abandon cooperation with brand audio, there are many considerations. First, save costs. Second, from the adaptation of some models, the effect is not good, and many big-name audio suppliers will not redesign for the intelligent cockpit. Third, the self-developed car audio has more initiative, the computing power is improved, the algorithm is more accurate, and the transmission of audio signals can be processed more, and it has more personalized highlights on the intelligent cockpit display.
Summary: With the rise of new power brands, more and more domestic self-developed brand audio will join the competition of smart cockpits, and in the future, foreign high-end brand audio will not be "a single one", and domestic car audio brands will slowly rise with the advent of the era of new energy vehicles.