Speaker 1: Pushkin. This podcast began with me remembering when I had
Speaker 1: Alexis ten years or so ago. I liked it, but
Speaker 1: also thought naively that it was like a German car,
Speaker 1: only from Japan. And then I went to Japan and realized,
Speaker 1: oh no, these cars are Japanese. And once you realize that,
Speaker 1: you can sit in one and be driven in one,
Speaker 1: even blindfolded, and know just where you are, even down
Speaker 1: to the sound system. You know, if I put you,
Speaker 1: if I blindfolded you, and I put you in an
Speaker 1: AA seven series, an S S class and an LS
Speaker 1: and I said, tell me turn on music. I said,
Speaker 1: can you? Can you tell me when you're in the LS?
Speaker 1: Could you? I met Mark levin Sin's operations outside of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. This is the place where Alexis sound System
Speaker 1: was created. Brett Home is one of the systems designers.
Speaker 1: And just as I thought, he could ide the car blindfolded,
Speaker 1: the LA specifically, guess what would be the cube? In
Speaker 1: other words, what song would he use to be absolutely
Speaker 1: sure he was sitting in Alexis. So I have worked
Speaker 1: with the car for years. Yeah, so when I'm checking,
Speaker 1: like I've listened to probably twenty different cars, I know
Speaker 1: where on certain songs I play things should be I
Speaker 1: know that. Would you priss? You could take one song
Speaker 1: into reach you do all four cars? What's the song
Speaker 1: going to set this up? Now? I'm right? I want
Speaker 1: I want the diagnostic song. So I want what's the
Speaker 1: sign that helps you distinguish between those four systems? The
Speaker 1: best answer actually, yeah, cool, Just the one that will
Speaker 1: help you identify the elis with one hundred percent certainty
Speaker 1: from Alexis and Pushkin Industries. This is go and see
Speaker 1: our podcast about what makes Alexis Alexis. This is our
Speaker 1: final episode, number six out of six. We have explored
Speaker 1: why the windows on the LS slow as they reach
Speaker 1: their apex, why the LC sports car accelerates in perfect intervals,
Speaker 1: what it takes to make an engine sound amazing, and
Speaker 1: countless other things, all in service of something I have
Speaker 1: to admit I did not fully appreciate until I went
Speaker 1: to Japan, which is that behind even the simplest details
Speaker 1: lies a mountain of thought and research and experimentation, expertise
Speaker 1: in service not just of the machine itself, in service
Speaker 1: of the driver. So, in the Sonic Temple of Mark Levinson,
Speaker 1: I asked Brad for his signature song, because by this point,
Speaker 1: at the end of my Lexus immersion, I know he
Speaker 1: has one. Okay, so the song that I would use
Speaker 1: just hit me. It's a recording of Sanctus. I forget
Speaker 1: the composer. I'm sorry. It's classical. There's two choirs. There's
Speaker 1: a female and a male choir on the stage, and
Speaker 1: there's a pipe organ that plays down to twenty eight
Speaker 1: ish hurts. So what's going to exercise low frequency extension
Speaker 1: that has to be even throughout the choirs are separated.
Speaker 1: You still need the reverb. But when you go into
Speaker 1: three D, the roof of that car seems to almost
Speaker 1: kind of disappear a little bit. And that experience was
Speaker 1: phenomenal for me. And so when I go to these
Speaker 1: different manufacturers, ours isn't overdone to be like, look at
Speaker 1: our technology. It's the next level of polish to deliver reference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you play that song Sanctus in an LS it
Speaker 1: is qualitatively different from the way it would sounded the
Speaker 1: other automobiles and you would be able to pick it out. Yes,
Speaker 1: trust me, we will play some Sanctus. When we were
Speaker 1: in Japan just a few weeks earlier, my producers Jacob
Speaker 1: Smith and Carlie Migliori went to one of the crown
Speaker 1: jewels of the Lexus operation, the driving simulator, And I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the simulator just for a moment,
Speaker 1: to make a point about perfectionism, about what perfectionism looks like.
Speaker 1: The Higashi facility is high security. You check in in
Speaker 1: an unassuming office building, hand over your phones and computers,
Speaker 1: then take a van up a long and winding road
Speaker 1: past the manufactured strip of ice Toyota uses for bad
Speaker 1: weather testing. You come to a second building in gray glass,
Speaker 1: up a flight of stairs, and then oh wow, this
Speaker 1: is it. I mean it looks like something for like
Speaker 1: spaceflight testing. Personally very comfortable concept. Yes, imagine a white
Speaker 1: dome fifteen to twenty feet high. The floor is a
Speaker 1: massive turntable and in the middle, on a set of
Speaker 1: tracks is a car alexis LS. Of course, when you
Speaker 1: quote unquote drive in this simulator, it's meant to feel
Speaker 1: incredibly real, like you're actually driving down the roads projected
Speaker 1: on the dome. The car can tilt, actually tilt, turn
Speaker 1: speed up. The projector creates a virtual reality version of
Speaker 1: the road and passing scenery. There's road noise. I don't
Speaker 1: even want to know what a gadget like this costs. Basically,
Speaker 1: take the kid who drives those risk car video games
Speaker 1: at the mall, give him a couple hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: when he grows up, and this is what you get. First,
Speaker 1: we're are all going to go into the unit. So
Speaker 1: we're going fifty six kilometers an hour driving straight towards
Speaker 1: Mountain Fuji. We just learned write through a van. The
Speaker 1: point of the simulator is that it records everything the
Speaker 1: driver does in there, every move, every decision, and your
Speaker 1: vital signs too, how fast your heart is racing. Everything
Speaker 1: is all recorded in real time and relayed to the
Speaker 1: control room where teams of engineers sit behind computer screens
Speaker 1: and try to make sense of it. Like your eyes,
Speaker 1: what exactly are you looking at? Yeah, so this white
Speaker 1: circle is tracking my eyeline. What are those multi colors?
Speaker 1: So that's your eye side? Yeah, that's the end. The
Speaker 1: oval is my face. Yes. I have two thoughts about
Speaker 1: the simulator. First, can you build a car without a
Speaker 1: multimillion dollars simulator? Course you can, people did for years.
Speaker 1: The simulator isn't really about the car, It's about the driver,
Speaker 1: or to put it more precisely. It's not really about
Speaker 1: making better cars, it's about making better drivers. This came
Speaker 1: up again and again at our time with Lexus, whether
Speaker 1: we were discussing engines or windows or suspension systems. We
Speaker 1: think of the engineer as someone obsessed with the object,
Speaker 1: with its design and operation and manufacture, and not the
Speaker 1: user of the object. But in so many cases with
Speaker 1: Lexus it was the other way round. I mean, what
Speaker 1: was the point of putting Jacob in that multimillion dollar
Speaker 1: contraption to learn about Jacob? To figure out how can
Speaker 1: we study him under controlled circumstances so the car can
Speaker 1: help make him into a better driver. All right, we
Speaker 1: got a pedestrian. I'm the word. Everyone straight, Let's see
Speaker 1: beautiful lady. Yes for me? Oh, the beautiful lady is
Speaker 1: a distraction. You looked at her. Got to be aware
Speaker 1: of what's around you. You cannot look. Oh, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: Oh a little kid just fell should I I don't
Speaker 1: trust this person? Yeah? Thank you? Defensive driving, right, So
Speaker 1: I didn't kill anyone, No, almost that little kids that
Speaker 1: I saw that kid coming from. How did you do?
Speaker 1: Was he good? Good driver? Very? Thank you? Ye? Maybe
Speaker 1: some some people, um, HiT's a with the studio. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: HiT's a bike. Lexus has run thousands of people through
Speaker 1: that simulator, recorded and analyzed oceans of data, created an
Speaker 1: unimaginably finely grained portrait of what drivers do and how
Speaker 1: they behave. Can you make a car without that data? Sure?
Speaker 1: But not, Alexis. This is what perfectionism is, isn't it?
Speaker 1: The ability to focus on more than the object in
Speaker 1: question and the commitment to something beyond what is merely sufficient.
Speaker 1: Which brings us back to Mark Levinson and Brad Hom's
Speaker 1: signature song. What was Brad's motivation? I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 1: at the core he didn't have some elaborate technical agenda. Wait,
Speaker 1: I want to go back to something. Actually, when you're
Speaker 1: talking about that song Sanctis, you were saying, if the
Speaker 1: sensation of the roof being lifted off, what did you
Speaker 1: mean by that? So, if your eyes are closed, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're in the church that it was recorded in
Speaker 1: and you're just sitting there, you hear the reverb, you
Speaker 1: can tell that this is a huge sense of space
Speaker 1: in a car. You don't get that often because the
Speaker 1: top of the car is sound absorbing. So for us
Speaker 1: to reproduce that it's kind of this concept with your
Speaker 1: eyes closed of no, there's a roof to the car.
Speaker 1: It's right here. I can sense that. And then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden their sound from about me and it's echoing,
Speaker 1: and I've got the sense of space above me. And
Speaker 1: so that's kind of like the tearing the roof off,
Speaker 1: where in a non George Clinton p Fund kind of way,
Speaker 1: what you're doing is feeling that you're getting this extra
Speaker 1: space in a vehicle that's not actually there. Lay see.
Speaker 1: So what the LS manages to do, the reason you
Speaker 1: picked that song is because what the LS has managed
Speaker 1: to do is to give you the sensation of listening
Speaker 1: to it in a church. It gives you where you
Speaker 1: were originally recorded, where that song was. But it also
Speaker 1: tests the four attributes that Jonathan was talking about, spectral
Speaker 1: e going from twenty eight hurts on an organ note
Speaker 1: which is very deep, all the way up to the
Speaker 1: twenty k that we're listening to, from spatial having the
Speaker 1: understanding of where everything is dynamics. It starts off very quiet,
Speaker 1: just choir, but then it moves to the full orchestra
Speaker 1: and that gets builds and builds, and the passion that
Speaker 1: comes out of that. For me, I love getting to this.
Speaker 1: It's a minute and a half clip that I use
Speaker 1: and by the end of it, everybody's in and I'm
Speaker 1: just like, you know, it's an amazing experience when it
Speaker 1: happens correctly. Like I said, we're going to place him Sanctus.
Speaker 1: At the end of our day at Mark Levinson, Jacob,
Speaker 1: Brad and I went into the parking lot. Lexus had
Speaker 1: loaned us an LS for a few days, which we
Speaker 1: had parked outside, and we wanted Brad to explain how
Speaker 1: he solved the problem of its sound system. So right
Speaker 1: off the bat we have you could see this stoor
Speaker 1: speaker here that's going to be our main wolfer and
Speaker 1: that plays a lot of upper base and lower mid
Speaker 1: range for us. We then pair that with a mid range.
Speaker 1: As I explained in the room, you can hear low
Speaker 1: frequency and you can put that almost anywhere in the
Speaker 1: car physically to help out. So in this case we're
Speaker 1: using low frequency in the corners because then we get
Speaker 1: loading in the car, so we can actually maximize the
Speaker 1: output low frequencies. Bass notes can come from virtually anywhere.
Speaker 1: Boom boom. You have a lot of freedom and where
Speaker 1: you put that in a car, but not high frequency sounds.
Speaker 1: Those are directional. If you want to properly hear someone's trends,
Speaker 1: senden soprano, it has to be aimed directly at your ear.
Speaker 1: That's what's so hard about setting up a car stereo.
Speaker 1: You need to tweeter up high. But up high in
Speaker 1: a car is all roof pillars in glass. Then we
Speaker 1: put our mid range in trouble together up across the
Speaker 1: instrument panel, so that we have left, center and right
Speaker 1: in a nice array like you'd see in a room.
Speaker 1: Speakers across the front of the dashboard. Then another set
Speaker 1: in the passenger door. So I'll open the rear door
Speaker 1: and what you'll see is the farthest forward upper corner
Speaker 1: of this door panel. Brad talked us through every speaker
Speaker 1: in the car. Where's the subwoffer? So the subwoffer is
Speaker 1: actually right in the center of the package tray here
Speaker 1: on the rear shelf. Yeah, it's packaged underneath this grow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then there's surround speakers that are on either side. Oh,
Speaker 1: so this whole back part here is all speaker here,
Speaker 1: there's five speakers, three locations in the back. Yesd yeah,
Speaker 1: he popped open the trunk or speakers. So this car
Speaker 1: has how many speakers in total? Twenty three? Twenty three?
Speaker 1: Twenty three? Do you really need twenty three? Well, if
Speaker 1: you want the roof to come off while Sanctus is playing, Yes,
Speaker 1: you do, and you need them all in exactly the
Speaker 1: right place, tuned exactly the right way. And in order
Speaker 1: to do that, you have to design the sound system
Speaker 1: at the same time as you design the car itself.
Speaker 1: You can't tack it on afterwards. When did Brad and
Speaker 1: his colleagues start working on the LS stereo five years
Speaker 1: before the car came out? Great, hul we listeners to music? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to jump in the driver's seat. Brad
Speaker 1: sat in the passenger seat and configured the settings on
Speaker 1: the sound system for three D. If it's too loud
Speaker 1: for you, I apologize, okay, So I'll start the track
Speaker 1: over and now we're going to go three D. Before
Speaker 1: you go into that, what does three D mean? So
Speaker 1: it means three dimensional surround sound. So these speakers that
Speaker 1: are above your face in the location, these are going
Speaker 1: to turn on and give you the reverb that that
Speaker 1: room should have. And this is where I was talking
Speaker 1: about the room coming or the roof being peeled off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the technology that allows that. So we got
Speaker 1: a little more that allows you to know with your
Speaker 1: if your eyes would close, it's your nanlos. So let's
Speaker 1: switch over to an so you could tell him that
Speaker 1: dynamics part as it goes from the quiet and the builds,
Speaker 1: say I'm going to car. The roof came off, just
Speaker 1: like Brad said it would. Brad had another meaning to
Speaker 1: go to, but we just wanted to stall him. He
Speaker 1: had a thumb drive in his hand, loaded up with
Speaker 1: a number of songs. It couldn't all be classical, couldn't
Speaker 1: What else could he play for us? We were thinking
Speaker 1: of the long drive back. He wouldn't do to drive
Speaker 1: down Sunset Boulevard blasting a sixteenth century him. I do
Speaker 1: have a polar opposite, I throw on. I kind of
Speaker 1: anticipated such a question, so let's see, I forget. I
Speaker 1: just had a couple of seconds to put on here,
Speaker 1: so instead of hip hop, just something Yeah, so I've
Speaker 1: got heavy metal, Okay, oh yay metal day metal. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So we talked about dynamics. This piece starts off with
Speaker 1: kind of a electrified flamenco style and then the whole
Speaker 1: band comes in and rips her round off, and if
Speaker 1: you don't jump in your seat, I'll be impressed. Six episodes,
Speaker 1: A long trip to Japan, a simulator, a day at
Speaker 1: the track, deep dives with some of the world's best
Speaker 1: automobile engineers. And there we were at the end listening
Speaker 1: to Lamb of God at very high volume in a
Speaker 1: parking lot in the valley, in order to discover that
Speaker 1: Lexis makes perfect things for everyone, even metal heads. Go
Speaker 1: and See. We went and we saw. Let me point
Speaker 1: this out, even though it's a metal you'll it's far
Speaker 1: pand but then center vocal I'll shut so you can
Speaker 1: hear world. Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith
Speaker 1: with Emily Rosteck and Carl Migliori, edited by Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Evan Viola composed our theme music and mixed and mastered
Speaker 1: our episodes. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, Paul Williamson,
Speaker 1: the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, chief
Speaker 1: engineers and designers who participated in our recordings. Also thank
Speaker 1: you too, Jess Merrill, Mary Jane Kroll, Amanda Abrams, Joel Dons, Tyler, dupay,
Speaker 1: Craig Crawford, and Riley Go and See is a production
Speaker 1: of Lexis and Pushkin Industries him Mountain Glaco