Speaker 1: Pushkin In Northridge, California, just north of Los Angeles, off
Speaker 1: the four or five Freeway, surrounded by a series of
Speaker 1: strip malls, there is what looks like a very ordinary
Speaker 1: office park, like for lawyers and accounting firms, or the
Speaker 1: West Coast distributor of some obscure German housewears brand that
Speaker 1: kind of thing, very stealth. But then you see a
Speaker 1: little sign it says Harmon Cardon, and you step inside
Speaker 1: and you're like, Oh, Harmon Cardon manufacturers of high end
Speaker 1: audio systems, home to JBL Infinity, Banganolfsson, Oh and a
Speaker 1: brand called Mark Levins and their flagship product one of
Speaker 1: the most serious names of all for true audiophiles. Imagine
Speaker 1: long corridors, feel with ideas for speakers, prototype speakers, random components,
Speaker 1: things that make you feel like you're at Los Alamos,
Speaker 1: in the middle of the Manhattan Project. And deep inside
Speaker 1: Harmon Cardon is a place called the John Urgel Theater. Plush, dark, hushed,
Speaker 1: everything in soft sound, absorbent fabric. All right, I'm going
Speaker 1: to give you a little about what we have in
Speaker 1: this room. We have a total of I think thirty
Speaker 1: three loudspeakers in this room. It's a full immersive experience.
Speaker 1: I think we're talking about probably half a million dollars
Speaker 1: worth of equipment. We're going to do immersive as good
Speaker 1: as it yet sound wise, this is probably an overkill.
Speaker 1: It's more than as good as it gets. Yes, Yes,
Speaker 1: you basically ruined every listening experience I'm going to have
Speaker 1: after this. Yes you're listening to go and see from
Speaker 1: Lexus and Pushkin Industries, our podcast about all things obsessively
Speaker 1: and perfectionistically Lexus. I'm Malcolm Godwell. In this episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the sound system on the Lexus
Speaker 1: LS and why it sounds so amazing because it does.
Speaker 1: Lexus loaned my producer Jacob Smith, and me and LUs
Speaker 1: for a few days, and we proceeded to drive it
Speaker 1: the length of La County in violation of as many
Speaker 1: known traffic laws as possible, and every time we cranked
Speaker 1: the music, all we could think of was WHOA why
Speaker 1: does this sound like no other car stereo we have
Speaker 1: ever cranked before. So we had to go to the source,
Speaker 1: the company that makes the sound systems for Lexus cars,
Speaker 1: Harmon's Mark Levinson, to get some answers and too geekap
Speaker 1: if you've been listening to this series, you'll know that
Speaker 1: the inner workings of cars are a lot more complex
Speaker 1: than people think they are. But car stereos I had
Speaker 1: no idea. It may take me more than one episode
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of this one. Does this
Speaker 1: room have a name? Yes, it's called the MLL, says
Speaker 1: we're multi Channel Listening Lab. Okay, the multi Channel Listening Lab,
Speaker 1: a room just as ridiculously tricked out as the John
Speaker 1: Urgell Theater, where the people up Mark Levinson put us
Speaker 1: through a drill so hilariously complicated that I can't even Basically,
Speaker 1: we were played a song on a series of different
Speaker 1: sets of twenty thousand dollars speakers, all arrayed on a
Speaker 1: complex trolley system. They're swapped out behind a black curtain,
Speaker 1: and after each playback, the audio geeks asked us which
Speaker 1: version we thought was better, when in fact all were
Speaker 1: equally absurdly ridiculously amazing. It's they were taunting us with
Speaker 1: how good their sound was. So let's start with speaker A.
Speaker 1: It could happen to you by Dinah Crawl, Hide your
Speaker 1: heart from sight, Lock your dreams at night. It could
Speaker 1: happen to be Hide your Heart from Sight, lock your
Speaker 1: dreams at night, it could happen to all right, so
Speaker 1: we're so good. Yeah, First of all, all of them
Speaker 1: are so many orders of magnitude better than any sound
Speaker 1: I've ever heard that. I well, you're right about that,
Speaker 1: and you will see why. I mean, when we lift
Speaker 1: up the curtain, you will see why you said. I
Speaker 1: want to say, I like be the best. The Mark
Speaker 1: Levinson of the Mark Levinson brand, was and is a
Speaker 1: jazz trumpeter who's played with Sonny Rollins and stand Getz,
Speaker 1: John Coltrane, Chick Career, and Keith Jared. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: he founded a high end audio company which ended up
Speaker 1: being acquired by Harmon Carton. Levinson's Mother's name was Hurts.
Speaker 1: Her uncle was the great German physicist Heinrich Hurts, who
Speaker 1: proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, which is why the
Speaker 1: unit of sound frequency to this day is called Hurts.
Speaker 1: The point is Mark Levinson has some serious sound pedigree.
Speaker 1: Mark Levinson components are at the highest of the high end,
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars. And there was a story
Speaker 1: that it kind of I think might be folklore, because
Speaker 1: no one can really confirm this. There's a great bit
Speaker 1: of British slang for someone who has mastered an incredibly
Speaker 1: arcane subject. Boffin, I'm quizzing two of the senior Mark
Speaker 1: Levinson's sound. Boffin's first up, Jonathan Pierce John is very smooth,
Speaker 1: very California. The story that I've heard time and time
Speaker 1: again is mister Mark Levinson refused to allow a company
Speaker 1: to take his brand into a vehicle right because the
Speaker 1: vehicle is not a good environment for acoustics. These are
Speaker 1: people who construct elaborate listening rooms with thirty three speakers
Speaker 1: and components where cost is no object. Now someone comes
Speaker 1: to them and says, would you shrink all that down
Speaker 1: and put it in a car? I mean, that's like
Speaker 1: asking Morimoto to do airline food. Wait, so I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to capture Mark Levinson's angst when presented
Speaker 1: with a car manufacturer. So he's someone's basically comes to
Speaker 1: him and says, you've got to shrink it all down,
Speaker 1: stuff it inside a car cabin at a fraction of
Speaker 1: the price, and make it sound good. Yes, and then
Speaker 1: you have to add two more things which are crazy.
Speaker 1: One has to be automotive grade. That's the second buffin
Speaker 1: bread Home chiming in Brads from Michigan Bushy Beard. He's
Speaker 1: in the metal and he's a serious car guy. So
Speaker 1: this room is always going to stay pretty much in
Speaker 1: the same temperature. When we test an automotive realm, you've
Speaker 1: got to go down to negative eighty five C all
Speaker 1: the way up to potentially eighty five C. So you
Speaker 1: want to make sure that the amp, the hardware, everything
Speaker 1: absorbs through. All of that tell me about I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about temperature before. So what happens at very low
Speaker 1: and very high temperatures to a stands to a sound
Speaker 1: system if it's not been properly prepared for that Sure,
Speaker 1: So when non automotive speaker, if you put it into
Speaker 1: a car park, the car in Arizona in the desert,
Speaker 1: not to pick on the state, just temperature and climate.
Speaker 1: You might measure on the dash one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. Well, that means the components that you built
Speaker 1: us with have to withstand one hundred and fifty degrees
Speaker 1: without changing shape, and the talances are so tight that
Speaker 1: they can't even start to melt or move any Their
Speaker 1: expansion has to be measured tight enough. So that that
Speaker 1: is not contacting. Speakers have copper wire. Copper expands in
Speaker 1: the heat, shrinks in the cold. If your car is
Speaker 1: sitting outside in that Arizona sun, your speaker is going
Speaker 1: to get all messed up. So an automotive, we have
Speaker 1: to make sure that as that grows or shrinks with temperature,
Speaker 1: it's not shrinking and contracting and breaking or expanding and
Speaker 1: then sticking to the walls of what we're trying to hit.
Speaker 1: You basically have to start from the ground up. You
Speaker 1: have to rethink the construction of the speaker itself. Then
Speaker 1: there's weight. A high end Levens and speaker can weigh
Speaker 1: as much as one hundred and fifty pounds. A serious
Speaker 1: Levenson amplifier weighs over one hundred pounds. Some people might
Speaker 1: want two hundred and fifty pounds of sound equipment blasting
Speaker 1: in their car, but not many. But wait, approach. Give
Speaker 1: me a rough bull pat. If I took all of
Speaker 1: the stereo components in an lys and put them on
Speaker 1: a scale, what am I talking about? Very roughly? Very roughly,
Speaker 1: I'll give you very rough if anybody else can correct me.
Speaker 1: But it's well under twenty pounds. I would say, including
Speaker 1: the sub wilfer and enclosure, the amplifier speakers. Yeah, probably
Speaker 1: right around fifteen twenty pounds at most. They must give
Speaker 1: you a cost constraint too, Yes, can you tell me
Speaker 1: what it is? I don't think so, I mean, but
Speaker 1: we can guess. If you didn't rain in the audio
Speaker 1: files up Mark Levinson, lexuses would cost three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: They would become the equivalent of a massive, hushed sound
Speaker 1: stage floating down the road. We just did three episodes
Speaker 1: on the engine note of the Lexus Elsie sports car.
Speaker 1: A car is not supposed to be a sound stage.
Speaker 1: So of course Mark Levinson said no to every car
Speaker 1: company that approached them. But then Lexus came call, and
Speaker 1: the boffins said, well, if there was ever a time
Speaker 1: to say yes, this is it, because these people are
Speaker 1: crazy perfectionists like us. I don't need to remind you
Speaker 1: that Lexus is the company where their master level driver Osakisan,
Speaker 1: spent two years convincing the engineers back of Toyota City
Speaker 1: to tilt the steering wheel on the LC forward two degrees.
Speaker 1: Lexis were the windows on the LS slow imperceptibly as
Speaker 1: they reach their Apex, American boffins meet Japanese boffins, and besides,
Speaker 1: sooner or later, even the world's most dedicated audio file
Speaker 1: has to face up to the reality that most people
Speaker 1: do not listen to music in half a million dollars
Speaker 1: sound rooms in their basement. They listen in their cars,
Speaker 1: for better or worse. For all I know, you're listening
Speaker 1: to this in your car. So if you have a
Speaker 1: company devoted did better ways of listening to music, you
Speaker 1: kind of have to say yes eventually to the car,
Speaker 1: which is why we ended up in Northridge. Here is
Speaker 1: the car stereo problem at its most basic. So when
Speaker 1: acoustic energy comes off of a speaker, it obviously doesn't
Speaker 1: just hit our ears. It hits everything else in the room.
Speaker 1: This is Levinson's John Pierce again. And if it's absorbed
Speaker 1: into carpet or absorbed into treatment in the wall, it
Speaker 1: isn't stuck inside of that material. It doesn't then come
Speaker 1: to your ears in the same manner. But bouncing off
Speaker 1: a hard surface as dry wall, hardwood, floors, even certain
Speaker 1: pictures on the wall glass that's going to cause reflections.
Speaker 1: Reflections are what happens to sound in any enclosed space
Speaker 1: in a space like the Urgel Theater. You can manage
Speaker 1: those reflections perfectly. The walls are made of soft absorbent material,
Speaker 1: the speakers are placed evenly. Everything is set up so
Speaker 1: that the sound reflects and reverberates exactly the way people
Speaker 1: at Levinson wanted it to be reflected and reverse berated.
Speaker 1: But a car is about as far from the Urgle
Speaker 1: Theater as is humanly possible. I mean, duh. It moves,
Speaker 1: but also it's a lot of metal and glass. It
Speaker 1: has an engine, a thing that makes its own noise
Speaker 1: in vibration, tires over pavement, and sometimes it has one
Speaker 1: person inside, and sometimes it has four or five people inside.
Speaker 1: It's a reflection nightmare, and you can't solve that just
Speaker 1: by turning up the volume. So the sheet metal in
Speaker 1: a car is becoming thinner to make vehicles more efficient.
Speaker 1: This is brad. When it's thinner, they move more so
Speaker 1: as we have a speaker in there, such as adorable
Speaker 1: for vibrating a lot. Now the sheet metal can buzz
Speaker 1: and it can almost start to sound like a steel drum.
Speaker 1: We're going to start hearing these what we call BSR
Speaker 1: in the industry. Buzz, squeak and rattles that come out
Speaker 1: of the interior or exterior of the car. Brad got
Speaker 1: his start in the industry putting massive sound systems in
Speaker 1: muscle cars driven. I'm going to guess by young men
Speaker 1: Jonathan Loos to make fun of me because I started
Speaker 1: in the aftermarket world, and I was the guy from
Speaker 1: a flea market with the forty three gigawatt amplifier and
Speaker 1: sixty three thousand subwoffers in the back, and my poor
Speaker 1: forward Escort didn't really survive what I did to it,
Speaker 1: So that was a BSR nightmare. I shook the absolute
Speaker 1: living daylights out of that car. In the act of
Speaker 1: putting in this high powered sound system, you created so
Speaker 1: much additional vibration and such in the car that it
Speaker 1: obscured the music of the sound obscured, as a polite
Speaker 1: way to put how bad it was. I could only
Speaker 1: hear bass. But I had moved into then sound quality competition,
Speaker 1: where the goal was to be the loudest that you could.
Speaker 1: And at that point you're designing a system to play
Speaker 1: a single frequency, a base frequency, and that gets challenging
Speaker 1: because you can dent your roof, the roof panel will
Speaker 1: start to flex and you can actually start to get
Speaker 1: indentations in the sheet metal. You know, there's all sorts
Speaker 1: of crazy stories when it gets into that. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can do that just with a high powered sound system
Speaker 1: instead of a guy. Yeah. If you look at the
Speaker 1: people doing the intense sound competitions, they actually are pouring
Speaker 1: concrete in the doors to try to keep that sound
Speaker 1: and integrity in there because the sound pressure is so
Speaker 1: hard that it'll move these panels. They have external clamps
Speaker 1: on doors to keep the door shut, to keep the
Speaker 1: interior sealed, like replace the glass with bulletproof glass, because
Speaker 1: you can get to a point where you can overdrive
Speaker 1: the stability of that. It's pretty intense. Wow. This is
Speaker 1: an extreme example, of course, but you see the problem.
Speaker 1: And it's not any different for parents driving minivans who
Speaker 1: want to listen to the soundtrack from Frozen. The automobile
Speaker 1: is inherently hostile to good sound. You can put the
Speaker 1: best set of speakers you want inside a car, but
Speaker 1: that's not going to solve your problem. Your problem is
Speaker 1: not the equipment, it's the room you're playing it in.
Speaker 1: Brad gave us a simple demonstration. So what I've done
Speaker 1: is taken a well recorded song, then applied what it
Speaker 1: would sound like for the uncute speed here to be
Speaker 1: in there, and then play the reference, which would be
Speaker 1: back to how it should sound. This isn't doped in
Speaker 1: any way. This is actually how much power we have
Speaker 1: in the vehicle. Sounds good. Yeah, this is a pop
Speaker 1: song played to a high end Mark Levinson speaker that
Speaker 1: Brad has just randomly placed inside a car so we
Speaker 1: can hear. We're missing a lot of what should be there.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of imbalances that really high trouble. You
Speaker 1: still hear that sparkle at the top of the symbol,
Speaker 1: but the mid range is really dulled. Right, So back
Speaker 1: to reference so that you guys don't leave with a
Speaker 1: better taste in your range changes. So we just understand
Speaker 1: the reference was the way the song was intended to
Speaker 1: be played in an ideal sound environment. The first one
Speaker 1: was if you simply played it through a set of
Speaker 1: anyone's car speakers, your car speakers. Before you do, how
Speaker 1: do you get the first Where did the first one
Speaker 1: exactly come from? Sure? So what I did was I
Speaker 1: took one of our speakers, we put it into a vehicle,
Speaker 1: and without any adjustments made, we just measured it from
Speaker 1: both seating positions in the car that first recording. The
Speaker 1: muddy sound, the dull mid range. That's what I've been
Speaker 1: hearing in every car I've ever driven, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to guess it's very close to what you here as well.
Speaker 1: That's what I've always believed a car stereo sounded like.
Speaker 1: But that was before Jacob and I cruised the freeways
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles in a tricked out Lexus LS with
Speaker 1: the music blasting. Next week, we're gonna sit down inside
Speaker 1: our Lexus with the boffins at Mark Levinson and figure
Speaker 1: out how they did it. One last thing. At Levinson,
Speaker 1: they have a series of what are called an echoic rooms,
Speaker 1: which are rooms designed to have no sound, reverberations or reflection,
Speaker 1: completely dead rooms, perfect for testing new equipment. They took
Speaker 1: us in one. Yeah, doesn't some sound. We're not getting
Speaker 1: locked in here. They're just like, oh no, no, they'll
Speaker 1: be pure out there. Unless they hate us, they should
Speaker 1: let us out like a horror movie. Yeah. We stood
Speaker 1: on a platform in a small square room. Above, around
Speaker 1: and below us were pyramid shaped wedges of something yellow
Speaker 1: and soft wrapped in mesh. Dozens of them. There was
Speaker 1: no harm, no echo, nothing, Every single iota of sound
Speaker 1: was soaked up by the yellow wedges. Yeah, can we
Speaker 1: have can we have like thirty seconds of sounds? Because
Speaker 1: I wanted, I'll write everyone listening silence. We almost we're
Speaker 1: almost never in Think about it. It's unnatural, completely unnatural.
Speaker 1: Nothing in nature exists like this, whatsoever. Yeah, it sounds
Speaker 1: like hears you're plugged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: if you stay in here long enough, your brain would
Speaker 1: probably go crazy, just just a little bit. The place
Speaker 1: was creepy. This is all like styrophone. It's fiberglass, fiber,
Speaker 1: it's just sucking up everybody sucks up everything. Absolutely, But
Speaker 1: there's enough metal in here to give you a little
Speaker 1: bit more ambiance. The one upstairs doesn't have that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You if you put someone in here like an under
Speaker 1: insultary confinement, they would lose their mind. They would absolutely.
Speaker 1: It would be a very cruel and unusual twicture for sure. Yes,
Speaker 1: what is this? Where you where you where you discipline
Speaker 1: wayward employees? Of Then I thought about it. It's not
Speaker 1: where they send wayward employees. I think the end of
Speaker 1: cook rooms are where the boffins go and scream when
Speaker 1: the stress of making a decent sounding car system proves
Speaker 1: too overwhelming. If a boffin screams in an anachoic room,
Speaker 1: does it make a sound? Go and See is produced
Speaker 1: by Jacob Smith with Emily Rostek and Carl Nigliari, Edited
Speaker 1: by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and
Speaker 1: mixed and mastered our episodes special thanks to Jacob Weisberg
Speaker 1: had a Fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and
Speaker 1: all the Lexus executives, engineers and designers who participated in
Speaker 1: our recordings. Go and See is a production of Lexus
Speaker 1: and Pushkin Industries. I'm Mountain Gradlin