On the afternoon of September 8th, Professor Sungyoung Kim of AIRIS, along with master’s students Minjae Kim and Sato Rai, attended the Dolby ‘Benz Road Show’ held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul.
In October 2022, Dolby and Mercedes-Benz announced the integration of Dolby Atmos into Mercedes-Benz’s sound system “Burmester.” This allows for the spatial audio experiences inside the car, combining the multiple speakers installed in the vehicle with Dolby Atmos object audio, all set within the luxurious interior of the Mercedes-Benz.
This time, we had the opportunity to board Mercedes-Benz’s “the new EQS” and listen to several audio works created in Dolby Atmos, including those on Apple Music.
Inside the car, 15 speakers designed by Burmester surrounded us. Thanks to the audio signal processing optimized for the vehicle’s interior, listeners could feel a sense of appropriate sound localization as if they were in a concert hall, regardless of where they sat in the car.
During this experience, we were able to listen to some music clips such as Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from Apple Music, Dolby Atmos movie trailers, and audio dramas produced in a Dolby Atmos format.
As promoted in the official announcement, a system that enables a spatial audio experience like Dolby Atmos in the car, coupled with the low-noise driving technology of electric vehicles, will have a significant impact on improving the driving entertainment experience.
However, there’s a practical challenge: achieving a stable sense of sound localization for all seat positions requires complex speaker designs and signal processing. What we have experienced in the car was amazing; yet we were not sure whether this experience can be regarded as ‘optimal’ listening in a car or not. Avoiding any unnaturalness in the sound output due to this complexity in signal processing is not only difficult but also could lead to another artefact – timbral degradation, which frankly we have experienced.
We hope for technological innovations from our research field that can offer a spatial audio experience balancing both the authenticity of the sound localization and its individualized experience, not just in car audio but in various contexts. And we hope that our lab could contribute to this entire move to ‘individually optimized spatial hearing with high timbral fidelity.’
(co-writtten by Rai Sato and Sungyoung Kim)