When visiting one of the big auto companies or major parts suppliers in Detroit, you usually don't go to an individual office building or even an office complex, but rather a sprawling campus. Automotive electronics giant Visteon has its own village. In fact, as my host on a recent visit explained, Visteon Village, the digs that the company moved into about two years ago, was designed to resemble a small town.
Visteon needs a town-sized complex to house all of the engineering talent and facilities the company has on tap. While Visteon may not be as well-known a name as, say, Alpine or JL Audio to those who follow the aftermarket, the company has been responsible for developing groundbreaking car audio technology such as DSP amplification, occupancy-mode equalization and binaural subjective evaluation. We'll take a closer look at Visteon's facilities and some of its people on caraudiomag.com, but the purpose of this visit was to get a sense of car audio's multichannel future from the perspective of Visteon and some of its high-profile partners.
The Streets of Detroit
I did this by hitting the streets of Detroit in a 2004 Chrysler Pacifica outfitted with a prototype system that's a joint project between Visteon, Dolby and Boston Acoustics. Visteon supplied the electronics, Dolby provided the surround-processing know-how and Boston contributed the speakers. The system, unfortunately, is not something that's scheduled for production anytime soon, but it was fascinating to glimpse what this OE trio thinks the future of multichannel music in a car will look and sound like.
First, the lowdown on the system. Sitting in the center stack is a prototype single-disc DVD-Audio/CD radio that plays DVD-A discs in full-resolution surround, as well as regular CDs using Dolby ProLogic II processing. In each front door is a Boston Acoustics 6" x 9" midrange, while a Boston Acoustics 1" tweeter and 4 1/2" midrange provide the center channel. Another 1" tweeter is in each A-pillar. Sub bass, or the Low-Frequency Effects (LFE) channel for DVD-A playback, comes from a Boston 8" subwoofer in a sealed enclosure in the passenger-side wall of the cargo area, near the tailgate. The rear surround channels are supplied by a 2 1/2" mid in a speaker pod attached to the roof near the back of the vehicle, one on each side. In each rear quarter panel is another 6" x 9". All this is powered by a pair of DSP amplifiers that boast 12 channels and approximately 550 watts of power.
Motown Loop
Packing my favorite DVD-Audio discs, I hit the road for series of loops around Motown. I kicked it off with R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People. While not my favorite disc by the band, with its layers of strings and vocals, AFTP is perfectly suited to showcase the power as well as the subtleties of DVD-Audio. On "Drive," the echo surrounding Mike Stipe's throaty vocals sounded thick yet supple enough to slice with a dull knife, and his low moans at 1:08 and at 1:22 cut through the intricate mix, while the mass of strings that start at around 2:25 sounded distinct, not blended together.