The music studio that made the Beatles famous hits the road in Volvo's new electric SUV. I visited Abbey Road Studios in London to check Volvo and Bowers & Wilkins' Abbey Road Studio Mode.
The all new Volvo ex 90 EV in partnership with Bowers and Wilkins is introducing an unparalleled audio update. Next year, Abbey Road studios mode smarter than the average EQ this feature transforms your vehicle into a mobile concert hall, delivering music with the precision and clarity of a professional recording studio. And I was able to get a listen at the source of the inspiration. Abbey Road studios in London. Here's how that went now for most folks home and home theater audio aren't high priorities for a variety of reasons, cost space, et cetera. So choosing a premium audio system for your car is often the closest that most of us will ever get to experiencing big bold high quality sound outside of a movie theater or a live concert. The Volvo ex nineties optional Bowers and Wilkins audio file system is among the most impressive with 25 speakers including the Nautilus double dome Tweeters, Continuum Mid ranges and the brand signature tweeter on top design borrowed from its home and studio speakers which is replicated here with a center channel tweeter that protrudes proudly from the top center of the dash. There are 1610 watts of total amplification and dolby atmos processing for spatial audio with services like Tidal and Apple music that supported the new Abbey Road studio mode builds on that hardware with bespoke processing that puts passengers and all three rows into the audio space of the hallowed Abbey Road Studios where hundreds of artists from most famously The Beatles to acts like Fela Kuti Adele and Lady Gaga, as well as the scores for films like Raiders of The Lost Ark, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Star Wars films were recorded and helping to shape that sound along the way is Bowers and Wilkins, which has worked closely with Abbey Road for decades, providing speakers and audio expertise. During the pandemic, we came into the studios and the control rooms and basically what we captured was impulse responses. So the process is you're using well w speakers and a variety of microphones, positioning them around the studios and you're filling the room with acoustic energy. Um The microphones will capture that signal and decoded into that signal is a sonic signature of each of the spaces. And we use that sonic signature to really um tailor the sound so you can be in a control room. So quite a dead sounding room um into a live room and you're gonna experience that in the demo here today, but also in the cost that was Dominic Bowers of Bowers and Wilkins. No relation. I think, explaining how that process ensures that every note, every instrument and every vocal resonates with the same authenticity as it would within the walls of Abbey Road studios. Now, the way that you interact with Abbey Road mode in the ex nine X pretty intuitive on the touch screen. You've got a couple of modes at the top. But the main event is this large virtual studio that you can interact with at the bottom of the screen. Now, swiping to the left on this display will actually make the sound more vintage, more like the sound that was in the studios when the Beatles recording, for example, swiping to the right gives you a more modern, clean and clinical sound. Now, if you swipe up, you get a sound that is more like being in the studio with the musicians around you, more of that sort of live music experience and swiping down towards the bottom of the screen, brings you into the recording booth for again, a more clean and punchy sound along the bottom. There's also a slider that allows you to move the virtual speakers inward and away from you for a more intimate or more broad and open sound. And it's not just the music Volvo and the gang are using that same processing horsepower and audio, know how to change the spatial feel of the entire cabin, including your voice. Here's Abby Rhodes Myrick styles, explaining the thinking behind that. It's also um quite c can be like a claustrophobic experience. You're in a small environment um with speakers quite close to you and the Bowers and walk ins um sound system is absolutely brilliant, um beautifully tuned. But we just thought if we started to add some of these tools on top, could we use these tools to sort of take the sound a little bit out of the cabin, you know, change the environment of the cabin a little bit. So when you activate Abbey Road mode in the ex 90 there are microphones around the cabin that are capturing sounds in the vehicle from the voices of passengers to maybe dings and beeps coming from the dashboard to maybe even the sound of you adjusting in your seat and it applies that same spatial processing feeding back through the speakers. The result is that the whole cabin, not just the music or the podcast you're listening to feels wider and much more room like there's less of that echoing off the glass and more of a big space that you hear. It's a bit odd, especially if you're not listening to any content, but it gels nicely with the playback to create a cohesive listening experience. Overall, I was extremely pleased with my listening session, both with the ease and novelty of being able to tweak the listening space, but especially with the overall sound of the BNW system, which I was also able to test on the road earlier this year. If driving a music studio, isn't your cup of tea? You can always disable the feature with a single tap. Plus the teams at Volvo Bowers and Wilkins and Abbey Road aren't finished yet. They've got plans for more applications and more modes in the future. This is just the starts. Um, this is almost a minimum version of what we could work together to just do because there's so much we could do. But of course, we can't tackle everything day one. So this is, this is, this is version one. There's more spaces, there's more spatial control we can do and there's so much more equipment we might choose to harness. Uh There are more presets we can, we can choose to develop. Um We will include the um custom presets as well at some point. So, so this platform has very much been developed so that we can iteratively update in, in, in, in the, in the Volvo. And the, the, the, the Volvo platform very much allows us to do that with the over the day updates. Uh And that's, that's a part of the chatting with Abbey Road. Studio mode will hit the road in the 2025 Volvo ex 90 early next year. Again, that's 2025 the mode will come via an over the air software update. So if you're already an ex 90 owner or you've picked doors up before the live date, you'll be automatic updated and presumably those extra mode spaces and features that Dan mentioned will also come via updates. Thereafter, you can head over to C net.com where we've got a full first look at the 2025 Volvo ex 90 EV and a deep dive into the rest of its technologies and features drive safe and I'll see you there.
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