Modern cars like to have a dozen loudspeakers to fill the vehicle’s interior with sound. Sennheiser has now teamed up with automotive supplier Continental to realize a room-filling sound experience with decent acoustics without loudspeakers. The whole thing is made possible by the Ac2ated technology – which, incidentally, is not new – which Continental is contributing. Here, conventional loudspeakers are replaced by actuators, which cause surfaces already in the car (e.g. pillar and door panels) to vibrate, which then emit sound like loudspeaker membranes in different frequency ranges. Coupled with Sennheiser’s AMBEO 3D audio technology, a room-filling, coherent sound is ultimately to be generated.
It is also exciting from the point of view that the whole technology – “without sacrificing sound quality” – is likely to save between 75 and 90 percent in weight and space compared to conventional systems weighing around 40 kilograms. As is well known, especially with electric vehicles, every kilogram counts that can be saved in order to further increase their efficiency. Additional benefit? In terms of design, there is no longer any need to take loudspeaker fronts into account in the vehicle surfaces.
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