A vehicle’s cabin is a challenging environment for sound reproduction, particularly when it comes to creating a system that delivers music as crisp, clear and defined as the artist intended. The variety of surfaces, materials and size of the car’s interior impact how the sound reaches the driver and passengers. Alpine Electronics of UK Ltd, introduces IMPRINT™, a new hardware and software product architecture that dramatically improves in-vehicle sound quality. IMPRINT is the first automotive sound system that automatically corrects the sound systems output for the acoustical problems inside the vehicle using sophisticated DSP and FIR filter technology. 

With IMPRINT products, Alpine delivers an automated equalisation and time domain correction technology that overcomes the car’s inherent acoustical problems resulting in improved sound staging, tonal balance and definition of music. The first products to offer IMPRINT are the CDA-9887R CD/MP3/WMA/AAC receiver, and the PXE-H650 system integration audio processor, which is a 2007 CES Innovations Award winner in the Mobile Audio category. 

 

In creating the IMPRINT sound architecture, Alpine partnered with Audyssey Labs to develop the automotive application of their MultEQ® technology. Audyssey’s research into the fundamental causes of acoustical distortion resulted in their creation of MultEQ, a breakthrough technology for minimizing sound distortion caused by the listening environment. 

 

“With IMPRINT, the highly technical process of sound tuning a vehicle is made easier, faster and better,” said Graham Johnson, Sales & Marketing Director, Alpine Electronics. “This revolutionary system not only allows retailers to give their customers a better listening experience, but gives them a tool to overcome difficult sound quality problems such as correction in the time domain, with a fully automated process, which is something that was never possible until now.” 

 

The signal from a factory head unit is not ready for processing right at the start. It generally has some type of equalization and even some time correction applied to it. This is why it is routed to AntEQ, which removes the factory sound processing. MultEQ captures frequency and time domain information from the vehicle’s actual acoustical environment and quickly identifies any problems. It then creates a set of equalisation filters to correct frequency response and time domain problems for each speaker in the vehicle. It also removes sound distortion caused by the specific acoustical problems in the vehicle by applying unique FIR filters, using more than 500 points along the frequency spectrum per channel. This optimises the sound reproduction to the specific vehicle listening environment with much greater precision than has been achieved up until now using typical graphic or parametric equalisation. The result is a more accurate, dimensional soundstage, and smoother, more natural sound optimised to match each vehicle.