April Fools Joke!

Exotic Automobile Manufacturer Offers 'The Audiophile Car'
Audiophiles no longer need to hibernate at home!
Review By Steven R. Rochlin

  For decades audiophiles have been stuck to the confines of their homes to reach musical bliss. In these, usually, darkened rooms they would toil away tweaking and tuning looking for the next nirvana. It brings me great joy to announce the very first auto manufacturer to satisfy the needs of audiophiles worldwide. This next generation vehicle will suit both those looking for style and substance.

It is no secret that home audio is doomed from the beginning with lackluster alternating current. This problem is exacerbated with the use of dedicated power lines, power filters, regenerators, and balancers. The Audiophile Car, or TAC for short, removes this entire exercise by being 100% battery powered! Fulfilling both the music lover and environmentalist, this project got off the ground with using 100% battery power. Audiophiles have long complained about how the car environment is very noisy, and so the advantages of drawing on pure clean power with the ultra-quiet operation of electrical motors was one of the many keys.

Another key factor was seating position. Any audiophile worth their salt will only buy concert tickets that place them centered within the venue. As such The Audiophile Car has a single seat mounted in the center of the cabin. Seen here is the listening chair, with the option of two others being added to provide your friends a hint to the grand achievement you have so rightly earned. Also note the curved interior, which is dampened with special material to greatly reduce outside noises plus takes advantage of sound absorbing material to virtually eliminate unwanted time smearing sound reflections from reaching your ears. Ease of use is also factored in as directly to the right are controls for every device, which is specially stored in a temperature controlled environment behind the passenger compartment. 

Audiophile Meets Computer Geekdom
While the company would not allow us to photograph their proprietary storage area, they claim to have separate enclosures for amplification and high resolution digital source electronics. These structures are made from non-magnetic material and act as a Faraday cage to eliminate RFI / EMI. The amplification section is kept at a perfect 115F while the digital source components are kept at a chip-friendly 95F. This ensures optimum performance while also reducing adverse component interaction.

Also of note is that the use of 56 total DAC chipsets! Unlike normal run-of-the-mill audio systems with a mere four per channel (quad balanced) with 14 channels, due to the small and tightly-controlled space here we only need 7 channels that are octal-balanced in operation at 64-bit/512kHz each to ensure all signals are of the highest in fidelity. This equips every channel of The Audiophile Car with the cleanest, lowest noise digital signal processing of for each of the 5 main channels plus two dedicated balanced subwoofer channels. Controlling firmware is upgraded via Over-The-Air (OTA) or an easy to access USB 3 port for those still desire relying on old-school physical connectivity.

The universal digital disc transport mechanism uses a 100% custom made double-triple laser assembly, where each of the six laser beams has a special variably tunable frequency range. As of this writing they would not tell me the exact span of frequencies, yet they inferred it is ready for everything from the decades old CD and HDCD to SACD with three times the highest scanning frequency range offered by mass-produced laser assemblies of today!

There is also 50 terabytes of RAID via SSD with 2TB of buffering onboard memory. For the techno-savvy, average read speed is 10GBs with an average write speed of 5GBs. Data can be stored via physical optical disc copy (how retro!), Wi-Fi 7, wireless Internet (including bonding four 6G cellular connections), plus has security support for standards including WEP, WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK, and the proposed WTF-SuperFast. For modern music lovers, every music streaming service is easy integrated, and remains state-of-the-art via automatic OTA updates. Naturally more storage and the supporting hardware can be added or substituted as new standard and faster drives become available.

Driver Of The Future
Gone are legacy technology such as Alnico, neodymium, or other types of ferrite magnets! Specifically, the drivers employ uniquely constructed coils that work in a computer-controlled electromagnet field. The advantages are many, including the ability to precisely control the cone driver's movement. While the manufacturer refused to tell me what material(s) they used for the cones, they did say it is 100-times stronger than silk, 50-times lighter than aerogel, and 200 times stiffer than titanium! Just trying to absorb all the technical brilliance made my head spin with amazement! But who cares about techno-wizardry if it can't, ya know, play that funky music.

The Music
Usually such a tour de force of technology has growing pains and hiccups. It brings me joy to say that the system worked flawlessly during the, albeit brief, review period of three weeks. Instead of giving a blow by blow of soundstage, frequency response and harmonic structure, suffice to say that the system was perfect. If I wanted tube warmth, a simple turn of the control dial provided the 'tube warmth' effect, which had a listing of PX25, WE300B, 45, 50, GE VT4C, Gold Lion KT88, Mullard EL34, UX280, 216A, etc. Sub categories of those included manual (adjustable) bias, type of rectification (solid-state or tube and which type of tube), etc. i did play around with the system to hear what a manually biased circa 1950 WE300B would sound like using a Mullard CV1377 for rectification. Nice!

i am hesitant to say the system has a sound at all, as a few turns of the dial and choices bring about sometime subtle, sometimes drastic changes. Ease of tuning can be made by varying the bias or tube variant. Oh, before I forget the system also has the sound of, say, various generations of tubes where applicable (i.e. WE300B from the 1950s, 1960s, and the newly manufactured version).

Conclusion
Am hard pressed to attempt to describe the 'sound' of this system. It is nearly impossible to find fault when you have such an extremely high-resolution, easy to use, comfortable system. As for driving, everything was light and fluid, as the electric engine is tuned for high torque as the car can travel 200 miles on a single charge. My only regret is that, sadly, i can not afford such a system. With a price tag of $20.465 million it can only be one of those audiophiles dreams. The good news is that this statement piece's technology is planned to trickle own to lower cost vehicles beginning in 2025 or thereabouts. Perhaps then audiophiles will begin to realize that high-end audio in their automobiles is not only obtainable, but may perhaps perform at a higher level than their home system! In the end what really matters is that we all....

Enjoy the Music,

Steven R. Rochlin

Company Information
Future Ultimate Company Kar, Mobile Electronics
6Z34R Molata, Shumwata
Imminent Islands 98H 5TG