Road EQ is a function that allows you to enjoy music playback in the car with virtually no sensation of noise, thanks to a sophisticated system that adjusts the sound levels and sound characteristics in real time, in direct response to the noise. On paper, this sounds easy to do, but as I pointed out earlier, it is extremely difficult to do this without sounding unnatural to the human ears. Therefore, Road EQ had to have two major technological innovations in order to achieve this high goal. One technology is to monitor the sounds of music playback and the road noise, in real time with exceptionally high precision. The second technology is to adjust the playback so that it would be heard and perceived as natural in the environment of the background noises. As you know, the car interior has many different noise sources: engine noise, tire noise, wind noise, rain noise, and others—and these change from moment to moment. Naturally, they also change depending on the road surface and the weather at the time. For this reason, we picked up the sounds that occur in the car cabin by microphone, and created circuitry that precisely isolates and extracts the noise elements from the signal containing music mixed with noise. Then we played back the adjusted sounds based on an acoustic model which was made by analyzing how the human brain perceives music amidst such noise. This process had to be repeated instantly.
This acoustic model was co-developed with a psychoacoustic research team at a university and it is supported scientifically. Previously existing sound compensation functions were made by the idea or experience of developing engineers and such adjustments couldn’t realize natural sounding results. |
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