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the heart of rock & roll
Piko (the car) periodically reminds me that I mean to write about design as expressed in the Cube audio system. These reminders come in the form of soaring music of various sorts; most of the time she gets to pick what the iPod plays.
It's not touted as an amazing stereo. It has, you know, 6 speakers. Whatever. It'll play your iPod! This was a big marketing thing, and a strong selling point for me. But not a lot of talk about the sound.
Compared to the Scion I used to drive, which has this Super Special Scion Audio Shenanigans Spectacular (SSSASS), the Cube is surprisingly superior sound-wise. See, a big part of the SSSASS was its ability to make the car vibrate. The interior walls and dash, specifically. This was a Huge Big Deal from Scion when they rolled out the car. It probably has a lot to do with the 14 year old boys who stopped and stared at the car: it was a sound system designed for someone who'd think it was exciting to make the car vibrate. Pioneer speakers and a decent subwoofer, all built at angles that amounted largely to extra wall vibration.
You know what doesn't contribute to your aural or emotional experience of music? EXTRA WALL VIBRATION. It can obscure some music, even. Mostly it's irrelevant.
The Cube does not play that. The first time I played Peter Murphy's I'll Fall with Your Knife (which is soaringly dark - it's a really affecting piece of pop music), I nearly cried. These simple, unvaunted speakers are arranged in a way that points music right at the driver's heart. With the right music, it's like my own personal concert hall - not live music, but pretty effing amazing.
And someone designed that. How much time does a design team spend on a car's audio system? This one was well worth the time, with no explicit marketing credit to the team who built it or the product they created. The marketing literature talks about the bulldog exterior, the waves-planet-cocktail-lounge interior [Here, someone got a little carried away with metaphors - like each team had their own, and the copy writers just wrote all of them down. The interior is physically coherent and pleasant, but its explanation is like a Cat Power song.], and not the good work of the audio system.
It got me thinking about the design can be talked about - as a feature list rather than an experience. I thought at first that this was a difference between 14-year-old-boy design and design for grownups, and that's still partly what I believe - but I think it's a more complex set of demographics. In a Lexus, where the brand image is more about driving comfort, an audio system like this might have gotten marketing play as a feature; in a lower-end car that's mostly about appearance, overwrought visual metaphors get most of the copy. And if you're going for cute visuals (possibly "feminine" design) over an aggressive driving=power thing (stereotypical "masculine" design), there's no need to have a throbbing subwoofer complete with extra wall vibration.
But. If that's true, then I'm perplexed: why did they design such an affecting stereo set up at all? I don't think it's an accident.
It's not touted as an amazing stereo. It has, you know, 6 speakers. Whatever. It'll play your iPod! This was a big marketing thing, and a strong selling point for me. But not a lot of talk about the sound.
Compared to the Scion I used to drive, which has this Super Special Scion Audio Shenanigans Spectacular (SSSASS), the Cube is surprisingly superior sound-wise. See, a big part of the SSSASS was its ability to make the car vibrate. The interior walls and dash, specifically. This was a Huge Big Deal from Scion when they rolled out the car. It probably has a lot to do with the 14 year old boys who stopped and stared at the car: it was a sound system designed for someone who'd think it was exciting to make the car vibrate. Pioneer speakers and a decent subwoofer, all built at angles that amounted largely to extra wall vibration.
You know what doesn't contribute to your aural or emotional experience of music? EXTRA WALL VIBRATION. It can obscure some music, even. Mostly it's irrelevant.
The Cube does not play that. The first time I played Peter Murphy's I'll Fall with Your Knife (which is soaringly dark - it's a really affecting piece of pop music), I nearly cried. These simple, unvaunted speakers are arranged in a way that points music right at the driver's heart. With the right music, it's like my own personal concert hall - not live music, but pretty effing amazing.
And someone designed that. How much time does a design team spend on a car's audio system? This one was well worth the time, with no explicit marketing credit to the team who built it or the product they created. The marketing literature talks about the bulldog exterior, the waves-planet-cocktail-lounge interior [Here, someone got a little carried away with metaphors - like each team had their own, and the copy writers just wrote all of them down. The interior is physically coherent and pleasant, but its explanation is like a Cat Power song.], and not the good work of the audio system.
It got me thinking about the design can be talked about - as a feature list rather than an experience. I thought at first that this was a difference between 14-year-old-boy design and design for grownups, and that's still partly what I believe - but I think it's a more complex set of demographics. In a Lexus, where the brand image is more about driving comfort, an audio system like this might have gotten marketing play as a feature; in a lower-end car that's mostly about appearance, overwrought visual metaphors get most of the copy. And if you're going for cute visuals (possibly "feminine" design) over an aggressive driving=power thing (stereotypical "masculine" design), there's no need to have a throbbing subwoofer complete with extra wall vibration.
But. If that's true, then I'm perplexed: why did they design such an affecting stereo set up at all? I don't think it's an accident.