Yeah the 5.7L has a thing where the engine shuts down cylinders when its cruising to save petrol. And doesn’t sound nearly as nice a the 6.1L Which also had 60KW more power and a twin exhaust system. I have driven both and lost count to the amount of them that have been parked in my driveway and the 6.1 has a much nice noise.
I have a real personal dislike of low register bass sounds. They bother me a lot, probably only physically but it manifests in serious grumpiness and impatience when I hear it. It’s why I don’t use my subwoofer on my sound system.
Anyhoo, cars with that low rumble fall under that category for me, especially when they’re idling near me.
So to me, a car is nice when it does not have that low frequency vibration through the pit of my stomach.
I thought about this thread at lunch, walking back to the office a VW Golf R32 took off from the lights beside me. The sound of the engine through the exhausts at high revs was awful, a bizarre high pitched sound like a stretched burble. It sounded neither expensive and refined nor terrible powerful and high revving.
When they switched the Mustang from the venerable 302 (5.0l) V8 to the 4.6 around 1994, a lot of people didn’t like the change and didn’t like the sound of the early 4.6’s. But they’ve tuned it so it sounds great now.
What a great country that you can rent a car from Hertz like that, the buggers in Belfast wouldn’t even give me a new MINI :rolleyes:
I read an article a while ago about the sound design team at Volvo. Now, even though it’s Ford owned, its total sales is not very big globally. Yet the sound team was at some 50 people. I don’t have a cite for this, since I read it in a magazine, which was in Swedish at any rate, but my guess is that it can be extrapolated upwards for bigger brands. Some things stuck in my mind:
- One guy said that they could’ve made the S80 V8 (4.4L) almost silent, but anyone who’s forking up $50k for the cheapest version will want that rumble to remind them and the world that this is no ordinary Volvo.
- They spend a lot of time making sure the car sounds right, when you’re closing the door. It should be a deep metallic clunk, like closing a safe.
- Basically most car horns are the same, but bigger cars get horns tuned with a lower pitch.
- Since turning signals are controlled by chips, there isn’t anything to go ting-ting-ting, so it’s added, or people will forget the signal and keep driving with it on.
In short, I don’t think anything about how a modern car sounds comes by chance. I¨t’s carefully designed.
NPR had an interview with one of the chief designers of the new generation of Mustang. He said Ford bought everyone involved in the tuning of the GT a copy of Bullitt and said, “Make it sound like that.” I’d say they did OK.
Other tricks engineers use include butterfly valves in the exhaust, which open at full throttle/high RPM and make the car really loud, and active tuning of the exhaust in which a computer and a microphone are used in a feedback loop along with a speaker or transducer of some kind. If there’s an ugly harmonic in the exhaust note making it sound strange, you can apply a negative waveform at the same frequency and cancel it out. On some luxury cars, active exhaust is used to quiet to the entire exhaust note.
All these techniques can be combined, along with traditional techniques for exhaust tuning to make car sound pretty much however the engineer wants it to sound.