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Photograph: Courtesy of B & W
It’s slightly strange to think that despite its ubiquity, Abbey Road Studios has never attempted to be the public face of anything. It is globally renowned as a facilitator of some of the most celebrated moments in popular and classical music, but it has never been directly customer-facing in any respect. Until now, that is.
The studios’ association with Bowers & Wilkins goes back several decades—the company’s loudspeakers first made their way into the Abbey Road’s control rooms back in the early 80s and have been there, in one guise or another, ever since.
A demo of the app inside Abbey Road Studios.
Abbey Road Studio Mode is the latest product of the collaboration between the two companies. But rather than Bowers & Wilkins simply providing more of the equipment necessary for the day-to-day operation of Abbey Road Studios, the pair have instead created a unique digital audio algorithm that intends to create the authentic sound of the world’s most famous and celebrated recording studio. Then, by way of an encore, they have made it user-definable, via an attractive and intuitive user interface that is slotted into the new, witheringly expensive Volvo EX90.
Volvo has been one of Bowers & Wilkins’ automotive partners for the best part of a decade now, and at a launch event at Abbey Road Studios, WIRED was able to get a hands-on demonstration of the technology inside the EX90, as well as speak with some of the people involved with its development and implementation—not to mention whether we might see this the new sound mode crop up elsewhere.
WIRED also got a demo of Abbey Road Sound Mode inside the Volvo EX90.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about the prized and fetishised sound of Abbey Road Studios is that to a certain extent it relies on various bits of homemade, one-of-a-kind equipment that looks, to the untrained eye, like it might be more at home in a quiet corner of the set of Doctor Who.
“The first thing I asked myself when Bowers & Wilkins approached us about Studio Mode is how do we make it authentic?,” Mirek Stiles, Abbey Road Studios’ Head of Audio Products tells WIRED. “Abbey Road and its parent company EMI manufactured its owner compressors, suppressors and the like, especially during the 1950s and 60s, so how do we capture that sound?”
Which means that not only did Bowers & Wilkins, along with Abbey Road Studios, find themselves attempting to capture the ‘sonic fingerprint’ of a physical room and import it into the digital domain, but they also found themselves trying to replicate the effects of unique, one-off spreaders, compounders and other Heath Robinson-esque studio equipment. This kind of equipment at Abbey Road Studios is the stuff of pro recording legend - so much so that when one of these artefacts becomes available, interest is profound and the bidding is feral.
Despite the obvious and considerable challenges presented in bringing Abbey Road Studio Mode to market, Mirek seems uncomplicatedly happy with the results. “A car cabin is such a small and unpromising environment. But I already had some tools that I thought might help—and what’s important to an authentic sound is the recording equipment in the studio and the techniques the recording engineers employ. Once the studio sound is mapped in the physical sense, a lot of experimentation results in a reliable formula.”
I’ve heard Abbey Road Studio Mode in action, and quite frankly there’s no arguing with its effectiveness. A colourful and immersive user interface, almost reminiscent of a screen from Garage Band, allows a Volvo EX90 owner to dial through a 180-degree horizontal plane between ‘vintage’ and ‘modern’ studio sound, while vertical adjustment between the studio room and the control room is available too. The user can select a position on either of these two axes to get the sound they’re happiest with, and enjoy a visual display that feels streets ahead of any other automotive in-car audio experience currently available.
The amount of audio influence this interface can exert really has to be heard. The difference between the two extremes (completely ‘modern’ and fully in ‘the studio’ compared to entirely ‘vintage’ and completely in ‘the live room’, for example) is pronounced - and when compared to the regular EX90 processing doing its thing through the Bowers & Wilkins array it’s an entirely different order of reproduction. It’s not so much that it’s detailed, convincingly staged and impressively dynamic, you understand—the regular EX90 set-up offers all this as it is. It’s more to do with the tonality, the quality of the frequency response and the harmonic insight that’s available—and that’s when listening to music that’s never seen the inside of Abbey Road Studios.
A closer look at the app interface.
Users can adjust the sound to their taste.
Switch to something that began its life there—Come Together by The Beatles, for instance—and you can almost feel the hand of history. The good people of Abbey Road Studios are happy to tell you that The Beatles made 190 of their all-in total of 216 recordings in Abbey Road Studio 2 , and when you hear this band’s recordings in Abbey Road Studio Mode, it’s hard not to feel transported. And that’s in a stationary vehicle.
This, it hardly needs saying, is a lot of trouble to go to in order to offer Volvo EX90 customers a little something extra to make them feel super-good about their purchase. The technology that has created Abbey Road Studio Mode is quite obviously tailor-made and ready to find a home in other applications—headphones, soundbars, other automotive brands, you name it.
As joint owners, Abbey Road Studios and Bowers & Wilkins are predictably coy about what’s next, but even though details are far from forthcoming, no one at the launch event seemed ready to deny that Abbey Road Studios Mode will see service in other products sooner rather than later. Sure, Volvo may be enjoying a period of exclusivity - but it seems safe to say that you’ll be able to enjoy the Abbey Road experience elsewhere fairly soon, even if you’re not ready to spend big on a new electric car.