Dirac and Polestar Collaborate for Ultimate Driving Sound Experience

Audio pioneers Dirac and EV innovator Polestar have expanded their collaboration to elevate the audio performance of the new Polestar 3 with Dirac Opteo Professional, the company's signature automotive sound optimisation solution.

Already offering a high-performance audio experience thanks to a 1610-watt Bowers & Wilkins Surround Sound audio system, combining that with Dirac Opteo Professional promises to "render a clear, balanced, and immersive sound experience that's consistent across every seat of the vehicle", says the company.

Roger Hjelm, Head of Connected Car at Polestar, told StereoNET:

With Polestar 3, we wanted to deliver a high-end audio experience that allows passengers to feel the depth and breadth of the soundstage, experiencing every subtlety, no matter where they're sitting in the car. To accomplish our goal, we collaborated with Bowers & Wilkins to provide class-leading in-car audio, then relied on Dirac to ensure the speakers sound their best. Our collaboration with Dirac, a fellow Swedish innovator, helped us ensure that our customers experience the market's best automotive sound system.

A vehicle's cabin is regarded as one of the most challenging acoustic environments in the world - ask any car audio enthusiast who goes to great lengths to equalise speaker path distances and apply sound deadening under the carpet and in the doors, for example. In-car speakers traditionally can't perform as well as high-end stereo or home cinema systems, regardless of their price point and design, at least until technological advances such as Digital Signal Processing (DSP) came along.

Speakers can't necessarily be positioned optimally in a vehicle as they would in a large room. As a result, the output from speakers interferes with each other, causing distortion and reducing audio clarity. The interference increases when more speakers are fitted. Further, the hard surfaces of the cabin also add unwanted sound colouration, resulting in a muddy, booming sound that can make it difficult to discern where sound is coming from.

Featuring patented multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) mixed-phase impulse response correction technology, the Dirac Opteo Professional solution, combined with the Bowers & Wilkins Surround Sound speaker system, is said to address these challenges by enabling all the speakers in a car to work intelligently together and co-correct each other's impulse response.

Dirac says its solution "erases" the car cabin – removing the unwanted effects of the cabin in ways previously regarded as possible only in theory. It also "creates ideal loudspeaker responses for maximum fidelity and achieves unparalleled bass performance". The company also boasts:

Sound is richer, more balanced, more dynamic, in every seat. Occupants hear deep, clean, and tight bass free of resonances, rarely heard in a car.

Dirac's Opteo Professional solution is built upon Dirac's industry-first Intelligent Audio Platform (IAP). It is a data-driven measurement system, semi-automatic tuning tools, integrated sound optimisation algorithms, and middleware to any hardware platform. This enables manufacturers to achieve perfected sound faster, more easily, and consistently across vehicle models.

Lars Carlsson, Dirac General Manager of Automotive Audio, added:

With the Dirac-enabled Bowers & Wilkins Surround Sound system, the Polestar 3 doesn't just produce a premium sound experience for a car – it produces a premium sound experience in general, on par with a high-quality home theater system. Dirac is proud to partner with another Swedish tech leader that's pushing the boundaries of product performance through innovation and design.

Bowers & Wilkins' Surround Sound audio system has been specifically designed for the Polestar 3. It comprises 25 high-performance speakers and the brand's proprietary technologies – Tweeter-on-Top and Continuum Cone – to ensure an unrivalled audio experience. 

For more information visit Dirac