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Comment by MRSallee | Hacker News Reader

As a motor vehicle enthusiast, I think it's important to distinguish "real noises intentionally amplified by physical audio routing" and "electronic recordings or audio processing played through speakers."

I don't object to routing engine noises to the cabin to allow for a loud-feeling vehicle (without necessarily being loud to people outside the car). To me, this isn't fake. The driver experiences real engine noise, with efforts to circumvent sound-deadening that comes in modern cars.

Playing recorded engine noises and/or digitally transforming sound is fake to me. It's a lie. I haven't driven a car that does this, but my guess is that it's noticeably simulated.

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Perhaps it's because I have no interest whatsoever in cars, but I have trouble seeing the distinction.

If the idea is that certain sounds are merely the side effect of attributes which are themselves desired for reasons other than their sound, like a powerful engine, then it seems like any intentional design to produce or amplify those sounds are completely useless. What the driver wants is the actual attributes which produce the sound as a side effect, and if those attributes are achievable and verifiable without hearing those certain sounds, then the driver should still be satisfied.

If, on the other hand, certain sounds are desirable on their own, because of aesthetics or whatever, then the driver should be satisfied if those sounds are produced, regardless of how they're produced.

Playback recordings are a facsimile. Even in my '08 1.6L Swift Sport I can very well hear and feel the exhaust pipe through the floor as it responds to various throttle inputs.

Haptic feedback is just as important to me as the sound, and is part of what makes a car feel alive, playful, and eager. IOW, fun.

I'm totally not against electric cars, but it just seems wrong to me to make them appear like what they're not (i.e IC engines). I'd rather enjoy a Tesla Roadster in its brisk silence than with any added artefact, especially one trying to mimic an ancient, physically unrelated technology.

> is part of what makes a car feel alive, playful, and eager. IOW, fun.

Car porn, literally.

Jings. In what world does anything being fun become 'literally pornography'...

It's becoming annoyingly common ("earth porn" for pictures of nature, etc). Your use of "Jings" however has brightened up my day. Crivvens!

Indeed, but that is (still) surely 'figuratively porn'. Call me a traditionalist, but 'literally porn' is for getting people turned on sexually.

That kind of wording has been polluted, as opposed to Jings, which I've literally heard for the first time.

Think of it this way. Enhancing the engine sound is like optimizing the acoustics of a concert hall - you're still listening to nothing but the sounds from the orkestra. Artifically playing a prerecorded engine sound, is like sitting in a room full of speakers and amplifiers. You still hear the orkestra, but only a prerecorded version. The result might be the same, but there are subtle differences.

I think that highlights the difference for me: you come to the orchestra to hear the music. People like the sound of a car revving because they associate it with engine power, but the revving itself isn't inherently desirable; can you imagine generations growing up without ever seeing a fuel-burning car, but still associating the loudness and deepness of a car's speaker's rumbling with its power?

People like the revving noise for the same reason a ringing bell makes a dog drool.

> the revving itself isn't inherently desirable

I'm not sure that is quite true. I like a deep rumbeling bass, anything from explosions, thunder, or music - I do however nok like higher frequency sounds, such as jet engines, or a 18k rpm F1 engine. A traditional large reving engine is like that low frequency sound.

> People like the revving noise for the same reason a ringing bell makes a dog drool.

But isn't that true for the vast majority of things we enjoy. People find different things beautiful, based on what they assosiate it with.

Just because the symbol's original meaning is no longer relevant doesn't mean we should get rid of the symbol. We still use a floppy disk as the save icon in every software, after all.

It's the same as hearing a recording of someone playing the violin vs. the real thing. Even with the best audio system you can still tell it's just a recording.

And I don't treat the sound the engine makes as a side effect of other attributes - it's just as important as acceleration or fuel consumption.

The real thing is also a recording, it's the memory of the music and the playing skill recorded in the violinist's mind, with the musician and his violin as the playback device rather than a speaker. You prefer the acoustic qualities of one type of playback device over the other, but that doesn't make it any more or less "real" for any commonly accepted definition of "real".

...I honestly can't tell if you are serious. Your argument is basically that everything is real, because sound coming from the speakers is no less real than the sound coming from an actual violin. Should I have used a term "artificial" then? Just like artificial diamonds are not the same as real diamonds, artificial sounds produced by a speaker are not the same as sounds made by a real violin. Like someone else said - the difference is the same as there is between attending a concert and sitting in your room listening to a CD. You could even argue that with a sufficiently advanced audio system, the aural experience is exactly the same, so technically they are the same. And that would be true, if humans were robots - but we experience a whole set of irrational emotions,and that's why a lot of people prefer being at a concert to listening to a recording, having real diamonds instead of mass-produced ones, or using actual sugar instead of sweeteners - even if the sensory experience produced is no "more or less "real" for any commonly accepted definition of "real". And that's why I would personally prefer having an actual combustion of fuel to be producing sounds in my car, instead of the speaker system , thank you.

Hey, preferring some playback devices because of your cultural background is just as valid as preferring some of them because they have higher pitches. You like what you like. But they're all "real".

Artificial doesn't make sense here because music is manmade to begin with. I don't think it would make sense to call an artisanal handmade telephone any less artificial than your factory-stamped Cisco IP phone. Diamonds are naturally occuring, so there is actually a distinction there. As the manufacturing process matures, that distinction will remain, but 99% of people just won't care. Like with salt.

In that case, it sounds like you wouldn't mind if a car was able to play audio recordings of engine noises that you could not distinguish from noises coming from the engine.

Ultimately it comes down to opinion, but for me, it matters for reasons of authenticity. I want the sound I'm hearing to be the actual sounds the engine in my car is making, even if there is no sound at all. Am I a fool for wanting authenticity?

"I haven't driven a car that does this, but my guess is that it's noticeably simulated."

According to the article, BMW does this, and I can say from first-hand experience in a newer model that it's not noticeably simulated.

And folks are apparently already hacking their in-cabin sounds to sound like higher-performance models! (cf. http://jalopnik.com/someone-hacked-their-bmw-m135i-to-sound-... )

As neat as that sounds, I wonder what will happen when the amplifier and/or speakers start to give up the ghost in 5-10 years. I associate the word "BMW" with "wiring issues" so I'm skeptical of any system that requires unflinching reliability for the life of the car.

The 2015 Mustang with the turbo 4 cylinder has a similar system but the functionality can't be deactivated or tweaked in any way. Can you imagine the frustration of listening to the acoustic meddling through a blown speaker that you can't disable? I had a Lincoln Mark VIII where the stock amplifier fried itself when I was on the highway. It blasted static with wildly varying pitch at full volume for 5 minutes before I could safely pull over and pull the fuse. It was literally maddening.

As a fellow driving enthusiast, I agree. When shopping for my last car, the manufacturer's outgoing model had a sport exhaust setting but did not pipe exhaust noise into the cabin. The incoming model did. (Note this is an actual mechanical opening or tube, not BMW-style synthesized noise.)

I ended up with the special-edition outgoing model for other reasons, including greater horsepower, but wouldn't necessarily object to piping in exhaust noise. Playing back recorded engine noise, on the other hand, seems just wrong to me.

Tangentially, a neighbor one street over has a pair of Ferraris that he and his wife track at Laguna Seca. I can always hear when they drive by (rarely, they have other cars they use on a daily basis) and it's a splendid exhaust note.

Say goodbye to that note; the newer cars will be turboed which muffles the noise significantly.

What if real engine noise is recorded in one part of the car, and then played back in the cabin?

The Coconut Effect will come into play.

I feel the same way. I have a 1982 Chevy C10 pickup, and the original owner had put "Flowmaster" pipes on it for a louder, but still natural, sound. With the original engine, it sounded impressive, perhaps more so than the engine actually was.

Not long after I got the truck, the original 305ci engine gave up the ghost (it had over 400,000 miles so it had had a great run) and I had a 350ci engine built for it and installed. None of the pipes were changed, and the exhaust manifold was a factory fit version for that new engine, not custom headers. Still, the sound difference was night and day. Now the truck positively thunders, where it merely growled before. While a lot of its sound can be attributed to the custom pipes and muffler, a lot of it is in the engine too.

To me, it's similar to the difference between a miked acoustic guitar and an acoustic-electric. Either way it's amplification, but the former sounds pure and natural, whereas the latter sounds forced and way too bright, and loses out on the nuances of left-hand technique and right-hand flourishes, as it only picks up the string vibrations themselves instead of the entire ambiance.

This reminds me of the trams in Manchester, which play the recorded sound of a horn through some little tinny speaker. I'm sure it's cheaper than having an actual noise-making device (I think other trams use bells?), but it sounds ridiculous.

If you're going to fake it, you should at least do a good job of it.

Living in Manchester, this amuses me too.

This discussion is very reminiscent of the debate over skeuomorphic user interfaces. As with the transition from physical interfaces to virtual ones, which has drawn interface designers towards the use of skeuomorphic elements to varying extents over the years, we are in another period of technological transition away from normally aspirated internal combustion towards quieter, more efficient means of making motion. To ease the transition for the conservative masses, some degree of skeuomorphism will be needed at first (although I personally think that creating synthetic engine noise is a horrible, horrible idea!).

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