To learn more, we asked Morten Hermansen, Senior Sound Tuner – Car, to join us on our Ask the Expert show, and for a meeting to talk about his work as a sound tuner and how the job has evolved over the years. According to Morten himself, he’s tuned around 50 cars for Volkswagen and spent nearly ten weeks every year for the last decade at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Wolfsburg. Here we talk about how work with the Passat B6 compared with the Passat B8 and how technology has changed in-car audio. Our lightly edited conversation follows.
Christopher Kjærulff: Tell about your time at Dynaudio, Morten. How long have you been here and what have you been up to in your time here?
Morten Hermansen: I have worked at Dynaudio for more than 15 years. I started in 2000 and then left for another company around 2005, but after little more than a year away from Dynaudio I was asked if I wanted to come back – and I did.
In that time, I’ve worked on a few different things. At first, I designed woofers, midranges, and tweeters for our Hi-Fi products and we still use the basic designs of them in some of our current drive units. But eventually, I began to focus more on in-car audio projects.
Why the change?
We needed more people working on our in-car sound projects in 2002. We had just agreed to start working with Volkswagen, so my first car project became the Passat B6. It was a ton of fun and a learning process – it was pioneering work we did back then.
What do you mean with pioneering work?
At that time, high-end audio systems for cars weren’t common. In many cars, the premium option was only upgraded drive units, but they still used four-channel head unit amplifiers. We used a separate 10-channel amplifier in the B6, which meant we had to write the playbook as we went along - It didn’t really exist.
Can you tell a little more about the Passat B6 project – what was the task?
The task was to develop and build drive units for the Passat B6: two types of woofer, one type of midrange, and two sizes of tweeters. However, Volkswagen had predefined where we could put them and what size the drive units could have, so we had to build something that fitted into those specifications. And, we got Volkswagen to agree on using the separate 10-channel amplifier I talked about to make sure we could design and implement a tuning that offered the real Dynaudio sound experience.
We had to figure out how to control all of those channels and keep them in check. And as I said, it was relatively unexplored territory back then. In addition, software anno 2002 was pretty poor compared with what we have available today. And to make it more uphill, even getting the car to understand what we were trying to do was a challenge. Nonetheless, we figured it all out and made it work, but it wasn’t easy.
I know you more recently worked on the Passat B8. With those tools available, how does that project compare with the B6?
In comparison, we use a powerful 16-channel digital amplifier with 680W of total output with a state-of-the-art 16-channel DSP processor. But, we also have much more computer processing power to play with than we did in 2002. And, we put that to good use by adding advanced digital signal processing with complex algorithms to control timing down to the millisecond. And when we make changes, we do it with absolutely no fuss on a laptop; changes that apply instantly.