Car cabins create unique acoustics with no ideal listening position.

Evidence

An automobile cabin is a distinctive space for listening. The programs are generally in stereo, but there is no symmetrical stereo seat, so nobody hears uncompromised stereo. Surround presentations are advantageous and upmixing is common. Listeners are in the acoustical near field of some of the loudspeaker transducers (with their very adjacent boundaries), in a space that has some strongly reflective windows, but which is overall acoustically well damped and filled with large sound scattering seat backs and headrests. The bass in cars can be excellent as there are no very low-frequency cabin modes, although they and mechanical resonances exist at higher frequencies. The transducers are located for convenience within the structure of the automobile, not for an optimal integrated performance as separate full-bandwidth channels. A lot of signal processing is required to achieve anything resembling the auditory experience one has in a normal room. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 585

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing understanding of listening rooms as infrastructure — the car cabin is an extreme case of ‘room as unwanted acoustic container’.