1st Place - Innovative Product Development: Front Bass project

All music fans savor the tracks that continue to send a shiver down the spine even after the umpteenth hearing. For me, that’s when guitarist Laurindo Almeida riffs on a theme from the Moonlight Sonata while his colleague Ray Brown plucks his bass to the melody of that famous jazz standard Round Midnight. Of course jazz may not be everyone’s thing, especially an esoteric mix of Ludwig van Beethoven and Thelonious Monk.

However, irrespective of the chosen music, the acoustics inside the black Mercedes-Benz S-Class are so warm and pure, so precise and present, that you’d think you were listening to the very latest prototype speakers in a test lab or unspeakably expensive monitors in a state-of-the-art recording studio. Ray Brown takes his instrument to the very lowest reaches of the bass register, down to the kinds of frequencies that are guaranteed, especially at high volumes, to set the very best subwoofers quivering — even when they are fixed in a rear shelf that’s reinforced with steel tubes — and to muddy the sound. Yet even at such nether regions of the scale, the resonation of each individual string remains perfectly clear, as if the individual tones had been carved out with a scalpel.

This first impression is more than confirmed by a second sample of music: Herbert von Karajan is directing the Berlin Philharmonic through “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Suite No. 1 of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt. In the space of just two minutes, the world-famous conductor takes the orchestra from the equivalent of a balmy spring breeze to an all-encompassing hurricane of sound. And that’s precisely what the passengers of the S-Class hear: pure acoustic power — from the delicate beginnings of the first wind instruments to the final tutti, with more than 120 musicians giving it their all, as Peer attempts to make his escape from the palace of the Mountain King.

The S-Class sound system does more than just replicate — in both an audible and palpable sense — the huge bass resonance that a symphony orchestra is capable of creating. In a piece like the finale of Grieg’s Suite No. 1, the greater the number of instruments playing together, the more difficult it is to distinguish them clearly from one another and to pinpoint them all precisely. But inside the S-Class, the acoustics also possess a transparency and a limpidity that is otherwise only found in the concert halls of architect and sound purist Alvar Aalto.

Onboard concert hall

The S-Class sound system creates a concert hall experience that fills a couple of cubic meters — thanks to the Front Bass project, this year’s winner of the Daimler Research Award in the category for Innovative Product Developments. In fact, the research and development team led by Norbert Niemczyk and Rainer Albus have comprehensively redrawn the boundaries of onboard audio experience. The idea first came to Albus three years ago: why not incorporate the bass loudspeakers into the vehicle body itself? After all, bass loudspeakers require a large and stable chassis with plenty of volume, so that their massive vibrations can pump out the low frequencies without any distortion.

Acoustically speaking, the ideal location was quickly identified in the front section of the body between the footwell and the engine compartment. The body shell is reinforced here with a steel framework to protect vehicle occupants in the event of a crash. This was also the origin of the Front Bass project name.

The project sounds simple, but it actually involved overcoming a whole range of hurdles. The reward, however, is a sound system — to be premiered, as standard equipment, in the follow-up model to the SL Roadster — that is genuinely one of a kind. And what about those music lovers who aren’t fans of jazz or classic? Just pop a disc of the Eagles into the CD player and lean back to the strains of Hotel California. Within seconds, it’s as if the S-Class were cruising down Ocean Drive borne along by waves of sound.