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No. 3469
Anonymous
14th September 2015 Monday 11:46 am
3469
>>3468
>The feel of the steering, of the buttons and switches, the view over the bonnet, they're all designed to evoke a certain feeling.
And this is often achieved with surprisingly simple means, because after all, even if a button feels like it was chiseled from a block of solid metal, it needs to be cost efficient. A lot of this is done simply by sound deadening; for example, I once had to remove a door card of my Audi A4, a car on which the doors would clunk with the sumptuous sound of a padded safe door. But most of this was simply done by sticking a sheet of rubber mat on the door frame, and by putting a 2-millimetre layer of closed cell foam right under the door card. Other than that, the door frame was no different from the doors of my brother's '98 Renault Espace, which sounded like a monkey shitting in an empty tin bucket.
>Before electronically augmented engine noise, manufacturers still artificially fiddled with the engine noise by tuning the exhaust system. In a sense, engine notes have been 'fake' for decades, because they have been deliberately engineered to sound a certain way. Electronic augmentation has come about largely because of widespread turbocharging - as any F1 fan knows, an efficient turbo soaks up most of the natural exhaust noise.
True; but then again, even on naturally aspirated engines, there have always been people who fiddled with the exhaust to give it a more wholesome sound. I'm not sure where fakery really begins; it is nearly impossible to design an exhaust system which will not affect the sound of an engine in one way or another. Because most of the sound does come out of the exhaust, and only part of it is emitted by the engine block itself, and because your engine is tucked away under the bonnet, you hear even less of it over the exhaust.
Anyway, here's a bit of exhaust porn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0_GCuim9kY
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