The Nissan Principal Acoustic Engineer, Patrick Dennis, measures many variables from all kinds of angles to ensure that your ear hears something pleasant.
A lot of serious thought and analytical data goes into the pleasant sounds emanating from your stereo system. And Patrick Dennis, Nissan’s Principal Acoustic Engineer, is the man behind the data to make it happen for Nissan and Infiniti. An electrical engineer by education, Dennis jumped straight into acoustics and never left. Now he heads up audio system, Bluetooth hands-free, and voice recognition technologies.
I got the chance to speak with Dennis to learn the ins and outs, literally, of sound. And learned quite a few interesting things along the way.
AUDIO OUT VERSES NOISE IN
In many ways, the first part of hearing good audio is first filtering out much of the noise a car generates on the road. Intuitively, you think that the acoustic engineers work closely with the noise, vibration, and harshness team to minimize that intrusion into your mobile concert hall. But, in modern times, those roles seemingly reversed.
“We work together,” Dennis says. “They (NVH engineers) use our audio system to help cancel out noise, so the system does both things. Not only does it cancel out noise, but it reproduces all the music and audio playback.”
The audio system receives several tools to achieve this, Dennis explains. “We have microphones placed strategically into the cabin itself and the system has to be fast enough to get the sound in, invert it, and send it back out and have it reach the ears about the same time as the other noise is coming in to cancel it out.”
And, new, more capable versions of this technology are on the horizon, ones that predict impending noises. “The next generation of that,” Dennis says, “they have what they call road noise cancelation. And there’s actually accelerometers on the suspension components because it needs to predict what that sound will be at the ear. It’s good up to about 1000 Hz because the wavelengths are manageable, 1000 Hz and below.”
Up to 1000 Hz sound waves, coming from the road, neutralized by the stereo. Fascinating!
OVERVALUED WATTS AND OTHER SIZE ISSUES
Quite often, you read about some 84-speaker stereo system with eight trillion watts, in the latest top-of-the-line, gotta-have-it, luxury vehicle. But do those specs really equate to quality sound? Not necessarily. Dennis prefers frequency response, SPL (sound pressure level) requirements, and distortion requirements. Much less advertised figures. Power—watts—certainly help but only when used well. More power is always good, but it, in of itself, does not mean a better sound system.
How about woofer size? Turns out size matters a lot less than placement. Here’s how Dennie explains it, “Woofers are very interesting, depending on where they are packaged in the car, you can get efficient gains. There’s something called a cabin gain. If you position the woofers in the corners of the car, you can get an actual good increase in the base, because you’re working with a small space.”
That’s actually true of speakers generally. Not the size, nor the total number, but what speakers the sound system uses and where engineers place them.
DON’T COMPRESS MY STYLE!
No sound system, or acoustic engineer for that matter, can completely overcome poor quality music files. Of course, Dennis agrees, and gave me a brief history lesson about the trajectory of music files.
“Yes, it’s funny,” Dennis says, “You can see the loudness wars when CDs became popular. You can see the level of how they’ve increased from the 80s to the 90s to the 2000s. And then, yeah, the dynamic range has been compressed so much.”
Dennis continued, “And then you have the mp3s come out and compress the data even more. That’s starting to get better because data is getting cheaper. And then you have the XSM type stuff, they’re trying to cram as many channels as (possible) on a certain bandwidth, they’re more about volume than quality of sound on certain channels.”
Fair warning: beware of your audio quality.
NISSAN AUDIO AT ITS BEST?
The best audio system Nissan offers, Dennis thinks, comes in the Infiniti QX80. It’s a Klipsch system with 24 speakers, strategically placed, of course.
“The new Kilpsch that came out, the 24-speaker,” Dennis said, “just because it has the height speakers and the position of the speakers. That’s what make it. It has the speakers in the right locations.”
And the new, 2025 Nissan Armada gets a 12-speaker version of the Klipsch. When I drove the Armada, Nissan set up a sound system demonstration and stressed how they placed the speakers to maximize sound. It’s lovely.
SUMMARY
Just like any other part of a car, a lot of smart people put a lot of work to make a vehicle’s sound system work well. Patrick Dennis dedicated much of his career to just that. His experience shows. I know I’ll start hunting for frequency response specs a lot more than before.
