The Iconic Abbey Road Audio Experience Is Coming to Cars—and Maybe Your Next Headphones

What’s perhaps most remarkable about the prized and fetishized sound of Abbey Road Studios is that to a certain extent it relies on various bits of homemade, one-of-a-kind equipment that looks, to the untrained eye, like it might be more at home in a quiet corner of the set of Doctor Who.

“The first thing I asked myself when Bowers & Wilkins approached us about Studio Mode is, how do we make it authentic?,” Mirek Stiles, Abbey Road Studios’ head of audio products tells WIRED. “Abbey Road and its parent company EMI manufactured its own compressors, suppressors, and the like, especially during the 1950s and ’60s, so how do we capture that sound?”

Which means that not only did Bowers & Wilkins and Abbey Road Studios find themselves attempting to capture the “sonic fingerprint” of a physical room and import it into the digital domain, but they also found themselves trying to replicate the effects of unique, one-off spreaders, compounders, and other Heath Robinson-esque studio equipment. This kind of equipment at Abbey Road Studios is the stuff of pro recording legend—so much so that when one of these artefacts becomes available, interest is profound, and the bidding is feral.

Despite the obvious and considerable challenges presented in bringing Abbey Road Studio Mode to market, Mirek seems uncomplicatedly happy with the results. “A car cabin is such a small and unpromising environment. But I already had some tools that I thought might help—and what’s important to an authentic sound is the recording equipment in the studio and the techniques the recording engineers employ. Once the studio sound is mapped in the physical sense, a lot of experimentation results in a reliable formula.”

I’ve heard Abbey Road Studio Mode in action, and quite frankly there’s no arguing with its effectiveness. A colorful and immersive user interface, almost reminiscent of a screen from Garage Band, allows a Volvo EX90 owner to dial through a 180-degree horizontal plane between “vintage” and “modern” studio sound, while vertical adjustment between the studio room and the control room is also available. The user can select a position on either of these two axes to get the sound they’re happiest with and enjoy a visual display that feels streets ahead of any other automotive in-car audio experience available.