Does a $200,000 Mercedes-Maybach Actually Get You a Good Sound System?

When it comes to listening to music in moving vehicles, I know of what I speak. As a young adult in the mid-Eighties, I made the lateral move from Walkman-addicted subway commuter to full-time long-distance hauler touring with They Might Be Giants. My musical partner John Linnell and I played as a duo in New York for a few years, but things got hectic when a few of our no-­budget videos sneaked into heavy rotation alongside peak Whitney Houston and the inevitable Rick Astley on MTV. Our Ford Econoline crisscrossed the U.S. countless times from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties, working the microcircuit of nightclubs friendly to the “college rock” sound. We spent a lot of time driving and listening, even though our entertainment options were confined to our slapdash mixtapes, trucker-song compilations, and, of course, the radio.

This story originally appeared in Volume 15 of Road & Track.

Fast-forward 35 years, and I’m still in the same band, now eight musicians strong. We are still making albums (even vinyl records!), and we’re still crisscrossing America. Some things have changed, though. We now typically play ­theaters, and we travel in a big old tour bus, each of us wearing earbuds, cocooned from one another, listening to our own podcasts, audiobooks, and Spotify accounts.

So I am here to do some close listening and guide you through a highly subjective aural taste test of three audio-tuned new cars. These vehicles all price out well above my paygrade, so I was not shopping! But for the readers always curious about an honest shootout or for those who have the means to become the custodians of these singular whips, this is for you.

Audio engineers report that cars are among the worst places to achieve quality sound reproduction. It’s not the size of the interior or the relatively small speakers, but, according to these hi-fi know-it-alls, it’s the windows. Glass is about the most unkind material for sonic quality, reflecting rather than absorbing sound, so designers typically minimize its use in acoustic spaces. Yet despite these nagging truths, the popularity of windows in cars endures.

So let’s get down to the testing. For our consideration, we have three luxury vehicles: a Mercedes-Maybach, a Range Rover, and a Rolls-Royce. All have extraordinary appointments and the smoothest of rides with the quietest of engines. It’s in this rarefied segment of the vehicle market that the battle for audio supremacy is fiercest, with manufacturers stuffing their cars with dozens of speakers, bewildering digital-manipulation programming, and the most elite audio brand names available. One could assume the cars’ manufacturers are not cutting corners in their quest to achieve stellar audio for their customers. But did they deliver?

In comparing these systems, my goal was to be consistent and systematic. I used a fixed playlist to audition in each car and set all the systems to neutral EQ, which is to say, no treble or bass boosting, as best I could control. I listened to all songs while on the road. The test audio files were downloaded from Spotify in the highest-quality setting. Not exactly FLAC-format lossless files, but quite respectable sounds. I connected my iPhone to each vehicle via Bluetooth.

First up was the 2022 Mercedes-Maybach S580. This bedazzled sedan comes standard with the Burmester High-End 4D Surround Sound system, and well it should since the car’s base price nears $200,000. The system is a $6730 option on the less opulent non-Maybach S-class. The Burmester sports a whopping 30 speakers, including five subwoofers, two amplifiers, and a total of 1750 watts of power. Like virtually all of today’s high-end systems, the Burmester’s interface is incorporated into a centrally mounted touchscreen. Trying to set up the Bluetooth, I fumbled with the screen, cascading from the hieroglyphs of a graphical interface to proper words for a couple of minutes. After getting completely lost and momentarily blasting the Sirius MSNBC channel at about one billion decibels, shocking everyone’s ears, Road & Track contributing editor (and They Might Be Giants longtime manager and my driver for this experiment) Jamie Kitman took command of the controls and zeroed in on the task at hand. To my shame, he got things sorted in seconds.

Once the system was on, the music was immediately pumping, but it also had an exaggerated, out-of-phase quality reminiscent of an Eighties boombox. I knew something was not neutral about this setup and poked around to find a series of “Personal Sound Profile” presets. The system was set to 3D-Sound, but there was also an option for Pure, which, as the name implies, sounded far more natural.