Happy New Year!


Welcome to 2025. We thank you for your support and continue to rely on it in order to vent our passion for all things music and car audio. The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed that we have split our monthly newsletter into smaller, more manageable chunks. This is simply because many of you are too busy to study everything we say in one go.


We are on the cusp of releasing a new issue of the magazine. This will be our best issue yet, with more cars and some actual breaking news, too!


In the meantime, listen to our not-so-hidden track in your car. I really enjoyed the mix of acoustic and electronic instruments on this brand-new track, and it fits quite nicely with our Top Five below! The timbre of the trumpet sounds great on top of the keyboards. Can’t hear it? Why not get a “check-up from the deck up” and see if your in-car sounds can be improved?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdFqnSY2o4w

https://open.qobuz.com/track/275830081

https://tidal.com/browse/track/345861909?u


Another trip down memory lane this month brings us to the first-ever article we wrote, where we reviewed specific tracks to describe how a system sounded! It seems a very obvious thing to do now, but there you have it. Although some of the equipment mentioned is no longer available in its original form, we are still pretty proud of the track review part and hope you enjoy reading or rereading it.

https://www.drivingsounds.co.uk/articles/archive/issue-3/immaculate-audio

Top Tunes


I recently spent some time at an exhibition chatting with Mark Harris. Mark is the newest employee of high-end car audio distributor FOUR Car Audio. He is supplementing its already creditable technical support capabilities and also helping build a catalogue of 3D print files for speaker rings.


Mark is familiar with car audio and has already impressed me with his eclectic taste in music. Here is a current Top Five of mostly club classics from him.


Brave New World (The Opera Song) - Jurgen Vries, CMC (Classical Rework)

Don’t Mess With My Man - Lucy Pearl

Put ‘Em High - Stonebridge & JJ (Club Mix)

Rapture - iio, Nadia Ali

Take It Back - Toddla T


If you would like to submit a Top Five of your own, simply email them to: editorial@drivingsounds.co.uk

As we approach the closing date for the printed copy of the imminent issue of Driving Sounds, we have been looking at new vehicles and the audio systems fitted to them. We know from our partners that the market for aftermarket car audio upgrades is still extremely buoyant, including with brand-new cars. Some of these are shipped from car dealer, directly to car audio installer. There are two main reasons for this. Either the standard audio is genuinely awful, and we have heard several of these, or the purchaser is used to listening to much better quality elsewhere. A good quality Bluetooth set-up or sound bar-equipped TV can sound leagues better than the system in a brand-new car.


We are thrilled to see and hear that there is so much demand for better-quality listening. There is a knock-on effect, too. People are far less genre-specific in their listening. It is typical for people to listen to anything from Jazz to classical to prog-rock rather than just consuming chart pop music, which seems now to be the domain of the TikTok generation.


Variety is the spice of life, and we hope this continues to be the case so that we get opportunities to continue reporting on people’s musical journeys.


Thank you for sticking with us, we look forward to doing more!


Take care,



Carl

Editor