What do The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Lady Gaga and the Volvo EX90 have in common?
The sound of the legendary Abbey Road recording studios is coming to the new Volvo EX90.
British audio giant Bowers & Wilkins has joined forces with the London-based studios to recreate the sounds of the studios responsible for some of the music world’s biggest artists, including The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Lady Gaga.
It’s also where some of the movie world’s biggest blockbusters – most notably Star Wars – recorded their scores.
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The Abbey Road app will be added to the EX90 in quarter two of 2025 via an over-the-air software update to cars fitted with the premium 25-speaker Bowers & Wilkins system.
“We recognise that people want to play and control and have fun with their control settings,” says Dan Shepherd, Bowers & Wilkins director of partnerships. “We looked to our relationship with Abbey Road Studios.”
The Abbey Road mode adjusts various parameters of the sound reproduction, including the equaliser settings, reverberation and delays in when the sound is sent to different speakers.
There are settings for different studios, each with its own subtle nuances to sound reproduction designed to place the listener in some of the most famous rooms in music.
”The engineers talk about you can hear the characteristics of those rooms,” says Shepherd.
“So we measured the rooms and we captured and digitised how they sound.”
The Abbey Road app even adjusts the audio reproduction for being inside the studio or the control room where sound engineers would listen to the music being created.
It’s all about optimising the sound stage and characteristics to have them mimic as close as possible the audio sensation people get by listening to music in the various Abbey Road studios.
It helps that Abbey Road has for decades used Bowers & Wilkins speakers, something that provides the inspiration for the audio system in the EX90.
