The Final Frontier of Luxury in Autos Is Sound
Everyone from Gen Z to CEOs being chauffeured now expect concert hall acoustics in the place where they listen to music the most.
Illustration by Dohee Kwan for Bloomberg Pursuits
It’s 8 p.m. on a Monday, and I’m sitting with Nick Rives in a dark recording studio at Dolby Laboratories Inc. in San Francisco, listening to SZA’s soulful soprano float over Kendrick Lamar’s urgent lyrics as they sing All the Stars during the halftime show of Super Bowl LIX.
Rives, the Grammy-nominated director of audio engineering for Universal Music Group NV, mixed the original studio track for that song. He’s ensconced at the center of a dozen soundboards studded with hundreds of knobs, his scruffy beard and flannel shirt belying the precision he employs to perfect the work of artists including Bob Dylan and Billie Eilish, as well as the posthumous remastering of Bob Marley’s oeuvre.