Harman Kardon will supply the entertainment bundle for Land Rover...

discrete surround sound system in the U.K. Wed. at musician Peter Gabriel’s recording studio, built alongside a 200-year-old water mill deep in the Wiltshire countryside. For the event, Gabriel’s recording engineer, Ben Findlay, made and mixed a live recording of Daby Toure, an artist for Gabriel’s Real World label, for playback demonstrations in the new Rover. The Logic 7 car system uses an optical bus and a 7.1 decoder to feed 14 speakers powered by a 710-w digital amp. The design goal for the system was to give rear seat passengers a frontal soundstage as good as the image front seat passengers hear, “even though a car is a small space and everyone is sitting off-axis,” said Tim Nind, vp of Harman’s Acoustic Systems Group. The Logic 7 decoder generates surround from stereo, or reproduces discrete Dolby and DTS multichannel source material for music, with movie playback possible in the rear seats. Progressive staggered-delays and frequency roll-off to the rear of the car -- combined with logic steering and stronger separation between the center and stereo front channels than usual for home systems -- hold the image of music vocals or movie dialog firm at the front even for rear seat passengers. Harman has been working with Land Rover for 13 years and the 2005 car will be the first use of Logic 7 discrete playback for autosound. Despite the multiple music sources included, DAB terrestrial digital radio isn’t among them. “It’s something we are looking into. But DAB digital radio won’t be standard before the 2008 range,” a Land Rover spokeswoman told us. Recently in the U.S., Cadillac previewed its 2005 STS sedan with DTS-supplied multichannel audio system. It plays DTS audio titles in surround but DVD-Audio only in stereo, and has the first factory-implementation of a rear center- channel speaker. An AV input under the front console armrest lets drivers connect an MP3-type portable to the system.