In life there are always certainties: the sun always rises in the east, Tottenham Hotspur will always have a meltdown anytime they get near the Premiership title and most factory-installed original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in-car entertainment (ICE) systems will leave this writer underwhelmed and uninvolved.
I said most because there are cars out there that boast of audiophile marques like Bang & Olufsen, B&W and Mark Levinson sound systems as standard kit but, sadly, the last time I checked, that isn’t an Aston Martin, Jaguar or Lexus parked in my car porch.
Not being a member of the 1% of the world for whom jet-setting the globe is a way of a life, the only way to improve upon bog-standard OEM ICE systems and their flattish soundstaging and limited tonal controls is to go through the aftermarket route.
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| The Legato Link and Teh (below) is seen installing the product in a car. |
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This, as you can imagine, involves a time-consuming and sometimes highly expensive process that can involve the installation of a new CD player and several amps, crossover networks and subwoofers with the odd soundproofing thrown in for good measure.
However, before you embark down this road, you have to check with your car dealership whether installing an aftermarket ICE system will void your car’s warranty.
Let’s imagine that either (A) you don’t want/can’t afford adding more equipment option or (B) your car will have its warranty null and voided if you do want to go down the “A” path.
What’s a music-loving car fanatic to do?
There's the Simonte Legato Link.
The name Simon Teh is well known in local ICE circles when it comes to installing high-quality ICE systems. For many years, Teh and his Tehnichi Audio outfit has sought to achieve audiophile quality sound in an environment that often makes it near impossible to do so.
By and by, he has been able to achieve this by going down the traditional route and fine-tuning the components to compensate for the acoustics of a car’s cabin.
He developed the Legato Link system over the past couple of years to meet the demand for customers who did not want to add more equipment to their existing ICE systems or were hampered by warranty restrictions but still wanted to listen to good music.
“The drawback of many OEM systems is that they deliver basic information. More often than not, there is a lack of definition and instrumentation. The tonal separation is also poor, especially when the volume is louder because this also raises the distortion levels in the background,” Teh said.
He also said the Legato Link was also designed to provide more definition from MP3 recordings that, by their very nature, are lacking in many background frequencies in order for a device like an iPod to store the huge number of song files that they are capable of doing.
How does it work? Suffice to say, Teh’s explanation of it was a mite technical, with terms like “suppression of spurious mechanical resonance in audio components” and “perfect mechanical ground” coming to the forefront.
At the end of the day, he said it was all about suppressing the mechanical properties that creates the problems in the first place.
“In mechanics, vibration also can be reflected and not transmitted depending on the surface and kind of material.
To properly evacuate vibrations, the connection between the various elements of the mechanical structure must have certain properties.
“The Legato Link has been produced with specially chosen materials combined in a cylindrical tube alongside a pair of special braided cables to form a device that is able to further promote clean signal transfer with maximum accuracy,” he added.
Teh said the significant end result of this was better dynamics and lower colourisation without the need for an amp, crossovers or a sub.
“All you need is just the car’s original speakers and, perhaps, a new pair of tweeters or more. The Legato Link should also not affect your warranty because it does not touch the car’s power supply or ECU. It just connects to the speaker output,” he added.
Now, for someone used to the joys of having two amps, passive crossovers and a 10-inch woofer rattling my spine, I initially found this hard to believe.
Yet, the Legato Link supported system in a test car, a Mercedes C230, and made me a believer.
The C230’s OEM ICE system had been augmented by two pairs of Legato Links, two pairs of Phass aftermarket speakers, two pairs of aftermarket Phass tweeters and that’s it.
And yet, after going through several pouches of CDs, the four occupants in the car were left gobsmacked by what they were listening to.
Essentially, the Legato Link is a one-trick pony but what a trick that is.
What it does is to take the shortcomings of many OEM systems and rips them to shreds. The OEM ICE system in that car provided the sort of depth and definition that was previously only ever available with an arsenal of amps and subs and post-OEM CD players.
The best thing about the Legato Link system was how honest its reproduction was.
It did not add any gloss to bad recordings or the lower levels often found with many first generation CDs from the 1980s.
What it did was what it did best, expanding on the limitations of the OEM ICE systems so that what was murky or gormless before now sounded interesting and involving.
Personally, I would still prefer all the mod cons.
There is something bloke-ish in being able to add more and more components into a car. And the idea of having a subwoofer so big that it takes up most of a car’s boot is almost Freudian and appeals to most men’s baser natures.
Yet, as an alternative, especially when you have those pesky warranty restrictions or are a little short in the funds department, then the Legato Link is a more than ideal alternative.
> Call Tehnichi Audio at tel: 03-7783 9662.