The global car audio market is worth $11 billion in 2025 and on track to exceed $20 billion by 2034. More than 70% of consumers want a premium audio system in their next vehicle, according to the S&P Global Mobility Survey. The technology powering that growth? Increasingly, it is Dolby Atmos — and the engineering partnership between Dolby and HARMAN is at the center of it.
In this episode of Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling, host Stéphane Lagresle sits down with Andreas Ehret, Senior Director of Automotive at Dolby Laboratories, and Greg Sikora, Executive Director of Global Acoustic Systems Engineering at HARMAN International, to unpack what it actually takes to build a great in-car listening experience — from the physics of a car cabin to the future of agentic AI in the vehicle.
“Once you experience high-fidelity sound, you’re not going back. If you ever bought a premium system, next time you configure a car, that’s going to be the first option you pick — and you might sacrifice engine size.” — Greg Sikora, HARMAN International
Answer: What makes Dolby Atmos different in a car?
Dolby Atmos moves sound design from a speaker-centric model to a space-centric one. Instead of mixing audio to a fixed speaker layout, Dolby Atmos lets sound engineers place audio objects anywhere in three-dimensional space. The rendering engine then translates those objects to whatever speaker configuration is present in the vehicle. In a car cabin, where speakers surround every passenger, the result is a consistent, immersive sound field that moves with the content rather than anchored to two front channels.
Key Takeaways
- Dolby Atmos is an object-based audio format: sound sources are placed in 3D space, not mixed to specific speakers, making it naturally suited to the car environment.
- HARMAN’s acoustic engineering teams are involved as early as five years before a vehicle’s start of production — sometimes at the body-in-white stage, before the frame is finalized.
- HARMAN’s multi-brand portfolio (JBL, Harman Kardon, Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen, Revel, Mark Levinson, and others) allows it to match audio brand identity to OEM identity, not just price point.
- Dolby Atmos and hardware audio brands serve complementary roles: the hardware brand signals craftsmanship; Dolby Atmos signals the content format and the spatial experience it delivers.
- Software-defined vehicles and over-the-air updates are opening a new era for in-car audio — enabling refinement, new apps, and premium tier unlocks post-sale.
What is Dolby Atmos, and why does it belong in a car?
Dolby Atmos was originally designed for cinema, where it first appeared in 2012. The core problem it solved was simple: adding more speakers to a theater was not actually making the experience better. Dolby’s answer was to stop thinking about channels and start thinking about space.
“The fundamental paradigm shift of Dolby Atmos was to say, let’s create a format that is able to give the creative the idea to mix in space rather than mix to a dedicated speaker setup,” explains Andreas Ehret. A sound engineer can place a bird call, a helicopter, or a bass guitar at a specific location in three-dimensional space. The system then adapts that placement to whatever speaker configuration is playing it back — a cinema with 64 speakers, a soundbar with two, or a car with twelve.
The car is, acoustically speaking, a controlled room. Every speaker position is known. Every listener position is known. That predictability is exactly what Dolby Atmos is built to exploit. “You have speakers all around you. You want to fill this space with the best possible impression,” says Ehret. “That is why Dolby Atmos applies so naturally to the car.”
How does a premium audio system actually get into a car?
Most people assume getting speakers into a car is a late-stage integration job. In reality, it starts years before the first vehicle rolls off the line.
“Ideally, we need to be involved even before the body-in-white of the car is decided,” says Greg Sikora, “because some loudspeakers — like subwoofers — have to be considered at the body-in-white stage.” In traditional Western automotive timelines, that means HARMAN’s engineers are typically working with OEMs three to five years before start of production. In China, where vehicle development cycles have compressed to as little as 18 months, the involvement is earlier in proportional terms, even if the calendar time is shorter.
The first conversation is not about hardware. It is about experience. What does the OEM want the system to feel like? Which HARMAN brand fits the vehicle identity and market positioning? Sikora is direct on this point: “The first step is a common understanding of what we want to achieve. Which brand fits which car, which level of the market. The cost discussion is an effect of that conversation.”
Structural constraints follow: door thickness, cavity depth, cabin volume, door seal geometry, the available real estate for a subwoofer enclosure. None of this can be retrofitted easily. The acoustic architecture of a car is baked into its physical design.
Why does HARMAN carry so many audio brands?
HARMAN International’s automotive portfolio now includes JBL, Harman Kardon, Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen, Revel, Mark Levinson, Lexicon, AKG, and Infinity, following the Samsung acquisition and subsequent portfolio growth. The logic behind maintaining distinct brand identities is not marketing complexity for its own sake.
“The more brands we have at different segments, the higher the probability we’ll have a fit with different OEMs,” says Sikora. A Bowers & Wilkins system and a Bang & Olufsen system are not interchangeable even though both occupy the premium tier. One leans toward acoustic authenticity and speaker transparency; the other toward design and lifestyle. “Both have high expectations for sound quality, but achieved through different ways. Very different beasts, different purposes.”
For the OEM, this matters because the audio brand becomes part of the vehicle’s brand story. Putting the wrong audio brand in a car is not just a marketing mismatch — it is a story that does not hold together. “You cannot have a brand that has nothing to do with the OEM identity. There has to be a match,” says Sikora.
How do Dolby and HARMAN work together?
The two brands operate at different layers of the audio stack, which makes them complementary rather than competitive. HARMAN builds and tunes the physical audio system: amplifiers, transducers, signal processing, speaker placement, and acoustic calibration. Dolby Atmos sits at the content layer — it defines the format in which audio is authored and the rendering pipeline that plays it back.
“When Harman is involved, I know the basics are in a really good spot,” says Ehret. “And when Harmon is involved, I can put Atmos on top of almost everything they do.”
From a brand communication standpoint, the two also serve distinct purposes. Harman Kardon signals craftsmanship and speaker heritage. Dolby Atmos signals that the content in the car — music, podcasts, films — will be delivered in a spatial, three-dimensional format. “It’s complementary,” Ehret confirms. “From a positioning point of view, we come in to tell the consumer what the experience will feel like — sound all around you, sitting in the middle of it.”
This dynamic mirrors what has happened in adjacent industries. NVIDIA branding in a vehicle signals compute capability. OpenAI branding signals conversational intelligence. Dolby Atmos signals audio experience — independent of which hardware brand is under the speaker grilles.
Do younger car buyers actually care about audio quality?
A common assumption is that digital natives, raised on Bluetooth earbuds and compressed streaming audio, have lower expectations for sound quality. Sikora disputes this directly, and he has the research to back it up.
“Take an average person who has never experienced high-fidelity sound and put them in a car where it is available. I guarantee you, they will never want to go back,” he says. HARMAN has conducted scientific studies attempting to find meaningful regional differences in sound quality preference. The finding: there were no significant differences. High fidelity, defined as accurate reproduction of reality, is a universal standard.
What does change across generations is the expectation of accessibility and evolution. Younger buyers treat their car’s software the way they treat their phone. They expect updates, new features, personalizable experiences. “She wants to control the playlist. She wants to control what she’s playing,” says Ehret, describing how his own daughter interacts with in-car audio. “That’s the lesson for OEMs: they need to provide that accessibility.”
Sikora frames the next frontier as bringing premium audio to more price points. “The task is how to bring that experience on a lower-cost, optimized system with fewer speakers but still maintain that experience. I think Dolby is doing a great job of having different rendering options so you don’t always have to have a high speaker count.”
Does culture affect how a car’s audio should be tuned?
The question of regional audio preferences is one that comes up constantly in automotive audio. Sikora has a data-backed answer that challenges the received wisdom.
In blinded scientific listening tests, HARMAN found no statistically significant regional differences in sound quality preference. High fidelity is high fidelity, regardless of whether the listener is in Munich, Tokyo, or Detroit. But the perception that American buyers want more bass than Japanese buyers is not entirely wrong — it just has a different explanation.
“In the US, if you want to listen to loud music, you just crank up the system. You don’t care,” says Sikora. “In Japan, a very different culture — thinner walls, you observe the people around you — people typically don’t listen to music loud.” The difference in perceived bass preference is a difference in listening volume, not in tonal preference. At higher playback levels, a system physically needs more bass capability to maintain spectral balance.
In practice, the JBL sonic signature — powerful, energetic — travels with the brand globally. “The reason why Toyota wants JBL is because they want JBL,” says Sikora. Car-to-car tuning differences reflect the acoustic properties of specific vehicle models, not regional taste adjustments.
What does the future of in-car audio look like?
Both Ehret and Sikora point to three converging forces that will shape the next decade of in-car audio.
Autonomous driving frees up attention. As driver-assistance systems take on more of the driving task, passengers have more cognitive bandwidth for entertainment. “You have more time to actually do more in the car than just getting from A to B,” says Ehret. “In-car cabin experiences — entertainment, work — are just getting more important.” This is the structural argument for why audio quality matters more over time, not less.
Software-defined vehicles enable post-sale refinement. Over-the-air updates allow HARMAN to respond to how consumers actually use a system after it ships. “We see the car with the system on the market, we see how people respond, and we can react much faster,” says Sikora. New content partnerships, audio games, interactive apps, and streaming tier integrations can be delivered after the vehicle leaves the factory floor.
Agentic AI will change how the experience is accessed. The in-car cabin of the near future will integrate audio, screens, lighting, haptics, and vibration into a single context-aware experience. “There’s gonna be more screens — maybe a pillar-to-pillar screen — and all these things together will define a different in-car experience,” says Ehret. The missing piece today is intelligence: a system that understands what a driver or passenger wants and surfaces the right content without requiring manual navigation. “Play me my favorite Dolby Atmos playlist. It should just work,” says Ehret. “Today, it doesn’t.”
Sikora offers a useful frame for thinking about the pace of change: “Sound quality — that’s an evolution. Getting more out of less, that’s always the challenge, but it’s understood. But we need to go beyond that. We need to go to the full audio-visual, truly immersive experience. And on some parts, that’s a revolution.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Dolby Atmos require more speakers than a standard car audio system?
Not necessarily. Dolby Atmos is format-flexible by design. Its rendering engine adapts spatial audio objects to whatever speaker configuration is present in the vehicle. Ehret confirms that Atmos does not require significant additional hardware beyond what a well-designed baseline system already demands, though larger cabin vehicles do benefit from careful speaker distribution to avoid sound “holes.”
How early does HARMAN get involved in a vehicle development program?
Typically three to five years before start of production in European and North American programs. In China, compressed development timelines mean HARMAN gets involved proportionally earlier — sometimes at 18 months before SOP — but the involvement point in the development sequence is the same.
Is Dolby Atmos only for music, or does it apply to other in-car content?
Dolby Atmos applies across content types. While music is the dominant entertainment use case in cars today, the format supports films, podcasts, audio games, and interactive storytelling. As autonomous driving creates more passenger downtime, the relevance of Atmos for video content will grow.
How does HARMAN decide which of its audio brands to assign to a specific OEM?
Brand fit comes before cost. HARMAN’s team evaluates the OEM’s vehicle identity and brand values, then identifies which audio brand — JBL, Harman Kardon, Bowers & Wilkins, or others — aligns with both the emotional positioning of the vehicle and the target buyer profile. The cost structure is a downstream output of that brand selection, not the starting point.
Are regional tuning differences real, or is JBL the same everywhere?
HARMAN’s own research found no significant regional differences in audio preference in blinded listening tests. Perceived regional differences, such as the belief that American buyers want more bass, trace back to differences in listening volume habits rather than differences in tonal taste. The JBL sonic signature is maintained globally; tuning differences between models reflect vehicle acoustics, not geography.
What role will AI play in the in-car audio experience?
Both guests point to agentic AI as the next interface layer — a system that understands user context, surfaces the right content format, and removes the friction of navigating complex in-car menus. The specific capability they highlight is voice-driven Dolby Atmos content discovery: asking the car to play a spatial audio playlist should work seamlessly, with no intermediate steps. That capability does not reliably exist today, but it is the direction both companies are building toward.
Resources and References
- Dolby Atmos — official technology overview
- HARMAN Automotive — product portfolio and OEM partnerships
- S&P Global Mobility — source of the 70% premium audio preference survey cited in the episode
- Andreas Ehret on LinkedIn
- Greg Sikora on LinkedIn
Andreas Ehret is Senior Director of Automotive at Dolby Laboratories, based in Nuremberg, Germany. He has been with Dolby for over 18 years and leads global strategy for bringing Dolby Atmos to the automotive market. Greg Sikora is Executive Director of Acoustic Systems and HALOsonic Engineering at HARMAN International, leading a global team of approximately 120 acoustic engineers across Europe, the USA, Japan, Korea, and China. This conversation was recorded for Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling, hosted by Stéphane Lagresle.