My favorite playback is through my home cinema system with pretty high-end speakers and my Arcam AVR 850 receiver which has, guess what, Dirac Live on board!

Hello Rüdiger Fleischer, Product manager at Dirac. You joined Dirac about a year ago. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

My background is electroacoustics, loudspeakers to be more specific. It all started out with friends and me at school building their own speaker boxes with DIY drive units and hand soldered x-over networks. The hobby encouraged me to dive deeper into the topic and so the focus of my Electrical Engineering study at the Technical University of Munich was on everything around acoustics. Needless to say that my Diploma thesis also dealt with acoustics. Luckily there was a loudspeaker development and production site only 35 min drive away from my hometown and so I was able to make a profession out of my hobby. After 30 years in different roles, mainly technical sales, in the Automotive Audio industry with a strong focus on hardware I became intrigued of what can be done with intelligent SW. I heard about Dirac already in their early days, giving us at Harman hard days with BMW for their innovative algorithms. When they were looking for a new Product Manager for their automotive business segment I applied and voilá, here I am.

What’s the most exciting trends in the audio industry right now?

I am amazed by how miniaturization still progresses and how this in combination with intelligent SW can make the audio world so much more exciting. TWS earbuds to me are the best example of this trend. In combination with your smartphone and streaming services it will bring personalization to a new level. We will see them integrated in the automotive environment fairly soon I believe and that enables a whole bunch of new opportunities, like noise cancellation, personal communication with other passengers, listening to your preferred content without disturbing others and many more.

Finally, what we all want to know… What’s your favorite sound?

To some extent I like contemporary music, but I somehow got stuck to what I used to listen to in the end of the 70s and early 80s, which is Soul-Funk. I grew up with Earth, Wind & Fire and that kind of black music and I still love it. My favorite playback is through my home cinema system with pretty high-end speakers and my Arcam AVR 850 receiver which has, guess what, Dirac Live on board! I was so amazed by what this SW can do, a balanced, flat, deep and dry bass which kicks your belly, yeah….that’s how I like it. Other than that I enjoy the sound of my branded audio system in a Volvo S60, which is tuned by Dirac Unison and gives you such a nice and punchy bass as well. What shall I say, it’s all about the bass….