Cadillac adopted its famous “Standard of the World” slogan back in 1908, a statement that concisely defined its commitment to world-class engineering, technology, and style. And for a time, there weren’t many contenders who could challenge that claim.
General Motors’ luxury brand has seen its fair share of ups and downs in the decades since. But after recent stints chasing BMW’s ghost around the Nürburgring and briefly relocating its headquarters from Detroit to New York City, Cadillac finally seems to have come around to the notion that products speak louder than posturing.
Halo cars like the Celestiq would have been unthinkable from the brand a decade ago, yet the hand-built $400,000 flagship sedan has purportedly seen enough demand to create a backlog measured in years. But while the Celestiq has certainly raised Cadillac’s profile in the ultra-luxury realm, it’s the volume sellers that truly dictate an automaker’s fortunes. And that’s precisely where the company is currently making significant progress with models like the Vistiq and Escalade IQ.
In 2020, Cadillac inked an exclusive partnership with AKG Acoustics as part of a greater effort to enhance its offerings and produce audio systems that would be capable of going toe-to-toe with the best that Europe has to offer. Known primarily for its recording studio products, AKG microphones have been used in sessions with artists ranging from Buddy Holly and The Beatles to Nirvana and Beyoncé, while the company’s headphones are often used for accurate in-studio playback.
As EVs continue to gain ground with the motoring public, audio fidelity has become increasingly crucial concern in the luxury space. Removing the constant din of an internal combustion powertrain from the equation results in a much lower sound floor, which allows for greater audio clarity and detail in turn. So, rather than simply ramping up the wattage and speaker count, Cadillac sought to partner with a company that would bring an engineering-focused approach to the complexities of in-car audio.
The collaboration’s latest endeavor focuses on Dolby ATMOS, an audio standard which builds on traditional 7.1-channel surround sound with the addition of at least four overhead speakers that are designed to create a greater sense of both horizontal and vertical space. First seen in movie theaters and high-end A/V setups, Dolby ATMOS is starting to gain traction in mainstream music as well.
Streaming services like Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music now offer a wide selection of ATMOS-enhanced albums, and as artists, studios, and record labels are beginning to embrace the technology, these libraries are growing at a remarkable pace. Automakers are starting to take notice, too, and Cadillac now offers an ATMOS-capable AKG audio system in all of its 2026 EV models.
“I think this is going to be like the transition from mono to stereo back in the 1970s,” John Cockburn, GM’s Vehicle Chief Engineer for Cadillac BEVs, told me ahead of an ATMOS listening session and a panel discussion with record producers and Dolby representatives, and at Larrabee Studios in North Hollywood, California. “When used correctly, it can be an incredible tool to add clarity and immersion to the music that you listen to.”
Cadillac faced an uphill battle convincing me, though. When I get into a new press car with a high-end audio system, I tend to immediately disable “surround sound” and other enhancement filters because these technologies typically rely on software algorithms to make educated guesses about which speakers should produce a given frequency range in order to create that sense of space.
Because these alterations are usually being applied to a stereo audio file, which does not contain data that would actually inform the system’s decisions, I find the results are hit or miss at best. And, perhaps more importantly, they’re not an accurate portrayal of the artist’s original intent.
“Some of this comes down to customer expectations,” explained Brandon Wheeler, Director of Acoustic Systems Engineering for AKG’s parent company, Harman International. “The customer is saying, ‘I paid for 38 speakers, and I want to hear every one of them.’ We’re not trying to make decisions about what the creatives wanted to accomplish. We’re saying, ‘how do we create an immersive experience here?’”
Dolby ATMOS, by contrast, takes a very different approach to spatial audio. In order to create an ATMOS-enabled song, the audio must be mixed track-by-track in studios that have been set up to utilize the technology with direct guidance and support from Dolby Labs, an American firm that has been at the forefront of audio standardization initiatives for nearly a century. AKG’s job, meanwhile, is to ensure that those ATMOS-enhanced songs are properly translated from control rooms like Larrabee’s Studio 6 to the cabins of Cadillac’s latest models.
“I think AKG’s authenticity is really centered on ensuring that the components in the vehicle can deliver the same kind of capability that you would see in a high-end studio,” Wheeler told me. “Automotive is a tough space because of the limitations you’re presented with when it comes to packaging and faithfully reproducing those frequencies. Something we lean into heavily at AKG is our capability and competency in transducer design. That’s all done in-house.
“I always say that audio engineering in the automotive realm is not only about having acoustic expertise, it’s about knowing which compromises to make. Compromises are inevitable, whether it comes down to packaging and the integration of the speakers or the tuning decisions that you have to make. We’re incredibly critical of those considerations, so we tend to look at how those compromises affect the end goal. With an AKG system, we prioritize consistency in spectral response – the frequencies that you hear – across the entire vehicle. Spatial representation – where a particular sound is coming from – is incredibly important for us as well, and multi-channel technologies like ATMOS make that sense of space a lot more obvious.”
After the panel discussion, I struck up a conversation with Ryan Ulyate, a Grammy-nominated record producer who has worked with the likes of Tom Petty, ELO, and George Harrison. Ulyate has also been creating immersive audio mixes since 2004 and has produced Dolby ATMOS versions of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Wildflowers and Long After Dark, alongside other albums in recent years. I asked him for his perspective on adding these spatial qualities to songs that were originally created for traditional two-channel listening.
“The creators have an idea, an emotion that they want to convey,” he said. “My job as a producer is to make that emotion translate to the listener as purely as possible. There are people working really hard to make sure that the experience is true and faithful to the artist’s intent. When you hear a song that’s really well done in Dolby ATMOS, it feels like a religious experience. When it’s done right, and the technology enables you to get the full feeling of what that artist wanted to express, it’s amazing. I’m glad more people are getting a chance to listen to music like this.”
The next morning, Cadillac handed me the keys to an Escalade IQ loaded up with a curated playlist of Dolby ATMOS songs for the fifty-mile trek from West Hollywood to the Anaheim Convention Center for the annual National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) event, where AKG would later announce a new line of condenser microphones.
The songs on the playlist were primarily top 40 tracks that, while beautifully reproduced, didn’t really convey to me how ATMOS mixes differ from their traditional stereo counterparts in a vehicle with more than three dozen speakers. (To be fair, I must admit that I wasn’t familiar with most of these artists.)
Eager to suss out where this religious experience could be found, I started thinking about classic artists with songs that I know intimately, and who among them would have embraced this technology if it had been available to them at the time of the original recording. “Let’s see if there’s any Hendrix in ATMOS,” I said to my driving partner.
After a moment of back and forth with Google voice controls, we managed to convince Amazon Music to cue up the ATMOS version of Voodoo Child (Slight Return). Cautiously optimistic, I cranked up the volume as the song’s intro unfolded. “If anyone can get away with guitars swirling all over the place,” I thought to myself, “it’s this guy.”
I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly spiritual person, but when the bass and drums kicked in around the 30-second mark, I was genuinely overwhelmed. Beyond the aural spectacle of the whirlwind panning and sheer force of nature that was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, what really surprised me was how much more information I could hear in a song that I’d listened to countless times before.
With specific instruments directed to specific speakers, the bass guitar was no longer simply holding the rhythm down in the background – it was now an integral part of the song and showcased details in Noel Redding’s performance that I’d simply never heard before. And it did so without competing for space with the rest of the mix.
Afterward, I fired up the original stereo recording, and it suddenly sounded simple by comparison. Have AKG and Dolby ATMOS converted me into an immersive audio disciple? Hey, if Cadillac can reinvent itself, maybe I can too.
PHOTOS COURTESY: Harman, Bradley Iger
