Toyota Aristo Is a Reminder That Car Audio May Be Better Now, But it’s Less Fun

Toyota has always paid close attention to in-car audio quality, which I'm grateful for. The Japanese carmaker's dedication to audio dates back to the 1990s, and possibly further back, with models like the Toyota Aristo and Sera, which my colleague Adam has written about at Jalopnik. Like the Sera, the Aristo featured some killer audio features, such as physical DSP controls that ran your tunes through different filters, of sorts, to give your listening experience a different vibe. These controls are something the majority of people won't miss in modern audio systems, especially with the ubiquity of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, but they highlight how car audio is no longer fun and experimental.

The Toyota Aristo is the predecessor to the Lexus GS, and it's how the car was known in its native country of Japan. The Aristo had a DSP button that lived on the dash and toggled different modes such as Hall, Live, Cathedral, and Dome. That sounds like something you're more likely to find on a nice home stereo, and, yet, Toyota decided that the Aristo needed some DSP goodness right on the dash, as the YouTube channel, Battles Digital, shows in this short vid:

Whether you would make use of those modes in your day-to-day listening is less the point than Toyota's anticipation of the need for that audio feature in the first place. Imagine being one of the Aristo's designers and thinking, «You know what this car really needs? A button that makes Donald Byrd's albums sound live, dammit!» It's the peak of superfluous controls, and yet I miss them.

In the modern age of car audio that likely blows away anything from the 1990s and 2000s, audio systems are now suffering from a lack of fun. Almost like they've become too good for their own good and are merely content taking a backseat to interfaces from Apple and Google. Audio is objectively better today, but it's not necessarily yielding more fun listening experiences.

One of the things that doesn't get brought up enough is that CarPlay and Android Auto have homogenized in-car audio systems for the sake of convenience. It's a streamlined experience, sure, but one that is deliberately predictable and therefore no longer capable