Harman/Kardon Sound System in the Polestar 2
I recently upgraded from Hyundai Ioniq EV to a Polestar 2. Like most people, I listen to a lot of music in the car, so its audio system matters to me. Let’s talk a little about car audio.
Ioniq Sound
The Ioniq did not have anything special for its audio system. It was just a basic six speaker setup with speakers in each door and tweeters in the A pillars. It sounded perfectly cromulent and had a surprising amount of (muddy) bass. It really only sounded its best when connected to CarPlay as the lower fidelity of the radio and Bluetooth really hurt its output.
RAV4 Sound
My wife has a Toyota RAV4 with the upgraded JBL sound system. This system has a subwoofer and it sounds really nice. You can get some serious thumping if you crank up the bass. Unfortunately the RAV4 itself is rather noisy, which hurts the overall sound quality, especially when on the highway.
Polestar 2
The Polestar 2 has a Harman/Kardon system with 13 speakers (two of which are subwoofers). On paper it should crush the systems in the Ioniq and RAV4.
On my initial test drives I was not amazed by the sound. I thought it sounded really good, but it didn’t have that “wow” factor I was expecting considering all those speakers.
However, now that I’ve tweaked its settings a bit and have listened to my music on some longer drives, I’ve changed my tune: I think it sounds wonderful. It has a solid, tight sound that works well with the rock and metal that I primarily listen to.
However, for a system with two subwoofers it does not have nearly as much deep bass as you’d expect. Don’t get me wrong — it certainly has a lot of bass, but I think the JBL in the RAV4 beats it in the deep bass department. The Harman/Kardon system does have plenty of bass and it is nice and tight, instead of muddy like in the Ioniq, but it doesn’t quite rattle the car. If you are a serious bass-head, you might be disappointed. It’s certainly more than enough for me, though.
CarPlay
I use Apple Music for all my music playing and that means I use CarPlay in the Polestar 2. Unfortunately Apple has not released their Apple Music app for Android Automotive so it is not available to download to the car1.
CarPlay is wired and works really well, providing much better audio quality than going through Bluetooth.
Audio Settings
The audio settings for the Harman/Kardon system are in the Settings app in the Sound section. There are two main areas to make adjustments: Sound experience and Tone and equalizer.
Tone and equalizer
The tone settings have three basic adjustments for Treble, Bass and Subwoofer. There is also an Advanced toggle you can flip to show the 10-band equalizer for even finer adjustments. Currently I’m only using the simpler settings, tweaked to boost the highs and lows.
Sound experience
These settings let you adjust sound positioning.
The Sound optimization section controls how the overall sound is positioned. There are not normal balance and fader controls. Instead you can choose the sound to be focused based on Driver, All or Rear seats. You can also separately turn on or off the front or rear speakers. I use the All setting as it sounded best to me. The Driver setting was louder, but also seemed to just shove everything in my face.
There is also a Surround section that I don’t feel helps music in any way. To my ears it made everything sound distant and less vibrant. This setting might prove useful should I spend any time watching movies in the car with HBO MAX or something, but considering it is a car and not a home theatre, I don’t see myself doing that much.
Listening Environment
One thing that really helps with the sound quality is how quiet the interior is when driving. That’s a feature of most electric vehicles, but the Polestar 2 is incredibly quiet with little road noise intruding into the cabin.
Like with all my headphones, I’m really enjoying hearing my favorite albums for the first time on an amazing new sound system.
I live this system so much that I’ve been going out to the garage (one benefit of an EV is that I can safely use it in the garage with the doors closed) and listening to my music. This audio system is just that good!
If you want a ton more details about the audio system, including how you can replace components, check out this detailed site: Polestar Audio.
Here’s a link to my Headphone Test playlist that contains tracks I use to test out new speakers and headphones:
Headphone Test playlist on Apple Music
Spotify and YouTube Music are available, however.