Audio

The Lexus LFA mini-site has been updated to include a Sound “Gallery”, where you can listen to the LFA in its various aural states—and lucky for us, Youtube user supercargasm has posted up each soundclip for our listening pleasure:

Engine Start

Acceleration

Full Flight

Downshift

Every time I almost get used to Lexus having a production LFA, I hear that engine note and I’m back to barely being able to contain myself.

Lexus Belgium is holding a very unique contest—choose two Dutch musicians from a group of seven, try to get as many votes for your grouping as possible, and you could win a private concert from your two selections—a concert that is piped through the sound system of a Lexus RX 450h:

Reminds me of the LS 460 symphony orchestra (which stands as one of my favorite promotions yet)—my choices would be Akro and Leki & the Sweet Mints.

The Hybrid Live Belgium contest winners will be announced August 15th, and no, they don’t get to keep the RX450h after their private concert.

(Enter at lexusconcert.be.)

VAIS Technology has long been the go-to option for Lexus->iPod integration, and now they’ve raised the bar with their new VML, or MultiMediaLinQ. This integration kit allows digital audio to be played from almost any storage device, including hard drives, USB thumb drives, iPods and even SD Cards. Here’s some videos demonstrating the VML:

Hard Drive Demo

iPod Demo

USB Stick Demo

As you can see from the videos, the integration is smooth and quite versatile, I can’t count the times when loading a thumb drive with music would be preferable to syncing an iPod. Best of all, the VML trumps Lexus’ official iPod integration by allowing for both digital audio and satellite radio.

(VAIS Technology is a sponsor of The Lexus Enthusiast.)

Last year, Lexus Japan opened the Lexus International Gallery Aoyama in Tokyo’s Aoyama area as a display space for introducing residents to the Lexus brand. This space has a unique feature—an immersive sound environment by Yamaha created especially to block out the surrounding city.

To better illustrate this, here’s a video created by composer Masato Hatanaka, who was asked to supply a “soundtrack” for the gallery:

This is an interesting contrast to the music from the Japanese RX launch event—the multi-faceted marketing approach in Japan is certainly interesting to watch.

When the Pebble Beach editions of the RX, ES, & LS were announced last year, Lexus broadcast the following commercial:

As is the case with many commercials, the accompanying music generated a lot of interest — so much that I did some research and discovered the musician responsible was Kael Alden, who works for a company called Robot Repair.

Now, at that time last year, there was mention of releasing the track on iTunes, but just last week Kael himself posted a comment here pointing at an MP3 of the track, named Where You Belong– here’s a preview:

(If you’d like a copy, just right click here and select Save As… to download onto your computer.)

Toyota’s Open Road blog has posted a short audio interview of Lexus General Manager Mark Templin & Toyota President Jim Lentz discussing the company’s low sales in June and what it means for the car maker:

Here’s an interesting excerpt from GM Templin on Lexus moving forward:

The good news is that we retained our position as the #1 selling luxury brand, so we feel like we’re doing a pretty good job in a really tough market of doing the best we can do to take care of customers and make profits. We’re also excited about the next couple of months, because all of a sudden, we’re going to enhance our incentive programs a little bit, and we’ll begin our summer sales event on July 25th, which always gives us a big boost during the month of August. And, I think we’ll make it through some tough times in the luxury industry, and we’re doing it in a way that’s going to support the growth of Lexus in 2009 and beyond.”

The #1 position in the US luxury car market is obviously a very important distinction, and one that Lexus is going to fight tooth and nail to maintain. As noted this weekend, Lexus currently has a 5,198 unit advantage over second-place BMW, so it’s still anyone’s guess just how 2008 is going to play out.