Where an engine gets its weight
An engine's weight here comes from two low-end sliders: bass, which feeds the sub oscillator and an 82 Hz cabin peak, and the sub oscillator's own level. Brightness, the level of the orders above the fundamental, sits on the other side of the mix. The V12 preset pushes both hard; the jet turbine pushes neither, and turns brightness up instead.
What gives an engine its weight
Two sliders in the DSP model set how heavy an engine feels below the exhaust note. Bass emphasis feeds a sub oscillator and lifts an 82 Hz peak tuned to the cabin, and a separate sub-oscillator level sits underneath it, adding a pure low tone the ear reads as mass rather than pitch. The V12 preset runs bass at 115 and sub at 105, the highest pairing of the three engines compared here.
That combination is what makes the V12 feel like it fills a room at idle. The 82 Hz peak sits close to a cabin's own resonance, so the low end excites the space around it rather than only reaching the ear through a speaker cone. Listen to the idle clip and the weight arrives before any exhaust detail does; the growl and the crackle sit on top of a foundation that was built first.
Brightness pulls the other way
Brightness is a separate slider: the level of the engine orders above the first, the harmonics that give a note its edge rather than its mass. The jet turbine sets brightness to 175, the highest figure here, while its bass sits at 55 and its sub oscillator at 40, both well below the V12's. The jet turbine preset spends almost nothing on low end and almost everything on the upper orders.
The V10 sits between the two: bass at 85, sub at 75, brightness at 150. Across these three presets the pattern holds: the engine with the most low end has the least brightness, and the one with the most brightness has the least low end. Nothing in the code forces that trade, each slider is set on its own, but the presets that read as heavy and the presets that read as bright have not landed in the same place on both axes.
Where the bass runs out
A third figure decides how long the low end lasts as the engine climbs: the rpm above which the bass emphasis has died away. The V12 sets that point at 3000 rpm, low against its 8000 rpm redline. The jet sets it at 4000 rpm, against a 9000 rpm redline, even though its bass level was already the smaller of the two.
That means the V12's weight belongs almost entirely to the bottom third of its rev range. Above 3000 rpm the sub oscillator and the 82 Hz peak have faded, and whatever growl remains is doing the work instead, largely the firing unevenness the V10 and V8 comparison covers in more depth. The jet keeps its faint low end going for longer in relative terms, to 4000 out of 9000, but there was never much of it to hold onto.
Three points along the line
Put the three side by side and there is a line from heavy to bright with almost nothing in between. The V12 carries bass 115, sub 105, brightness 120. The V10 carries bass 85, sub 75, brightness 150. The jet carries bass 55, sub 40, brightness 175. Each step down in low end is a step up in brightness, and the three presets sound like distinct points on that line rather than three unrelated engines.
The jet turbine's single gear makes the effect easier to hear in isolation, because there is no shift interrupting the climb: the note gets thinner and more metallic as rpm rises, with none of the chest the V12 carries at idle. Play the V12 and the jet back to back and what changes is what sits beneath each note, the weight under the V12's idle and its near absence under the jet's spool-up.
Weight and brightness are four separate numbers, tuned so far to move in the same direction across these three engines. Nothing in the code forces bass, sub and brightness to trade against each other; a future preset could push all three at once. What the current line-up shows is that a pronounced low end needs somewhere to sit below the brightness, and the lightest-sounding engine here has been the one asked to give up that space.
Hear it
Ten seconds each: an acceleration run through the gears, then the overrun. The same presets the numbers above come from.
- GT V12 6.02.0 · silk thunder
- JET TURBINEturbofan · spool
- ITALIAN V10 5.22.0 · high-rev scream