Air-cooled flat-six sound

An air-cooled engine is loud in a way a water-cooled one is not, and most of that extra noise is not combustion at all. It is the cooling fan, the induction, and the mechanical racket of an engine with no water jacket to damp it.

Ten seconds from a standing start. The launch, the gearbox working up through the ratios, then the overrun as the throttle closes. Driven by the same gearbox model the simulator runs, so the shift points are the ones you would hear in the car.

The preset puts that in the noise parameter, set to 135. That is high for a car, well above the inline-six at 90, and it is the single biggest reason this sounds different from every other six here. Bass is held at 79, one of the lower values, because the character sits in the middle and upper bands rather than underneath.

Three firings per revolution and unevenness of 12 give it a flat-six signature: more textured than an inline-six at 5, far tighter than a flat-four at 34. The horizontally opposed layout with equal-length pipes lands somewhere between those two, and 12 is where it sits.

Brightness at 115 and saturation character at 65 sharpen the top without making it harsh. Comb feedback of 55 with a pipe length of 105 gives the hollow, slightly resonant quality of a short sports exhaust.

It redlines at 7,300 and shifts at 3,700 across five ratios. Willing to rev, and it gets more interesting the harder you work it, which matches the engine layout it is modelled on.

Five ratios topping at 37 km/h per 1000 rpm put 100 km/h near 2,700 rpm, high enough that the fan and induction noise stay present rather than dropping away. It is one of the few presets here that holds your interest at a constant speed.

Specification

Every figure above is read from the preset the app actually runs, not retyped.

Drive it

Open the simulator with this engine selected, allow location, and press ignition. See how it works for what happens between GPS and sound.

Related

• Inline-six engine sound
• Flat-four boxer sound
• V10 engine sound

Every other engine

• RECORDED CARS
  • BAC Mono
  • Ferrari 458
  • BMW M1 Procar
• SUPERCARS
  • Muscle V8
  • Modern V8
  • V10
  • V12
  • Anti-lag rally car
• NORMAL CARS
  • Three-cylinder
  • Four-cylinder
  • Turbo hot hatch
  • Inline-six
  • Diesel
  • Flat-four boxer
• FUN SOUNDS
  • Steam locomotive
  • Radial prop plane
  • Jet turbine
  • Alien craft
  • Single-cylinder thumper

All twenty on one page, with redline and gear count for each.