Four-cylinder engine sound

Every other engine in this library is best understood as a departure from this one. A naturally aspirated two-litre four is the engine most people have spent the most hours sitting behind, which makes it the baseline the ear measures against.

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.

Two firings per revolution puts the dominant order at exactly engine speed, the simplest relationship available. Unevenness is 10 and jitter is 7, both low: an inline-four with a flat crank fires at even intervals, and there is no lope to model.

The rest of the values sit near the middle of their ranges by design. Bass 83, brightness 100, noise 100, drive 95, comb feedback 45, pipe length 110. Read the other pages on this site and you will keep seeing those numbers quoted as the thing a preset moved away from.

It redlines at 6,800 and shifts at 3,100 across five ratios reaching 37 km/h per 1000 rpm. Unremarkable, which is the point. It will not surprise you at any speed.

Overrun pops are 8, close to nothing. This is the setting worth starting from if you want to hear what the gearbox model is doing without an engine character getting in the way, and it is the honest choice if you drive something that used to be a petrol hatchback.

First runs to 51 km/h at the redline and top gives 37 km/h per 1000 rpm, putting 100 km/h at about 2,700 rpm. Nothing about the gearing is unusual either, which is what keeps it useful as the thing everything else gets compared against.

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

• Three-cylinder engine sound
• Turbo hot hatch sound
• Inline-six 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
  • Air-cooled flat-six
• NORMAL CARS
  • Three-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.