​​Meet The Man Who Is Fine-Tuning Your Nissan Audio System​

Your Nissan experience should always sound magnificent. You can always look at the speaker grilles and know that you will be driving along to your favorite tunes or the game analysis with exceptional sound quality and immersion throughout the cabin. If you have a Nissan with a Bose, Fender, or Klipsch audio system, you can thank the ears of Patrick Dennis.  

Dennis works at the Nissan Technical Center North America near Detroit, Michigan, as the principal engineer for audio sound quality. He banks his 20-year career at Nissan on his ears. His job is to ensure that your ears will enjoy the beautiful sounds he captures from his own. Dennis does so by fine-tuning the speaker systems inside each Nissan so you can enjoy the ride. They range from the standard audio systems in the Versa and Kicks Play to the 12-speaker premium Klipsch system in the Armada. 

To us, he’s a very adept sound engineer. To the people at Nissan, Dennis is known as “Golden Ears.”  

Dennis explains, “[i]It’s not that my ears are naturally better than anyone else’s – it’s that I’ve been trained to identify certain things in the music that other people might not be able to catch.” 

For example, he attempts to capture the time drivers and their passengers have attended their first concert. As Dennis explains, “[w]e want the customers to feel like they’re at a live show. That’s the vision,” Dennis said. “We want to transport them there.” 

There are plenty of challenges to accomplishing these goals. For example, the speakers are often drowned out by the sound from the exhaust, the engine, or the sounds around them outside. There’s also the position of the speakers themselves, usually further away from the ears of the vehicle’s occupants.  

Under Dennis’s leadership and research, Nissan has been working on bringing the sound from the speakers closer to the listener. The front headrest-mounted speakers for the Bose Personal Plus audio system inside the 2025 Kicks are a prime example of this approach.  

It is not just headrest speakers that Dennis is working on to attain these goals. “We can now manipulate sound to give it the best quality possible, even with just a few speakers,” he said. “We can make audio coming from door speakers sound higher in the vehicle than it actually is.” 

Another great example is the immersive sound inside the 2025 Armada with the Klipsch Premium Audio System. As a name synonymous with studio monitors and high-end home audio systems, the aim was to create not only studio-quality sound inside the expansive cabin but also a surround sound element that would give the passenger a movie theater-like experience.  

Another technology developed by Dennis and his team was Active Sound Management. This uses a microphone inside the cabin to identify low-frequency engine sounds and neutralize them with sound waves of the opposite frequency. Think of it as a form of noise cancellation. It is something to appreciate when you are humming along the highway.  

In every Nissan we offer, there is an appreciation for the work Dennis and his “Golden Ears” have accomplished. In his own words, he said, “[y]ou have to work with the system to get it to pop. When it does, you know it – you feel that fun factor immediately. And you can’t wait for the customer to experience it too.” 

To experience the magnificent sound inside each Nissan, contact us at Dick Smith Nissan of St Andrews for your own “Golden Ears” to listen and enjoy. Every Nissan also comes with the Dick Smith Advantage, too.