Now the fun could start.
We started with the sound system first. The Alpine set up is incredibly sophisticated and allows for masses of tweaking and tuning and has several complex means of improving the sound quality including time elapsed speaker settings, it has its own tiny microphone that you position around the car, so the system can monitor the sound levels at different locations and calibrate accordingly. It has the ability to alter when each speaker is fired, so for example if you had a speaker near your feet, another by your knees and a third by your shoulder, it would fire the one by your feet slightly ahead of the knees and the knees slightly ahead of the shoulder. That way the sound from all 3 speakers, reach your ear simultaneously. It can also set a frequency range for each speaker that is adjustable, so you can tune each speaker to only work in the ranges that you programme. This means each speaker is producing only the best quality sound, by not being asked to deal with signals outside of its optimum range.
Kerry spent hours sitting in the car tweaking and fiddling until he was happy. His professional ear was invaluable, as he is used to listening intensely to music in a near perfect environment in the studio. The end result is fantastic, it is beautifully clear and crisp and sounds equally good on a low setting as well as flat out. There is no distortion anywhere. At full blast it is producing around 2800 watts. The interesting thing is, with the doors and windows shut, you can hardly hear it outside other than the Subs thumping away.
The giveaway is the way the roof panel flexes with each thump of the subs! A testament to the Dynamat and attention to detail that went into the shell. Inside it is a different story, it is so clear, that you do not realise just how loud it really is! On a couple of occasions I felt quite ill after a prolonged “loud” session. We all bought in our favourite CD’s to try out, it is amazing the details that you don’t hear on your average home Hi-Fi. Cd’s that I had held in some regard as technically good turned out to be not as good as I had thought. There are surprisingly few CD’s that really do the system justice.
Next was the DVD and screens. There are 3 screens in total, 1 in the middle of the dash console that “posts” itself into the dash when you don’t want it and one on the back of each headrest. I didn’t want to do the usual thing of cutting out the back of the headrest and burying the screen in it. My concern is that in a crash, the soft squidgy stuff has been replaced with brittle, sharp plastic, that would make a mess of your face.
<< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | next >>
