Clarion’s Las Vegas 12×12 Isobaric Boomer

I have a deeply conflicted set of feelings about Las Vegas. It has to do with it being the Ultimate City. It is certainly the place to be at every January to see the World’s newest and best car electronics in the most mind bendingly brilliant examples of craftsmanship, nay art and sculpture in all ICE.
The best cars I have ever seen were there. If you are the cream of the crop, if magazine covers hang off you like pussy hangs off a pimp, then you and your car might just be cool enough to qualify to be in the North Halls at the LVCC for CES time.

Even with the rise of SEMA in October, the electronics side is still all about the CES. And even with a load less visitors this year, they had 110,000 come in from all over the world.

I was lucky enough to get to go along once more and dived right in, morning one, first bus into the Las Vegas Convention Centre from the fabulously naff Excalibur hotel. There were as ever, some great installations but this was one that I wanted to simply beam over to Britain and steal.
It’s a Scooby WRX Estate, it has twelve twelves and hits 156dB rright down low. What’s not to want?

First look and you mightn’t realise just how major the bass installation is in the car. Mind you, it is walled!

It has had the entire rear of the vehicle taken over by the bass box and there are six twelve inch woofers sunken into the face of the box. These are PXW1252 and are rated at 500w RMS and have dual 4 Ohm voice coils and Polypropylene Electrolytic Spun Aluminium coated dust caps (it means they are silvery) and boom via Kevlar/Paper composite cones. They have cooling features like ‘SET or Spider Exhaust technology’ with the tinsel wires woven into them for strength and a double Strontium/Ferrite rare earth magnet system. Which all adds up to badass.

There are two of these woofers on each bass amp, but you can only see six subs and three amps round the back. It’s because the woofers are in what’s called an Isobaric push-pull array. Each subwoofer is sealed onto the face of another in its own closed box which in turn is driving the transmission-line style port system of the huge rear enclosure with their collective back wave. The front wave of the subs plays as though the woofer array was a single driver but one that ‘saw’ twice the cubic in volume than is actually there – so it’s a good system for getting more bass out of the space. The amps in the rack under the tailgate are forced-air cooled and are two layers deep like chocolates in a box.

I have seen some isobaric systems before but nearly all were ‘clamshell’ or with one speaker arse-outwards and nearly all with pretty windows in their bass boxes and all tidy inside the box. This is a no nonsense boomer and the guy who was with it told me that it had huge performance and that it was about getting that really high output result as much as any crazy exotic BoomZilla’s-Fist type design but that it was, to prove that you don’t need brute force and ignorance to create woofers that can do SQ, SQL and SPL. As these Clarions are a tight class act and sounded sweet and deep and crisply edged with the rest of the component speakers nicely balanced in the output.

The headunit was a CZ509 and apart from the settings within it, there were just two other controls in the car in the shape of two knobs. One was simple Low Frequency gain or a bass quantity knob, while the other was to show off the product and was hooked to a tone generator. You twiddled and could send mad tones into the bass system just to play with it. It was bloody brilliant and better than finding that one tone on a CD to really throb for a moment.

Instead of the stock rear locations being used (they have been engulfed by the bass box) there were a set of SRU1720M two-way 17cm component speakers  custom-mounted in the back of the car in pod-styled builds with three sets of SRU1320M components being builded into the front doors and kick wells of the car.

You can also see in the photos that there is an extra pod or build above the one used that is now no longer occupied for reasons of sound quality. Meanwhile, the doors get a D’Appolito array of two woofers around one tweeter and the kick wells get a two-way HF + midbass system of the same drivers. So although three 13cm sets have been used in the front, you only get two of the tweeters they came with, pointing at you for better imaging.

A four channel APX 4361 amplifier, pushing 90w RMS in each direction, is used to drive these doors and kicks, one per side. With another playing bridged into the rear set as they are the bigger 17cm size and are needed to cut through when played in SPL Boomer mode. After all, a fore-aft fader will quieten them down for more SQ-esque urges.
It was a lovely car and I coveted it badly.

What made me gurgle with amusement was the curmudgeon in a grey suit with a grey face and a grey soul who was in the stand opposite. A tiny company with a small wall-based booth facing the corporate might of Clarion. Or rather the elemental bass of the Scooby. For it was working, hooked up and able to do it.

I was played the car and had to stop as apparently old grey-everything had already complained a whole load about the bass. But not before I had given him a really, really good reason to be pissed off.

A lovely car, sexyful install and pure essence of the Las Vegas CES. I loved it.
I wonder how big a party of cub reporters I need to take next time? Anyone want to come on a Talk Audio working holiday? I’d have to get you signed up as reporters and credited with a story of two on the mag and we could all go together. You need to see and feel this stuff yourselves and I think you’d love it!

A huge Well Done Mate to the man Peter Johnson of Orange California who built it. You are a star! The car was sponsored by Scosche for the wiring, Toyo for the tyres as well as Kinetik and BBE and Sirius/XM radio.

For more Clarion-ness go clarion
Talk Audio want to thank Clarion, Midbass and TDR Distribution for enabling Talk Audio magazine to go to Las Vegas to report on the 2009 Winter Consumer Electronics Show