Talk Audio ICE-T17

The Ice-T meetings have a long and illustrious history for Talk Audio. For as well as meets up and down the land and those on the beach, there is the yearly bash held in a field near the hub of the Car Audio Direct operation in deepest Oxfordshire. This year’s was the seventeenth, hence T-17.
You can feel it getting posh on the M40 entering Oxfordshire as you drive across that horrid cut through the downs the environmentalists tried to stop. We headed into the wilds following our Googlemaps and sat navs and arrived at the Field Of Dreams. A site that apparently holds steam rallies and the like, the locals seem to be both cool and far enough away to make it all possible. We have had complaints about booming in the past but this year we didn’t get to hear about any. Well, apart from the SQ types who found it tough to hear the delicacies of the third triangle on the left with the end of the world happening right next to them. A huge after-thread on the forum discussed the possibility of a way of easing the dichotomy.
For that is part of the joy that is Talk Audio. We might have a separate forum for the bass heads and one for the SQ fairies as they get called by the thud heads but they all came.
We had had Lee Thomas arrive with his no-compromise out and out top-SQ-possible install with the Audison Thesis and Audio Wave amplifiers and Morel Elate limited Edition three way active speaker system and also Ian ‘Iceman’ Pinder’s Astra which although running on a fraction of full power after blowing an amp or two, was still incredible (and was heard driving away afterwards for around a mile, so far does his 25Hz bass carry!) Amazing when running a movie, as his HUGE dynamics do work rather well with Hollywood sound design.
There were competitions from both the nutters of the Street bass format called “Propper Droppers” as well as the dB Drag guys, all using the same PC RTA and a slice of co-operative facility use.
Alongside that I had a huge pile of swag to award. Late in the day the guys at Armour Automotive came through with a brace of ready-bass Mutant kits comprising amplifier, wiring and a massive 18mm thick MDF box with a twelve in it, all tuned to play really low. Entry level but a big box of swag to win. Those were the second prizes. First prize for guessing the SPL of Adam ‘DumDum’s car’s system was a JBL GTO24001 amplifier which, after 64 folks had gone head to head and then done rounds to eliminate down to one, was taken by the lads from Cartoonz. They are big Rockford fans but we’ll see what he does with the amp! On the SQ side there was a guessing competition for the folks to guess the pitch of any one of 31 tracks recorded by a tone generator to win a £1,000 set of JBL 660GTi component speakers and I have to say, versus the really pretty close to-the-tenth-of-a-dB guesses that went down for the SPL up to 137dB, the pitch guessing was often wildly out! DumDum was allowed to enter and bit by bit he went through – to win the SQ swag in the end. He’ll never live it down. A big thank you to Mark (shown with the SQ prizes) who earned the RE-12D4 sub for his first car install by acting as my runner chasing the entrants to make it all go smoothly through the whole day
Am Singh showed up with the Chevy Astro van he’s been pouring blood, sweat, tears and money into for over a year. Twelve eighteens and a huge banks of SPL Dynamics power amplifiers. Awesome work and a van destined to become another legend – as soon as he’s sorted the inevitable bedding-in phase.

The one guy I was delighted to catch up with is he who is known as MG for Mother Goose. An utter perfectionist, his system has an Aliante subwoofer by Phase Linear made like a glider’s wing. Butler Tube Driver super-rare valve-preamp car amplifiers and some really exotic drivers by Rainbow and Hertz’s posh Mille leaf tweeters – all in his sexy Jag. Amazing geezer with a no-compromise approach. I missed him last year so made sure I snapped him this time.
One of the best showings brand-wise was from Rockford Fosgate, who sent a collection of cars. The cool van from Cartoonz with the lambo doors and the sexy FTO with the quilted insides and of course the loud green thing that was parked next to us at the Modified Nationals. A serious slice of ice and Paul Richardson’s install in the FTO was especially lovely – look at the pix in the gallery.
Incredibly, despite it getting wet in other places, it avoided our field and despite it being as windy as last year, we had a ball and the after-event curry night went long into overtime, with the boss getting kept out late and ending up wending his way home a bit wobbly on foot in the middle of the night after an insane day. You got to admire the man’s sheer stamina. I was knackered after a day poncing through 128 tournament style folks to get to winners of the fabulous Harman Consumer UK supplied JBL swag.
The scran was as yummy as ever from the Legendary Burger Van and a good time was had by all. If you made it, well done, if you did a no-show then shame on you. It seems to have been an event blessed by lucky weather – or else the clouds keep off because of the bass emanations.
Perhaps we’ll have an SQ Oasis at the other end of the field next year.

And here’s the day’s snappery….
link