Earthquake R32 Golf
Reece Price is not a tall dude. In fact his mates call him WeeMan, after that bloke in the UK answer to Jackass, Dirty Sanchez. But his musical urges have always been huge. This is the tale of the R32 Golf that he has had installed with a mighty system with help from high level experts, from bass making to airbrush artworks. It has been in the car a while and the shoot was done last summer but somehow I had problems facing writing this feature, due to suddenly losing the bloke behind the UK operation that supplied the kit and the box design. That was Earthquake Sound UK’s Joe Ajji. So it’s been a minor demon of mine to face, despite happily doing all sorts of Earthquake product and video coverage in the time since with his bro Tej who now runs the company. (Especially the music reviews of Bassotronics and Bass Mekanik albums in Quakeshaker’s Earthquake Astra – see Reviews: Music) It’s because Joe had a good bit of input in the first place, with advice as to which things to use for best effect in the space and cost available. Joe even told the bloke who made the bass box for Reece what size slot would tune it to the low-low 27Hz required, having done the tech.
But enough of that, I know Joe and especially Tej, Amar and the rest of the family (including the extended family that are Earthquake Sound of San Francisco, Abraham and Isaac Sahyoun in the USA, who I have known twenty years) would want to look forward, not back.
I caught up with Reece with his mate Jamie Foley at the Pure Carma drift event at Arena Essex on a sunny weekend evening. I had hoped to get the car shot well enough to go on the cover of Mobile Electronics News magazine, which would have been my first ever cover shot. But I jinxed it by telling the lads it was going to happen and yet when the magazine saw the shots, the editor told me they were ‘too contrasty’ and so didn’t make the grade. I was gutted and embarrassed&;
Reece Price and Jamie Foley with the R32- note the drift race going on upon the oval at the time&;
I see a golden evening sunshine shoot in the photographs and equipment that looks mean but I know what he meant. Have a look at the shots and tell me what you think below in the comment section. I failed to get the art shot well #nopro
Reece told Talk Audio magazine ‘I’ve always been into my loud music as I’m a DJ. In my bedroom, I’ve got Technics 1210s and 15in Jamo speakers – blast the house!’ yes, he’s an old Skool Garage DJ and his mates are in the same field of interest. Which is why his other mate MC Vapour wrote ‘WeeMan’s Earthquake Anthem’ which he has recorded and I have to admit, sounded bloody cool on his system. Especially since it was written, mixed and produced to sound good in his car!
Massive lows, deep dropping throb-holding boom and real melodic grip all add up to a bass system that really needs a savage set of mids and tops. So there’s lots.
The whole system doesn’t seem terribly over large with two boot-occupying fifteens in a dirty great ported box of great beauty (just check out the airbrush art!) and some coaxes up front with amps and control to master it.
EQ-7000PXi
The bass box was built by Mark Smith, after talking to Joe at Earthquake Sound UK and uses the classic slot-port concept, where instead of pipes let into the surface to create the ‘bass reflex’ effect, you build the cubic capacity of the port and the box into one enclosure. You then build it so it looks like a slot-shaped hole in the front. The exact proportions of the space inside the slot and the space inside the rest of the box that the woofers are bumping in, is what creates the ‘tuning’ or frequency at which the box works best of all. Making it fit inside the boot of the Golf in this case, can take some real skull sweat as well as a clever bit of software.
Subs and slot of BOOM
Here’s what kit’s being used:
Up front, there is a trusty Alpine IVA-D130RB head unit that seems to work well in a 150dB plus bass environment! This sends its signals through two Earthquake Sound EQ7000PXi half DIN chassis processors. Seven band equalisers with subwoofer control as well as offering an aux input, they give Reece all the control he needs.
These feed their high pass signal to an Earthquake EQ T2000W4 four channel amplifier that nestles in the rear offside quarter. This has massive four gauge power cable inputs and bridged to be used with two speakers hooked on each channel to show 2 Ohms, will be dropping 150 Watts RMS into the array at each corner.
And with two speakers on each of four channels, that’s eight and is how many of the Earthquake VTEK-62 high end coaxes he has hanging on the amp, four pairs, so four per door. These are a posh coax with carbon fibre cones, silk swivelly tweeters and large excursion cones to go in their pukka cast ally chassis. They really go loud and are built to handle more than the 75W RMS/150W peak each one gets. They reach down to a respectable 45Hz (that’s where most amp makers centre their ‘bass boost’ btw) and the posh tweeters reach up to 22kHz. So they really sound sweet as well as coping admirably with cutting through the bass mayhem from the boot.
Doors with LOTS of speakers
The woofers have a wicked steep parabolic cross-section top surround, which is all about maintaining some linearity under insane amounts of in-out excursion. It’s tech you can see on a good few makers’ massive-travel woofers. It works and these EQ DBXi-15s are evil examples of their breed. Especially as they have an EQ-PH5000W/D1 3kW monoblock amplifier up their voice coils to the hairs.
This mono amplifier is a class D behemoth. And like the door speakers is simply looking at two four ohm speakers to ‘see’ a 2 Ohms load and thus excrete three solid kilowatts of bass power into the two woofers. Rated at 750W RMS each, the DBXi’s are technically on the receiving end of ‘too much power’ but the dynamic maximum of these woofers is 2,000 watts, so in fact with good use and some ability to tell if things are breaking up, the woofers can be driven to the edge of their envelope and yet give years of huge bass entertainment.
And stuff me, it works!
Reece played me the tune his mate Vapour had recorded, called ‘WeeMan’s Earthquake Anthem’ and told me, ‘I have always had car systems, what I would call little ones, and I wanted to go up a notch&;’ to which Jamie Foley added, ‘A couple of notches!’ and Vapour’s tune with lyrics written to fit him like a Saville Row suit are just brilliant.
I have to talk about the awesome spray art on the back of the Mark Smith-made box (btw if you want one built like it, call Mark Smith on 07789 988 700) as Reece found a card in a window advertising the artist’s services. He called him up and after a brief explanation of what was wanted, he got this painting on his box.
It’s one of the best I have ever seen on an install in the UK – folks usually put such art on the bodywork!
I love the whole package. Not just Reece. Not just the Earthquake system and the people behind it and not just because he has had two artists’ efforts poured into him and his ride, (paint and tunes) but all of it at once. The car, the sound, the tune, the cheery fellow who owns it kicking the ground hard with his bass.
Long may he and his mates enjoy it. I know the bloke who told him how much porting he needed would have approved heartily.
The pictures above and a few more may be seen here in a whizzy gallery:
link
In memory of Joe “Da Earthquaker” Ajji aka ‘Mister Earthquake UK’