Alpine: The International CES, Las Vegas 2014

Alpine Electronics are the ones seen as holding the audiophillic high ground. Clarion may have made some of the best sounding decks of all time and Rockford Fosgate ventured into a mad head unit territory for a brief while and Pioneer still supply their ODR decks. Yet Alps were the first to do the crazy-end stuffalthough Sony also had a line called ES that was seriously nutty too and Panasonic even had a double DIN head unit with a VU meter and with a military spec valve in a window on the front of the deck, in the preamplifier circuit! Yet in brand awareness terms and even in popular culture, via Mr. Will Smith on his track ‘˜Summertime’ with the line, ‘turn up the bass and let the Alpine blast’ Alpine remain in that lofty bracket of top end perceptions and folks adore them.
So serious is this fandom, that when one year Talk Audio was asked to provide the trade awards scheme with a voting polling facility to choose the worthy products of that year for the trade, the results got skewed. When we asked Talk Audio readers to vote, the resulting event ended up being recalled as the ‘˜Alpine Awards’. It was embarrassing yet adherence to righteous rules meant they were NOT going to make it up. Thus gong after gong was awarded to Alpine.
A similar thing happened at the new trade awards dinner this last year, with Parrot making efforts to get folks to vote but few others really engaging with it. Bless the new publishers, they made the same mistake of whom they asked to vote and 2013’s are recalled as yes, the ‘˜Parrot Awards’. They got, like, nine, even that for the best DAB radio award. Granted to a radio that had no DAB tuner in it but which could get Digital Radio via the Internet and a 4G data connection via smartphone. Oh dear.
I was taken to Japan by Alpine many years ago to a World Press Conference, never done before or since, called Discover the Future of Mobile Multimedia which was gripping and great fun. The jetlag going east was as savage as I experience now, as I type, recently returned from Las Vegas via Texas. But we went and saw their product museum, rode on the world’s only car audio test track that mimics world road surfaces from ruts to cobbles and saw their testing robots. These inserted and ejected media (CD and just about Cassette still, back then!) until something broke. They fixed the robots but the idea was to make their car radio’s disc and tape mechanisms long lived by improving the parts through destruction testing.
They even had a room with an artificial sun that can be shone in any direction to test car radio display technology and environmental chambers where the air can be sucked out and replaced by air of a different temperature. From like minus 20 degrees Centigrade to plus fiftyin ten seconds. All the while the Alpine unit within can be seen chugging away happily through a little window.
It was the most amazing experience and I met folks form the USA and even Australia. One such was a thrusting youthful executive called Steve Crawford, who does not recall this incident in Japan. But we were all jet lagged and grumpy and despite seeing this particular set of stuff, we had been forbidden from taking photographs in a blanket ban. Steve had a discussion with the bosses in which we gather he had to put his job on the line to make a point for us. We got our pictures and Steve carried on with his career. Nowadays, Steve Crawford is boss of Alpine USA and greeted me warmly at their Las Vegas CES facility, which was serious, and handed me over to Javier Vergara, a top chap who knew his stuff and grasped that I ‘˜got’ it, to take me through what is new in the USA for Alpine. A damn fine communicator, he just didn’t want to be on video. I liked him a lot, top bloke.
TuneIt is in V2 now:

Right, so what is it like over there? They have some bass products made especially for the USA market and the pickup truck as we call it, is king of the road out there. Not as in the UK, seen pretty much only as a workmen’s’ vehicle, in the USA, truck culture is wide. And they have worked out that the dude who here would be a Volvo estate owner in years gone by {TRANS USA: Station Wagon} (and is now is a people carrier owner here in Blighty) is a family man with a family style truck and will have wife and back seater kids to please. Then, they still have the dude in the hi-viz jacket and hard hat, who is also most definitely a buyer of Alpine stuff and finally the ‘˜BLOKE’ who has a quad bike or jet ski that goes in the bed of his bachelor-toy truck and may have all sorts of other tough-assed accessories on the thing, like suspension lifts and chunky wheel/tyre combos.
This little spud needs a CE rating, then importing, I feel

But I think this one WILL be coming under seat basser.

Bass Line woofer and posh grille, together designed by a rap act, are $100

PDR amplifiers like PDX but even better

There’s a ten inch woofer in here, loaded against the floor and the box is dense and solid.

I didn’t swag a great deal of photography, as the three-piece video clip I made, seen below, has pretty much the whole thrust of the new approach, which is to be more vehicle-specific. I can reveal that in the UK, we are led by Germany, as in ‘˜Europe’ and that means the Mercedes M-Class of three or so years ago and onwards will have a set of hardware you get with it to just make fitting a new radio a plug-and-play thing. Then the same generation of Audi cars are next. The level of penetration into the OEM tech is utter just check this out:

1,150 watt TuneIt system layout:

To get more on Alpine UK and what is here and buyable NOW, click here:
link