Bling Bling Mister Singh

Like a cat landing on its feet, a mad amplifier ended up finding a good home with utterly, deliciously bonkers car audio fanatics. Adam Rayner dons a polite turban with help from an elder and goes to check out The One&;

I am a true dyed in the wool car audio fanatic. I love high quality sound, fabulous imaging and detail and bass with power, clarity, girth and depth. I adore the American approach to car audio where huge over-engineering, massive heatsinks and surfboard size proportions can all add up to a sexy pile of watts. One of the maddest of all US brands was Phoenix Gold, who made special amplifiers for limited editions like a mutant combination of two of their big amps and called them mad names, like ‘Frank Amp’N Stein’. This last was amazing and came in a big wooden box and had a clear base plate.
Now, the Phoenix Gold company have been utterly true to their roots and name and have risen from the ashes of the past, for once they seemed to have died out. But the right people have got together and the feathers once again gleam brightly. Part of the process of the new-old Americans is to tell the world and to spread enthusiasm for their stuff. So, the new outfit have made an all-new crazed nutter limited edition amplifier and called it ‘The One’. And Celsus Ice, the UK importers and distributors of Phoenix Gold and a slew of posh kit besides, like Dynamat and JL Audio and more, got hold of one.
Being proper ambassadors for their brands, the Celsus guys invited the American audio evangelists of Phoenix Gold to come over to Blighty and train some Limey dealers. They ran some really cool training events, including one so close to my house, it would have been proper rude not to have attended. It was great fun and everyone came out of there filled with new zeal, enthusiasm and ideas. Not least of which was that I found out that as a dealer event, there was a rudely sexy inducement revealed to win their dealer sales contest. Yes, it was ‘The One’. Whichever dealer was most successful at promoting the Phoenix Gold cause in their shop, would win the ‘The One’ amplifier, a retail value of £3,999.00.
The One

I met the eventual winners, as I met all attendees of the course and although there was more than one event, to cover the UK, they were at mine. They had travelled a LOT further than me. The hotel was next to the drive through MacDonald’s we use on the A41 if going to shop at the Dome (famous roundabout outside Watford as it has Sainsbury’s petrol, Asda petrol and a huge Shell petrol station) and they drove from Leicester!
It was the men from Kings Audio. In particular Billy and his dad Kultar. Huge P-G fans and running a successful car audio shop in the town where the mighty Car Electronics Leicester is based. In fact, it turned out, we were a bit close to said company’s home. But more of that later.
It was arranged that Kings Audio would receive the amazing amplifier in its huge wooden box and the plot was that they would build a demo car around it. This story is the tale of that demo car and it is a mad one&;
‘Punjab Customs’


For Hardeep (Billy’s mama) was sick of her car. Trouble is, it was a kind so darned reliable and solid and comfy and indestructible, that she didn’t really want to part with it. It was even pretty. That last precludes Volvos, so yes, it was a Lexus – an iS200 Sports. She’d been mama-pootling around in it since before Billy had a beard and had it since new. Now, ten years later, mama wanted a Beemer! Yes, the new mamawagon was to be a BMW X5.
And with The One amplifier populating his fevered dreams at night, where Billy, clad in a cloth of gold Turban and flowing robes, surfed upon it like the Golden Bass Surfer in a sort of Bollywood madness-version of a Marvel comics movie&;.but with big song and dance numbers, he knew what he had to do. Yes, mama’s car was gonna get chopped. Billy had a mad fit one Friday night after the Kings Audio shop had closed and with a little help from an equally as engineeringly-insane cohort, he cut the bloody roof off the car!
‘Yer Only Supposed to cut the bloody roof off!’

Now, do bear in mind that at no point was any drawing made. This was all done from the depths of their engineering souls. From turning this into the only UK registered Lexus pick up truck, to rolling the arches and making the new bulkhead wall to house a TV as well as make the thing go from car to cab-with-bed, it was all done by eye and feel. And it is all fabricated in steel with the help of Gore Motors’ Pajan, with Raj and Satpal the paint masters. They applied the amazing White Ice marbleised paintjob with the white pearl overlay and metal fleck cab with fully seven layers of flatted lacquer. They spent four thousand pounds on just the paint materials alone!

And what a result. The Lexus iS200 pickup truck now rides on Wheel Mania Savoy five spoke twenties. Ten inch wide at the back and eight inches wide at the front, they wear 265/30/20 and 245/30/20 tyres by Hancook. It’s rubber band low slung.

The cabin has been left pretty much stock except for the fact that the dash is now graced by a double DIN JVC AVXD-6080 headunit and they have also got a USB connection cable in there to run a Sony Viao laptop into the rear system. The driver gets a set of Phoenix Gold Ti 650.2 components to listen to in the doors.

However, the general public get to listen to a lot more. Indeed, as we went from the shop to find a place to do the professional shoot, Billy played the system in the bed and I drove behind. It was clear and full range and absurdly big broadcasty of bass as it has no bleeding roof on it. In the same way a rubbish OEM system can be heard from a convertible, a seriously large system in the bed of a pickup is likewise simply like ruddy public address.

And what weapons! For the speakers in the back are many and whilst there are two Phoenix Gold SD500,4 amplifiers to run the rear mounted and cabin based bids and tweeters, the massive ‘The One’ amplifier is sat in the back, like an electronic Jabba the Hutt, leering hungrily at the bank of six mighty Phoenix Gold twelve inch bass makers, two of which cower underneath it. Called the Ti1200, they are wired cunningly. Being dual 2 Ohm voice coilers, they have a series-parallel thing going on with the hook-up, such that at the terminals of The One amplifier, the amp sees a mere half-Ohm of resistance or load. Thus it is crapping its bassy intestines out over the voice coils to the tune of some two thousand watts each. Yes, I know six times two is twelve.
Go on, say it. Like Danny DeVito in Twins when he says ‘five million dollars!’ in many ways&;
Twelve thousand watts, twelve kilowatts, six by two thousand by power sharing, two kilowatts by six.

However, you say it, it seems insane, especially to be being broadcast to the world rooflessly. And the car has the power. Greens Alternators fixed them up with a rewound monster from a Lexus Soarer rewound from 200A to fully 270 mighty Amperes which fills three 290Ah batteries on some 1,000 feet altogether of the finest Stinger cabling. So it can play bass all day.
We had engaged the services of Si Gray, front cover motoring snapper credited on a really large number of top titles. His photographs have sold literally millions of car magazines in his time and have been on the front of Max Power, Fast Car and a good few others. He hosed us down as we played with the car, shooting reams of images.
At lunchtime, the lads in the factory next door came out to sit on the wall in the blistering sunshine and there was not even a flicker when they saw me in the turban. They must have just thought I was an ugly looking fat-necked convert to Sikhism. And here’s the co-incidence thing. The Gurdwara, or temple, who’s car park we drove to, to do the shoot, was literally abutting the Car Electronics Leicester compound, with its posh building in it!
The four channel amplifiers are simply hooked up. One runs the left channel of half the speakers, the other the right. Such that each plays a half-pair of six inch components at the front and back of the bed with two of the channels and a Ti5Cx coaxial and a Ti4Cx set of component loudspeakers inset into the pick up cabin wall, pointing backwards and flanking the big old 36 inch TV set. The cabin’s Ti650.2 speakers are running on the amp in the headunit.
This install has caused mayhem at every show it has attended and while it wasn’t painfully hip enough for Fast Car (I did try&;) the FHM magazine guys labelled it as one of the coolest modified cars of 2012 and featured in their top ten article of the same name. It caused a roadblock at Ultimate Street Car at Santa Pod. They intend to keep on taking it out to as many shows as possible and as this mad project is all finished, they have felt the need to start another.
So far, all I know is that it is a Bentley Arnage, has had its suspension replaced with air ride and is to be chrome coated&;
And here, your reward for reading all the way to the end. The slideshow gallery of all the Si Gray shotsthey are all full pro grade of course.
gallery