ICE T19
Like an old but loved Christmas Bauble, the ICE-T meet write ups always start with this bit pulled out of the box
‘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 nineteenth, hence T-19.
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.’
Well, that was until last year
For last year, we had reached the tipping point in bass where it goes suddenly LONG RANGE. Below a certain frequency, around 30Hz, the wavelength gets really big. It’s all of twenty five feet at the 45Hz ‘˜Bass Boost’ frequency used by most consumer bass amps for cars but at 30Hz, it’s nearly 38 feet and at twenty cycles it’s a massive 56 feet six inches. So the energy just keeps flowing. Elephants talk across the Savannah with deep bellows and an adult Lion can be heard basso-roaring from five miles. So a few hundred yards of Iceman and Am Singh together dropping deep into one sixties and at seriously below 30Hz for Iceman, meant the neighbours were unhappy.
Our Guru on Talk Audio is not a man who enjoys a confrontation and was ready to take a sad-but-necessary step of cancelling the whole event after said neighbour summoned the help of both Environmental Health (for the sound) and the county’s events officer. In the event, both attended but as we had curtailed the boom cars’ permission to boom, by way of it being conditional to even hold it this year, we had a group of people in cars meeting in a field. The chap with the sound level meter was more used to dealing with local objections to things like major outdoor festivals (like a wee one called ‘˜Reading’) and admitted that we really didn’t pose a problem. However, wanting to remain stress free for us and the nearest property, we kept it doors-shut only and mostly boomless.
One thing that I really loved about the T-19 meet was in fact one of the boomers, well SQL-head, really, who showed up. A chap from a goodly distance oop North from Oxfordshire, he has been at every ICE-T meet I have been at and is a well known bloke on our forum boards. A committed photographer, he has one of the most extensive libraries of Ice images from years back and has had to scrimp, save and commit carefully to achieve his dream system. It’s taken some time and as soon as his video, below, was shown on YouTube and linked to the dude’s Facebook account, the comments sprouted. These include the usual experts who know better, know best and start into explaining what he did wrong. Fact is, the system merely started up gently on tick over and I bloody swear, I could see a ripple in the turf, spreading out towards the distant worry-house. I had to run over and point out that even at tick over, at no level at all, the thing was dropping really low and was going to upset The Man.
It was Sam Ellis, freshly finished his bonkers mega-box install, yet to complete the pretty-up bit but entirely justifiably chuffed to have it finished. Sam’s a long term major poster on TA and has had some serious stuff before but this is something else and is going to catapult him to legendary status. Here’s an interview with Sam Ellis, with him sat INSIDE his bass box
We had a row of cars from Paul Richardson of A1 Audio Designs and the quality as ever was delicious. It was very bright and the camera struggles in places, plus the wind was blowing and you can tell from how often I mindlessly repeat what Paul was saying that I felt the audio was being lost by the microphone. I remain astonished at how good the mic on the Canon I use actually is, so forgive the fat bloke muttering and listen to Paul explain the systems and what’s where and why on the three cars. I love the fierce loyalty they all exhibit for Paul.
It’s always an event for clearing stuff out and bring and buy 
As ever this season, we had a seriously superb set of swag from Dodo Juice to give away, with a year’s supply of their sexy wax as well as some shampoo and other goodies. The EMMA guys went into a draw and the first three out of the hat got the swag, as long as it wasn’t a second time around….
Three sets of swag at sixty quid’s worth each, lovely!
And I took a bundle of Fusion swag to award to some lucky souls. There were inflatable aliens and a few of the cute desk sets of paper clip holder, pen holder etc, again with aliens upon them.
We also had the EMMA sound off being held on site with the Ackerley father-and-son team in attendance, having driven through the small hours from the North-East to run the event. Here’s Andrew Ackerley calculating who has won what.
That said, we have a stalwart selection of Scots who drive bloody huge mileages to come and participate. Here, I finally catch up with Ian Edgar and his dad, who together, installed this beautiful SQ system into their company wheels.
And here’s a couple of images of the van
And although I royally mis-identified the Toyota van as being someone else’s, (and thanks for the gently-put correction-prompt I got on YouTube. Always nice to have someone help me take my foot out of my mouth, rather than let me ram it in to hip-deep!) this monster-woofered install was running towards the end of the day, with the doors shut and was getting something of a crowd around it to experience the sheer violence.
What they were looking at was how the vehicle was literally being shaken to death. Just check out the rippling, flexing metalwork on the thing in the video below!
It was a lovely chilled event with familiar faces
And a rare chance to meet the guys who sponsor the event, the Car Audio Direct chaps
Always a good event, just for the social and the cars assembled
And this year, especially cool to have a full-on round five of the EMMA sound off in our midst. Here’s the deserving winners, who can be found out about in detail as to scores, classes and placings by checking out the EMMA website here: link
A huge thank you to Car Audio Direct for their continuing support of the ICE-T meets, it is hugely appreciated by the Talk Audio forum folks who come along. We’ll keep you informed if we have to change venue for next year!