Installation Feature: The Legendary Project Big Black

Installation Feature: The Legendary Project Big Black
Regular readers and Ground Zero fans will recall a mad LWB Mitsubishi Shogun owned by Matt Sprigg. He called it Project Big Black and it was a doirty great 4×4 with a truly horrible matt black paint finish. It was mighty and crushed all before it, even going to Italy over the mountains and back to take glory at the world Bass Race champs, proving his huge control skill as well as his big audio installation mastery.
For Matthew had decided to make a serious bass install that year and had been on the circuit making some really big waves in dB Drag racing for a few seasons. I got a call from GZ Europe HQ, asking if I could suggest one or two likely competitors to plop a woofer or two upon by way of general promotional sponsorship for their high power car audio brand?
Had I knowledge of a couple of candidates?
I suggested that instead of spreading it about, I suspected future glory for the man and that Matt aught to have the LOT plopped upon him. Since he and Lou were a team and while Lou was back office, support logistics and team coach, offering encouragement and biscuits, Matt was the horny-handed artisan. It worked well and he had a glint of madness in his eye.
It was Matt who got his paws all shredded on the tinfoil of the Ballistic sound deadener he used, as he lined his stripped-out Shogun live at the Mobile Electronics News Expo trade show. He also built the wall behind the occupants and the whole of the rest of the hugely potent competition bass install.
PBB was a madness zone, an utter hoot of extremely silly bass. It did the circuit for the year, supplied a couple of videos that catapulted one promo lasses’ career off to a good start for as soon as LJ got seen, she got a slew of admirers for her utterly arresting loveliness as well as her earthy laugh and of course, proper petrol head car knowledge. (These days she works for big household names like Citroën at top shows like Gadget Show Live.) Anyway, just for the hell of it and by way of reminder of JUST what this damn thing could do Read on.
The Car
A Mitsubishi Shogun 4×4 LWB. Here it is, with Laura Jane at Brands Hatch for an EMMA Sound Off.
Mostly, this is just a two-girl hair-trick

And before that at another showthis has some flavour and flex of the power barely contained within, despite huge stiffening work.

And here is how people reacted to it impressed and a bit in shock after it stopped.

So, what the hell was in it? Let’s learn more
Matt ‘˜thejoose’ Sprigg in ‘Footballers’ Crouch’ position
Source
The headunit was, like the rest of the ordnance, swagged by my fat self as a sponsorship and when it comes to ruggedness under stupefying bass power, the Kenwood brand does work well Iceman has proven it down the years as he has murdered so many CD decks with bass vibration! In the Shogun, it was a Kenwood KDC-W7044U 120GB iPod controlling double-DIN doodad. Thanks, Kenwood!
Here it is, nestling above all sorts of switch gear for amps and so forth.
Cabling
Another serious swag This was from Tsunami (unfortunate name, I was in Las Vegas at the CES the sixth day after all those people died in the real ones and the Americans on the stand looked ashamed.) Distributed by Connects2 in the UK, it is a really good value for money line of cables and wiring accessories that go all the way up to really flashy and posh as well as high function.
Raw POWA!
Like the Tim Allen character kept saying in that American sitcom ‘˜Home Improvement’ , ‘whadda we need? MORE POWER!’ And all that begins in-car with a coil of wire being cranked around by an engine’s force, within an electromagnet. With the diodes doing their thing, the magnetic force being pulled about, is used to make electrickery in Direct Current. Great farking gouts of it for a basser like this. Plus, you will also need a battery bank and a starter battery if not from hell, at least the near environs. Like Heck.
Alternation multiplication, for tha’ generation of the wattage’ motivation. And thing.

Shuriken BT-100 exotic super-deep-cycle mega-dump, current-from-heck competition audio battery you get the idea. This was under the bonnet, a bank of its brethren lived to the rear.
Front Stage
Now this thing was about hearing it from waaaay off and the speakers were deeply unhealthy to experience unprotected, close up, for too long. There was no shame in wearing high frequency hearing protection inside Project Big Black and Matt had a collection of hearing defenders inside. That WERE used. As there were two offensively high efficiency and I mean like 107dB for one little watt efficient, GZ CT2200 bullet tweeters in each door. These are a pro-audio derived product that everyone now sells and uses and are deadly. These are the things that’ll make your ears ring and never allow you to hear your grandchild’s voice in old age. Deafness is not good. Beware!
Bullets of great danger

As part of a subtle door array note the old fashioned-looking Linen suspensions of the GZ CW 8-4 8in competition midwoofers, actually mean pro-audio derived massive power midband-output-only specialist speakers not ‘˜old’!
Sub-Bass Wall Of Mayhem
But the big story was that wall not by ANY means as badass as Ground Zero woofers can go, this was still good for pushing one hundred and SIXTY decibels of bass at times. Meet eight metal-coned twelves, each able to be powered by monstrous amounts of watts. The mighty wall of GZ NW12 Nuclear subwoofers

They had a savage rise time, faster than the massively weighty Orion 12in HCCA, so the snap and attack of bass in here was evil and just what unreconstructed rock nutter Sprigg loved. He would play loud guitar-based rock music as well as those silly demo bass drops and stuff.
Amplification
In the front, driving duties were taken care of by a Ground Zero GZUA 2125SQ which makes it a Uranium range SQ amp for running the GZ CT2200 bullets each side with 2x 125 watts. Through those bullets, that’s wickedness.
In the three eight inch midbass specialist drivers’ case, each door trio has one channel shared of a GZUA 2225SQ which makes that one also a Sound Quality aimed product but still driving the thick end of half a kilowatt on peak of midband to each door.
Portrait of the artist as a bass head

And the main amplifier bank in the back. These were GZ NA1.2500DXII 2,300w RMS animals. ONE per woofer!
Sound
Well, it was BRUTAL. Loud and nearly as low as Ian ‘˜Iceman’ Pinder’s ridiculous Astra van, it could easily do dual hair tricks in a much bigger whole doorway, such was the epic displacement. Above all, it had this madness of clarity and detail you could make out even in close up, due to the bullet tweeters’ flared hornlets.
The balance was remarkable and it really did play all kinds of music well. I was astonished as well as the general public and you knew it was him at long range, as he hove into view, if only for the beardy taste in music!
It was quite an era and while we can admire the man for being part of a twofer-team that enables stuff like this bass madness to happen, which mantle is worn by H & Daz Hircock these days, I will freely admit I was gutted when Matt announced the Shogun was fractured and spent and in an effort not to use the same ‘˜Fractured & Spent’ description for his marriage to Lou, he simply took it to bits at the end of a massively successful season.
I invite Matt or any event organisers or those who simply know, to chip in with the ‘Full Captain Kirk’ qualifications, prizes, medals and lists of great acts of this man and this wagon, below the article, here.
Meanwhile, a slideshow of the pictures above, and some more, of Matt and his Project Big Black Shogun at a meet a while back, now are all at the end of this click.
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And if you are inspired to buy Ground Zero in the UK, click Car Audio Direct’s Ground Zero ads in the magazine format pages at any time, or for more, now, click here: link