OXFORD CAR AUDIO JL AUDIO GRAFFITI BEETLE

Now, regular readers may know that I am an experienced soul when it comes to car audio. In terms of the sheer breadth of systems and how long I have been doing it, I may well be um, just possibly a Mister Worldwide! Daft but true, if you think about it and a bit puke making for those of you who ache with longing to hear the finest and most potent car audio experiences. But I have been to Vegas nine times and heard the twice all-Europe SQ winning car from Finland, meeting the beautiful young couple, who’s garage life was car, food, work and lurve.
I have sat in cars in Iwaki City in Japan, listening to the latest Alpine PXA processor. (Although I do recall having to share with an oaf from Australia who got sacked not long after that tripwho WOULD NOT shut the fuck up, starting prattling 20 seconds after the demo started. I was listening for more stuff than he had the remotest clue about and after two requests, my jet lag got the better of me and I just got out of the car, causing some offence.)
I have been in corporate and made-for-love bass demo cars, from the mild to the wild. I was the project manager for the first ever British 150dB install with Earthquake Sound Of San Francisco. It hit 153.4dB but was horribly badly built, had several woofers out of phase and then simply burned itself to death on the motorway, due to bad wiring, making the owner break down and cry on the phone to me! I was writing a cartoon strip called BoomZilla at the time and we had a funeral scene.. I wrote my best couplet for it:
‘Voice coil to ashes, alternator to dust, if the bass don’t get you, then the HF must!’
I have sat in a good collection of the best cars the SQ scene in the UK has to offer. I have sat in the Galpin Scythe in H=Vegas at SEMA and THAT is a HUGE honour. I have been inside a £660,000 Morel equipped Lamborghini Aventador and sat in new Bentleys and Audis and Maseratis. I have felt 160dB purge my very soul in way no other install has before or since, hitting way down low so your very being is shaken and grasped inside Mark Smith’s Ground Zero Volvo.
But all that pompery fades to fuck all when it comes to Big Mick, the Metal Overlord. Live engineer with Metallica, he has won Sound Engineer of the Year more than once, and when Led Zep get some other bloke to warble and do the live thing, it can be only he that is there to make it sound like them. As I type, Metallica are gearing up for Glastonbury, where their very own ‘˜sound’ was quite a new thing for the festival, as Mick deals with 100,000 strong crowds all the time and well, Metallica are known for a certain rich weight to their bass. More of that another time. Also, they are heading up Sonisphere
And Oxford Car Audio was a nice spot to meet for a bacon sandwich and a catch-up. My mate Mister Mick came to Oxford Car Audio on the day we did the shoot with the gorgeous Sabrina. Her Ford Street Ka car was being done and there is a lovely delicatessen/café next door. Thing is, Mick too has now heard some astonishing cars by hanging out with the likes of me, been to the trade Expo, done a hair-and-beard trick that you can see at the top of my Presenterbloke channel on YouTube, sat in some mad cars at a Car Audio & Security open dayand HE WAS THE REVIEWER for this car
The Car
A lovely old Beetle.. with years of TLC, massive reinforcement to the roof, amazing amounts of labour literally years of getting to the place where they can make it happen and they did. It has been painted with skill by an artist they know called ‘Kleiner Shames’ and wet sanded TWICE before the vitreous shine was finished being fettled. Yes, she’s an old girl with creaky knees and a bit of arthritis showing here and there but she’s a game old bird and now has a whole new lease of life as a superb demo car for the business. Without further ado, here is the video I made for the OCA YouTube channel, that happens to include the Beetle. There’s an in depth one, further down:

OCA Post Grad DONS OF ICE!

External Processing?
NONE! Look closely and you see Caché line drivers in my photography. But I am here to tell you that the serious level of signal coming out of the Alpine CDE-178BT head unit, at some four volts, was all they ended up needing. The line drivers have been removed! (In the ‘˜olden days’ the line level signal was always a mere 500mV so these boosters had a place.) They are not even using all three RCA pairs of outputs, but rather simply feeding the JL Audio HD 600/4 amplifier with one stereo RCA feed, to drive the component speakers. Then, the internal crossovers are there to split the tunes up between the tweeters and the mids and the ‘pass thru’ signal RCA outs on the amps are used to send the music onwards

JL Audio clearly use high quality audio amplifiers in their preamp sections, as from here, the sounds go off to the bass amps. Here, the signal dives in head first, only to Dolphin-leap clean out again, to go off to another amplifier. These too have little crossovers of great accuracy and clearly described frequency values, that keep the subwoofers working perfectly. This means less RCA cords of shorter lengths and the processing is kept to a minimum. It all sounds the cleaner for it.
The speakers and hook up
Essentially, this is a very ‘˜simple’ system and describing its power is hilarious to onlookers who do not understand our world. At merely 4,200 watts, is not a particularly ‘˜powerful’ system at all. Told you it was hilarious
For the woofers are a 13-and-a-half incher, an odd JL Audio size, and in the 600 watt power handling W3 model, these are a smooth sound quality subwoofer, such as an entry level sound off competitor could easily be usingbut just the one at a time!
The speakers are the C5 coaxes in the kick wells, with four midband speakers and four tweeters in each door. These are the six and a half inch high quality JL Audio TR-650CSi components and run on passive crossovers in bunches of two, to show 2 Ohms to each respective JL Audio HD 1200/1 amplifier channel they groove upon and thus suck more watts. There’s 3,600W RMS (or continuous power) of bass.
The Double Clamshell Multiple Order Enclosure
This, like the coach grade 19in TFT TV set in the roof lining was the result of a classic, ‘YOU CAINT DOOO THAYAT!’ challenge. He was told you can only get four in a wall. So meet a clamshell. This is the term for a set of woofers that point at each other in a concavity. In minimum terms, three, bended round like this, is technically a clamshell.

But there are TWO such clamshell arrays of three, in a common cubic and with a shared port hole in the middle. Carefully calculated and designed with the skill of a top end bass Mekanik, LEM’s bass box is thus a ported double clamshell. If one of the deeper box geeks will work me out what ‘˜order’ of box this is in the comments below, I will send you a swag item!
Big Mick’s Verdict
The way I met Mick was that I had bitched up a storm after a cheaply equipped Max Power show. The audience could not hear me on the microphone. I said we needed a REAL P.A. system. So they hired this not-currently-on-tour system from the bloke who works for Metallica. This was nearly twenty years ago. Metal is lost on me, so he knows it’s the WORK that we share and are chums.
Thing is, as soon as I learned he was a ‘˜loud’ music engineer, I thought, ‘I’ll give him fucking LOUD!’ And led him to a potent bass motor car, asking the owner if he could let Mick control the bass. To his credit, he turned it up a bit then ripped the living crap out of it.
Then, to a bloke who made his living thinking about words for BASS for at least ten years at this point, he gave me two knew words for the sound that I nicked immediately and have used ever since. He said it had ‘GIRTH’ as in had deep bass and was ‘Crushing’ in terms of loudness. I thought he was utterly cool right there and have ever since.
And since that car, Mick has had a massive install in a Lexus and has sat in and listened to some amazing installations of all kinds. He is a God Of Power Audio and can tell you about time alignment and phase coherency.
In stadia! (stadiums, like you know, WEMBLEY!)
He asked to get the Beetle fired up and was mighty impressed. He engaged LEM, the installer in deep conversation and told me later that he found him massively impressive in his acoustical grasp and design and especially the gorgeous craftsmanship.

But best of all, he said it was the best sounding power system in a car he had ever heard. That it had a phase coherency and accuracy that was bloody brilliant. He said some pro PA systems do not work as well as the system in the Oxford Car Audio Graffiti Beetle and that the bass was impressive. He said it was smooth and melodic and not remotely that one-note boom that most every other big bass car he has heard was like, by comparison. Steve ‘˜LEM’ LeMasurier was blown away that The Metal Overlord should say such things about his sound.
The OCA Graffiti Beetle may be one of the best cars ever built in the UK. The thing has had five years of gestation. (Ian Pinder’s Astravan took two years) and the paint is a big part of it.
It has an Alpine DVB-T TV tuner in there, the TUE-150V, to drive that 19in telly, as well as the iPad Mini in the dash as a superannuated iPod for the tunes. An Alpine USB hub source serves as a tucked-away item for playing stuff from in ‘˜attract mode’ in the shop or at shows. (And yes, they have to move the back wall of their showroom out of the way, to get the Beetle out to play her at shows!)
Its just one of my fave cars in a whole career.
LINKS:
Oxford Car Audio link
To book YOUR car for some work, from curing a rattle, to doing THIS: Call 01865 769911
To find out more about the stuff in the car
JL Audio UK link
Dynamat link
Buy garments with designs by the graffiti artist here:
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and check out his Facebook page here:
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The Beetle all on its own

Your reward for reading to the very bottom of this feature is this slideshow, with a few swapsies and errm, ONE out of focus shot of Sabrina I plumb forgot to picture edit out, come to think of it
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