Source Sounds’ SPL Monster Golf

I was at an open day of a major UK leading dealer when I first clapped eyes upon the Hertz SPL Monster amplifier. There is definitely no fat on the name of that product at ALL. It looks like a lintel from the Sarsen stones at The Henge. It must be a modern druidic tool for harnessing the power of Ley-Lines. Or breaking subduction-zone faults open.

It was designed from the ground-up to run a huge set of subwoofers at enormous power and sound pressure level and when I caught up with an old chum named Paul Ellis at the recent Ultimate Street Car show at legendary drag strip Santa Pod I was in for a treat. For this mad scientist of an ice engineer, he who once stretched the wheel base of a small Renault to make it look an homologation rally special model with a sound system, had actually surpassed himself with one of the single most extreme, trailer-queen ice installs I have ever seen in the UK. Source Sounds in Sheffield is the hot spot he runs.
And Paul’s demo Golf has a Hertz SPL Monster 15,000watt RMS amp at its heart.

Come to think of it, I reckon I may only have ever seen a couple of installs as extreme as this before in my whole life. Las Vegas, I think, at the CES. But they didn’t use anything like the amount of equipment, nor have twin monstrous output alternators installed to actually RUN the systems on petrol power, either. Mind you, the twin 240A each mega-dynamo-beast install in this old Golf was done at the expense on slicing through a lump of the monocoque bulkhead at the bumper. She’s never going to drive on the road again but may the most extreme Ice car ever made, as a result.
The ‘˜seat’ is just perch-your-arse-on-a-hot-amplifier and the steering wheel is central and wears the screen of the quite utterly unique Kenwood KOS system. This screen bosses a hidden source and feeds the colossal Hertz amplification and speaker system.
We’ll start at the arse end. A single Hertz SPL Monster feeds a ridiculous, whopping thirty-six ten inch woofers. Stacked in rows and columns. Crammed in so close that the arse end of one woofer’s magnet is definitely obtruding within the cubic of the cone-shaped space in the face of the woofer it is facing in the opposing wall.
There are two rows of three ten inch woofers enclosed within the flank of the Golf and facing them are another set of six. They vent to the outside world or the ‘˜vehicle’ cabin via a fat round slot. These in turn share a common volume with another array of six tens with their baskets fitted inverted s as to fit the ‘˜stacked’ yet fully enclosed woofers across the Golf’s width, allowing for the woodwork, in SIX layers.

Thus three fat round slots show inside the Golf. Look in each one and you will see the butts of six tens and the fronts of the cones of six more and the whole ruddy lot are hooked up to that insane Hertz SPL Monster amp in the very back. So that’s thirty-six ten inch ES250 subwoofers on fifteen thousand watts continuous, then.
And to the ‘˜cabin’ which has its floor lined with Hertz HDP amps and its front utterly reconstructed to make a total wall of speakers, is laid out very symmetrically. Starting at the outside of the Golf, each door-panel wears six midbass speakers and a brace of evil bullet tweeters per door. These are brilliantly motorised and are NOT speeded-up in the video below:


We gather it took some real application of engineering from a dude who makes bearings for factory automation. And that was after destroying three terribly slow linear actuators in early build attempts! Then the Flanges Of Madness dash contains seven sets of Hertz ESK 165 six and a half inch component speakers and five sets of the Hertz ESX 165 coaxial versions.

Add up all the voice coils and this Golf actually has four more than Ian ‘˜Iceman’ Pinder’s mad Astra van had, at one hundred voice coils! (read that one here: link)
The sound of the thing was brain bending and along with the now famous Hertz SPL Show Panda, is well able to be used as a PA system. In fact they had the Panda, this crazed Source Sounds Golf and Smoke & Mirrors, all hooked up to the de-rigueur Pioneer CDJ decks and many a cool tune was spun throughout the day at intense SPLs that even drowned out the normally dominant demo cars from the Vibe stable who were right next door.

It made for one hellaciously rocking USC at the ‘˜Pod and was a fitting venue to release something this radical and wicked!
You can reach Source Sounds to ask about more modest needs in your ride on 0114 257 1550 and you can check out their web presence here: link
Paul Ellis of Source with his friends

check out the whole gallery of shots of this mad install here: link