Talk Audio at the Expo
It was a milestone year for the Car Audio and Electronics industry in the UK. This was the very first ever Trade Expo that featured a day when it was open to the public instead of being trade-only throughout. Always dubbed simply the Mobile Electronics News Expo and married to the tuning and styling side of the same publishing house’s doings, this year it was called the Autosound and Styling Show 2010 and we had some tickets to give away on the forum and a slew of stuff fixed up to do and sort out.
For one, we saw the first round of the EMMA car audio competition scene and it was the moment when a bunch of sponsorship and feature arrangements came to fruition. I also bought a new PA system which I collected from a TA-er at the event! So now I can harangue you lot anywhere I can get to that has electricity or I can take a battery!
First out of the traps is Ian “Iceman” Pinder who was freshly sponsored by JKM Entertainment to the tune of a dirty great in car PC system and big old screen to add to the multiple multi-media sources in the Astra Van Of Legend. The marketing benefit for JKM’s in car PC ordnance is that if the unit doesn’t implode or get destroyed by the levels of intense vibration in Iceman’s Astra, then it’ll find your fleet’s tasks a doddle. I know Ian loves it and will be playing with the install to refine it from the get-it-in-for-the-show situation we saw this in. But then he always makes certain he is ready one way or another….
I did a video of the JKM stand with Ian upon it, before the inevitable requested hairtrick from a lass called Estelle in this case – who we thank for her bravery, although you can tell she didn’t dig the furious wobbling as much as some who have done it!
Matt “thejoose” Sprigg materialised with the black Shogun called Project Big Black, lined completely with Ballistic sound deadening mat and with a spaghetti of cables being installed into the beast over the weekend. I did a couple of videos…one was the lucky bleeder getting a Kenwood headunit which I thieved for him – Kenwood placing a lovely cherry on the top of the pretty much entirety of the Connects2 marketing budget for 2010. As C2 are placing a bloody VAST Sound Pressure Level system into Matt’s Shogun with his soul as their fee…now he’s a GZ boy and will be off to just about as many contests as he can, with the glorious difference with Matt being that his Good Lady is behind him all the way rather than her being an Ice Widow, so it all helps! Here he is looking delighted!
But of course his daily ride up and down the nation is a SEAT Leon FR that he wanted to put a decent system into, without making any holes in his bosses car. So, what with Connects2 being the leading creators of solutions for fitting aftermarket kit into modern cars, we asked them to provide Matt with the bits he needed to posh his own Kenwood headunit into his Leon. Check out the factory-match of the panel. Things have got better since I last looked!
And since the whole video thing seems to be better than verbiage…here’s a walk through of what 2010 has in store for you from the powerhouse that is the Vibe stable. Just check out the sheer mad volume of the amount of new and evolved product that midbass distribution have got for us this season….
Regular readers may recall my being pretty impressed with inexpensive Onyx kit – in raw woofer form. This brand is now with Car Sound Supplies and was selling well as a whim-purchase to show goers.
The Armour guys were there, with Mike Smith looking delighted to be holding the very first examples of the new Focal Power Symmetric or FPS amplifiers. These feature external add-on capacitor banks like posh home audio sometimes does (Mission Cyrus in particular) to add the most expensive headroom, snap and attack enhancing increase to available power to massively rapid-slew amplifier sections. This adds attack and dynamics to an already keen sound (suspected, as after all Focal do go a bloody long way into the High of Hi-Fi!) and is all part of the mad-end construction that demands that the internal electronic topology is actually the same on each side of the amp. Yes, they are laid out inside with perfect symmetry.
The Clarion guys were there with their new easy-set-up product demo trailer and had an amazing car parked on their stand. It’s a Nissan GTR and belongs to a higher-up in the Clarion Malaysia division. He has two of these one here and one at home (kept in Swindon indoors in the heated niceness) so he always gets the ride he wants. I gather it was a stripped-out racer and so has had the interior replaced but it is a full on race spec monster. Brian Skeete tells me it’s crap for being inconspicuous in but it puts a real smile on your face even if you don’t break the national speed limit. “Coming out of London, I had a Maserati on one side, an Audi R8 on the other. They looked at me, I didn’t need to bother to look back. Then they roared off, like they had something to prove.” Seen here with Richard Sadler, Alan Smith and Brian Reece.
The guys from ProPlus Sound had a savage posse present, so much so, I reckon we’ll have to do them their own little thingy once we find out just how much kit was in the ruddy fleet that showed up. Seen here is Oz, charismatic new dude with daughter and his mad Golf as well, stuffed with kit.
It was a brilliant season-opener and great fun was had by all, except Ian’s new sponsor from JKM who had a nasty mishap upon leaving and not having parked indoors at shows often before had no ‘target image’ for driving out of shell schemes – he ploughed a skinny pillar he hadn’t seen and scratched his car! All fixed now and shiny for the next show of the season – see you out there!