ULTIMATE SQL AT AUTO AUDIO 20kw of Sundown plus £6k of Morel front speakers!
I shall open with if ‘Built, not Bought’ is a religious tenet for you, then read no further, for this is the tale of the single coolest Sound Quality -LOUD (SQL, see!) car audio installation ever committed by a commercial enterprise in the UK.
Yes, folks have asked builders to make astonishing cars before and there have been some monsters from the experts before but nobody ever did this. Our nutter, sorry hero, Nikolai Troubetzkoy is from St. Lucia, where his family own and run Jade Mountain Resort, an utterly paradisiacal place. As well as his main job as a games developer, Nikolai is also the resort’s sales director, doing the meetings with the big British travel operators’ posh ends as it were.
And the dude has taste and firm opinions and worked out that the most beastly car woofers and amplification and clearest speakers around, were things he wanted in his ride.
At first, he had an install done in a car chosen especially for its ability to take a good system – a Golf. And with all the latter day technology worked out to produce these absurdly high power woofers and 12V tech-based amplifiers and the ridiculous power delivery he needed, already done, this was no pioneering job. On the bigger-is-better principle, Nikolai had gone with a single huge eighteen inch Sundown woofer to go with his Morel Elate Ltd Edition tip top quality three way front speakers. Thing is, the big old Pioneer amplifier he had to drive it, was OK but not like the madness of the surfboard sized exotics out there, especially from the same brand as the crazed woofers. Then he did some more homework and realised that with the cubic he had in the car, a different box, much rigidity and four twelve inch woofers would actually work better, take more power and offer way more actual air shove than the eighteen alone! So he wanted it rebuilt.
Steve Wong used to get 157dB in the footwell of his Golf when he worked for a different outfit in the nineties. This was when three spoke wheels were the painfully coolest thing. I cannot even recall why or if he knows why I did but I do remember driving the car a ways across London one day for some reason. The box had two fifteens with dual spiders and they were in a box that had a layer of sheet steel epoxy resined into two layers of MDF to make a composite. years ahead of his time. Fast forward a whole career slice and Steve has one of the coolest jobs on car audio – working for these guys.
The box Steve designed, with Nikolai’s input, is a massive shared common cubic, with a huge port that comes from behind and has its output pressurised by the woofers as it goes by. I have no clue what you would call that, except to count ‘orders’ it’d be a fifth-order enclosure, I think.
This time it was to have two sets of the Morels in the front, all running on super high quality Alpine PDX amplifiers. Each of the six front drivers gets its very own channel of amplification, driven into the amps actively from the clever Audison DSP box. The bigger drivers get two amplifier channels bridged into one, to offer more grip, headroom and plain power to the front soundstage. The doors are works of art. The speaker housings and how the whole door construction fits, right down to the subtle curve of a bit of door-switch trim being followed by sculpted multiplex, is a treat.
The headlining is stripy at the front, the cheater panels are neat as ninepence. And where the edges meet the world, they are capped with fabricated stainless steel sheet and fixed everywhere with quality Allen-headed engineering bolts. I am on record in five dozen home audio loudspeaker reviews saying that the use of posh Allen headed bolts indicates a maker that cares about what they do. As if that wasn’t enough, the seams are all sealed with silicone mastic.
The area behind the two seats in what was chosen as at a two door car, entirely deliberately for the better structural integrity, by the way, is where the bass amp and Audison hub of empire live. The four Alpine PDX watt houses are in the rear.
The first layout of this new system had the bass amp in the back but Nikolai intends to truly spank this system and realised that sealing the subwoofer amplifier into a small sealed space was daft. The Alpines are on cast chassis with the hot bit on the top, so aughta be OK. This internal upside-down layout also means that if you wanted to move the badges by 90 degrees in the chassis for the look of the install (like in the Alpine van) you have to do a full warranty-voiding strip down and rebuild of the amp to make a cosmetic change. So they didn’t. Yet they still look cool.
But those four monstrous woofers… just look at them in the build video below!
The power and acoustical rigidity this amount of bass requires, is bonkers. Those lumpy Stinger batteries we saw could jump start the heart of a mammoth, frozen in the permafrost in the tundra for three thousand years. The amount of copper in the phat one-over-guage power and earth cables could wire up a whole street of houses. And as for the steel square section framework hidden away under all that dense multiplex ply, well you could probably make a go-kart from that much steel.
One thing it does mean is that unlike other cars that have had way past the 150dB level audio installs, the roofline at the front, in the middle of the windscreen does not flex. In other cars, a pole is often welded to hold the roof in position. Can you imagine describing this stuff to an earlier, 1990’s Adam Rayner? Stripper Poles, steel reinforcing for boxes and roof and not a power capacitor in sight? I would have been amazed And even more so that this car does not need a stripper pole.
Everywhere you might rap it with a knuckle, it feels simply inert, like a solid lump of wood or a tree trunk. But that is part of the sheer genius of Steve Wong, the installer and Nish at Auto Audio for being able to say a simple ‘yes’ to all the bonkers requirements Nikolai had. Nish is a top chap, an asset to the outfit and gets named in the great reviews that Auto Audio garner. Never pushy, this is the second version of the install, with Alpine amps instead of Pioneer ones and that humungous main ‘sublifier.’
I have a lovely arrangement with the Ace Café for press use. As long as you ask in advance and say where you were, they bend over backwards to help. All they want is no double bookings. And you don’t take the pip. As in tea, coffee and comestibles is their department. The guv’nor Mark, is a lovely man and it turns out, in the edit, was sat quietly in his favourite spot and just happened to end up perfectly in shot in the long-awaited second part of this video.
It took some getting.
Now, check out the pictures:
The Audison gets one input and splits it to the whole system
