Viva Las Pioneeras
Adam Rayner gets ‘comped’ all the way to Vegas in style, hanging-on to the recent Pioneer dealer trip to SEMA…
I moved from professional audio to high end in-car to work for Robert Drake, who is a bigwig at Cobra these days and is the only man ever to have made me redundant twice! We were years ahead of our time but tried a couple of times.
First was Jetcell, then American Autosounds. We had Cerwin-Vega!, StreetWires, Altec Lansing, HiFonics, Amptech alternators, Collins tubes and even the ill-fated LA Sound. It was soon clear that if you were really a mensch (geezer of note) in car electronics what you did was to fly off every January to the impossibly exotic and exciting Las Vegas to the WCES show. It was attached to the porn convention at the same time back then and a ticket to the CES meant you could go and take little bits of video of your favourite adult performer and have them say ‘This one’s for you Johnny!’ before winking at you so you could edit them onto the front of a VHS tape for extra piquancy. Sometimes it was their eyes doing the winking.
Anyway, the whole prospect of going to Gomorrah was simply not on the table for me for years. I did get out there in the end, though. I clearly recall all the companies who have taken me under their wing and flown me there in the past but I can tell you that only Pioneer have been generous to the point of taking me a second time. Last time it was for the WCES and the launch of their Organic Electro Luminescent display technology. This was called OEL and is now termed OLED for Organic LED and is easier to say and understand. This time around it was for the SEMA show.
SEMA stands for the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers’ Association by which they mean speciality automotive equipment. It is a vast show, every bit as big as the CES and spills out all over where the coaches normally pick up delegates for the CES. There are show cars everywhere and although a much smaller presence than at CES time, there are also mobile electronics companies who populate the same North hall that they do in January. This was where I was headed.
The party was fifty strong and was bear-led by some terribly affable and professional folks from an outfit called Indeprod. Professional travel experts, I gather they work a lot in the automotive field, doing things like taking Iveco trucks dealers on factory jaunts to China. It meant never worrying about anything. One lady, part of the US team even got me some Tylenol for a pulled muscle in my shoulder and wouldn’t let me pay for them, just because I was whingeing about it. I had actually pulled an intercostal in my back ripping the VooDoo lounge group pass wristband off from the night before. How wet is that?
The trip kicked off as soon as we hit the airport, with Indeprod’s Chris to greet us and guide us to our very own desk with the red-skirted ones. When we got into McCarran we were met with real limousines. Bus-sized behind a pickup truck cab but with standing room, two brass dance poles and three built-in ice buckets filled with ice and bottles of mineral water. I wanted to have a wriggle but we were whisked off to the Bellagio the hotel with the dancing fountains in the lake in front and enough concrete pumped underneath it to stop it sinking into the Nevada desert valley floor to make a road all the way to LA. It cost silly money to build but Vegas and money is all silly numbers from what a car door opener at the taxi line earns to the amount you can win on a fruit machine.
We all got exhibitors passes the next morning although I had applied to the SEMA folks in advance so as to get press access. This meant that I was given a posh ballistic Nylon roller bag by the organisers (which is now available as swag to some lucky forum poster) as well as happening to meet up with an old mate.
Andrew ‘Fly’ Tipping and his American wife Courtney. Fly was part of Max Power’s very birth although rarely credited with just how vital he was to their whole shape and flavour. He has a USA mobile number now as well as an English one on his card (the flash git) and he was well surprised to see me.
All very lovely but I had to peel off and go dive into the show.
I have now got a ‘Prosumer’ camera from Canon (means one with a serious lens, SLR viewing and full manual control, as well as a lot of automatic features) as well as a shiny new lightweight tripod just for use on TA business and after some practise on the cats and my patient wife and boy, was only slightly ready to go fling some pixels onto SD.
Thankfully the camera is simply brilliant and I got enough of a grip to get some consistently lucky shots.
We have a feature on a car from Subaru America, filled with Kicker, We have a slew of sexy shots of mad cars in the gallery
attached to this story and we even got an interview with Mad Mike from MTV’s Pimp My Ride. All because I met the Mitek promo lasses inside the very front door of their hall and they had his name emblazoned across their behinds. The vehicle they were with is just insane and is at the end of a full year of show going. It was seen by a million people.
It is a pickup truck with five alternators. Four 250A jobs running at nearly 20 volts and one at 14 Volts fully independent of the rest for the vehicle’s electrics to use. It has TWO 22 inch MTX Jackhammers in it and seventeen thousand, five hundred watts of hard-assed RMS power. At a quarter volume I estimated it was throbbing a good 152 to 154dB. I was told that it was an accurate guess. (I can judge from 130dB to 157dB SPL to 2dB accuracy by which bits wobble. Guts, nostrils, eyeballs, wuurrggh!)
I made sure I shot it to death and then went off and photographed everything else that looked sexy. There were some fun gadgets and some really cool stuff. The most likely to be of use to our community has got to be the spray-on chrome paint. Used on plastic parts it looks like real chrome and is a real development for installers.
I had a blast, ate too much beef (in lumps big enough to make a roast for a family of three) and saw the cream of the UK’s Pioneer dealers in their wild state. Which, for some, was pretty wild.
I want to offer Talk Audio’s heartfelt thanks to Pioneer for a brilliant trip and also for the inside information regarding their new season’s equipment which we will also be bringing you as soon as the embargo date is finalised. There are goodies ahead, folks.
Viva Las Pioneeras!
And here’s where to click to see a funky cool slideshow in the newly imported gallery system. We LOVE this! If you go to the gallery itself from the menus above you can get at the fuller size versions of you want to nick any….
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