Week Forty- Seven In Which We Visit Dodgy Car Parks

So, did you see the BBC between Strictly and Merlin on Saturday night? If so, you will have met D Love, my soul brother from another mother from Stockport. Both fat and fifty-ish now, we still feel the lurve and D Love is here to tell you about the joys of digital radio. (At this point, a linky to the video would have been good but the BBC needs to place the clip on THEIR YouTube channel first, before we can see it.) I had a bit of a moment back there in the BBC Rehearsal theatre, as I realise now that I fell in love, yes, with DLove. It’s a hoped-for bromance I SO wanna ask him stuff about his life.
I have been getting a tiny bit better at filming with the lovely sponsored Sony HDR-CX730 Handycam and now feel I need to go visit that professional video/film showroom in Elstree for some sexy hardware to use as pukka video ‘˜legs’ as they call them in the trade. (And a windscreen sucker mount, and a body-mounted Steadicam thingy.. if only – £££!) If you look over to the right (while this column is current this week, or else under ‘˜Products’ on TATV listings to the left) you will see a video, made tripod-mounted inside Atsuhiro Takeda’s VW Touran. We went to Old Redding, a look-out-view public car park notorious for nocturnal nefarious goings-on to film the clip. It shows off how a loom of Alpine stuff with a couple of boxes of electronics woven within them, can make the difference between a sexy aftermarket headunit crippling some of the car’s cool original display functionality, to a totally sweet married item.
It might not seem much of a big deal, when the headunit has its own superb WVGA display with industry-leading clarity of graphical interface but when the extra stuff your cool headunit can do also shows up on the central binnacle display, with say iPod track listed and named when playing, it really is a help. Paying attention to driving is always the first object of the exercise of being on wheels, so the ease of use has always mattered to Alpine. (It’s what their ‘˜One Look’ display tech is all about for Sat Nav.)
And while I was told that Sony used to make this sort of thing, only Alpine do so nowadays. I think I need a video intro script that makes it clear that TATV is sponsored for the camera kit I’ll chat to the head PR honcho at Sony to see if a generic ‘˜Handycam’ reference would work for them. On the enduring Sony sub-brand front, have you seen the original Back To The Future film? It has a spoof version of a techno-amazement moment that we all experienced in the Eighties, to the point of it being life-memorable and getting in the movies as a concept. This was the first time you heard a cassette sound awesome – through a Sony Walkman. Nowadays, the Walkman brand has long since had anything to do with cassettes, yet Handycam remains huge as well. Mine has an active wobbly steady-shot gimbal lens mechanism for the Zeiss optics and a full GPS engine to boot!
OK, solid week of writing, apart from a visit to Pioneer to check out the 2013 range tomorrow and going to KEF on Friday to review a seven grand 7.1 speaker system. But I really want to play with an item I have been told is a little nugget of gold. A dinky wee Alpine SWE-815 active subwoofer with an eight inch speaker and a tiny 150 watt amplifier. Small enough to fit in with the shopping in the boot, loud enough to please and yet affordable and easy to fit, I am assured. I have one here and am going to find out.
Adam Rayner On Line Editor