Saturday, September 28, 2024
Editorials

Week Twenty-Three: In Which I Write Up A Cover Car.

I’m chuffed that this month’s trade magazine, a well produced glossy called Mobile Electronics News, has a car on the cover that I wrote up. It is an install in a bonkers aggressive looking Toyota thingy with a huge engine in it that is due to go off to Ibiza this summer and give people beer.
Yes, that’s right! It serves beer from the back from a fully installed compressor-cooler driven professional beer pump that was installed by Huets The In-Car Specialists at their Shoreham On Sea branch! It has a simple-but-effective four corners-plus subwoofer installation.
Stock but beefed up spots in the doors and shallow subwoofer and two coaxes in the rear. Here’s an extract
‘The truck, a Toyota FJ430, is raised up a little, Yank style and has a massive great petrol V6 under the bonnet. It doesn’t want to be lacking torque to trundle up a Balearic beach. It also has a fabricated battery tray to house the serious Stinger auxiliary battery. While they were re-wiring the high power stuff, they also upgraded the winch’s power feed when it found to be a bit weedy.
The install is simple in essence because the products are potent and really solidly mounted. Starting with the headunit, it’s a Alpine INA-S900 AV unit and drives two JL Audio amplifiers, found to the rear right under a nicely watertight clear cover (it needs to be, that close to the bar!) . These are a JL Audio XD400/4 and an XD600/1 and drive the JL Audio Evolution VR690-CXi speakers (!) in the American spec front door stock locations. Obviously these have been internally reinforced for better power and quality of sound and being six by nines they really work well. The subwoofer and rear speakers are in the custom box at the back. These are a shallow JL Audio 13TW5 and a pair of coaxial JL Audio Evolution C2-650x.’
It’s bonkers and if any of you see it on holiday get yourself photographed with this ‘Experiential Marketing’ tool (i.e. get a beer) then get a shot taken and we’ll sort you out some front page glory. Do it by e-mail from abroad in the holiday season and we’ll give you a prize! Tell ‘˜em The Fat Man Sent You!
Lots of lovely Fusion gear here to test, as well as heap of subs, from JBL, Pioneer and Alpine and a Caliber unit and that New York Blaupunktso heaps to do, as ever. Let’s see how much I can get at this week. (I do lose half a day to Peter Kay at the O2 for meJulie’s birthday!)
Adam Rayner Online Editor