When did obsession begin.!

joeaudio26

What age where you when you first started this car audio obsession?

I'm 26 but bought my first system at 21 ,which was MTX 12'' sub in a sealed enclosure and power the sub with thunder 202 mono amp with a pioneer HU.

MacLeod

1990. I was 18

Bought a Pioneer HU and amp and some MTX Road Thunder speaker boxes and paid a buddy of mine $10 to teach me how to install them.

Been obsessed ever since.

RuSsMaN

I was 15 years old. 1987.

I got a summer job detailing exotic cars for a body shop. I was part of the 'finishing crew'. 911's. Buick Grand National's. There was a speciality shop inside the main shop for EVERYTHING Lotus. The Vette's, the Audi's....

No drivers license, obviously. I got a daily ride from a friend 'Clint'. He had a 1978 Olds 88 2 door with a four hundred something under the hood. I don't know the headunit - but he had that cool rat shack 10 band external EQ hooked up, and 6x9's in the back dash. Not Kraco type stuff, but I'm sure it wasn't a whole lot better.

Blown away. We used to blaze up on the way to and from work, and throw on some Edgar Winter Group or some such, and rock the F out. Steve Miller Band. Foghat. Zeppelin. I never heard ANYTHING get so loud, and so CLEAN in a car before.

That car was 30 foot long if it was a foot. Man, what a time. The ride to and from was worth the long work day. This wasn't dad's 8-track.

Cheers,
Russ

pentavolvo

When I was 16 which was in 01. My first system was a Pioneer entry level headunit. Some Kenwood Coaxials and a 10"MTX 4000 off a little MTX 2 channel getting liek 200wrms at best and I thought I was banging.

Now a higher end Alpine from 2 years ago. Polk C400.4 to polk components and coaxials. Elemental Desgins Nine1 to 2 16OVs. A whole ton of sound deadening and now its really banging

Jstas

I got started doing this stuff in about 1992. I was still a freshman in high school and only about 14 years old but a bunch of my friends from Boy Scouts were 15 and 16 years old and getting thier first cars. So I started hanging around with them.

Since my dad was an electrical technician at TRW when I was younger, he had a very good understanding of electrical circuits and soldering skills. He did his best to pass them on to me and I guess he did a good job because I'm still **** around with that stuff now.

Well, because of all that learnin' I got, I was the only one that could solder so back in the days prior to crimped connectors and pre-wired adapter harnesses, I was wiring systems up from scratch. By the time I was 16, I had built a competition winning stereo in a 1977 Malibu Classic station wagon. We reached 143 dB which, for the time, was right up there near the tops of the amateur ranks. We did it with Kicker and Pioneer full-range speakers, Earthquake subs and some serious Hifonics gear all with a Denon head unit as the source and a Power-Acoustik multi-amp crossover.

I realized that I had a propensity towards this stuff. It just made sense to me. I started doing alot of work for friends and learning about the ins and outs of enclosure design. I started building sealed boxes and small fiberglas enclosures to fit into doors and rear decks when everyone else in the area was running vented enclosures with MTX Road Warrior subs. My friends and I got good at it and we were more than just noise. Yeah, it was loud and pissed off all the old people but we were running stereos in the 2000 watts range in daily drivers. Very few pros in the ranks were above the 2000 watt point at the time. At least in the ranks I was competing in. I designed multi-amp systems and got into building boxes with a high stealth factor. I could install a head unit in about 40 minutes, including wiring. I had friends of friends asking me to do work on thier cars.

I think I realized I was hooked hardcore when a local stereo shop's owner looked at the work I did on a Sunbird and told me I had a job that started Monday if I wanted it, just show up. I didn't take it because I was starting college and wouldn't have the time to spend in his install shop and still get homework for an electrical engineering degree done. I still did work for people on the side though because it's just fun. That Sunbird had a Sony Mobile ES head unit and attached CD changer with the Power-Acoustik multi-amp crossover from the Malibu, Hifonics amps, all Warrior series and JBL subs and speakers.

My first stereo though, that was in my Ranger. It was a Kenwood KRC-503 head unit with a Profile California Series CA-460X stereo amp, two Kenwood W3000 8 inch subs, Polk Audio EX402 4" coaxials in the dash and Kicker Impulse 460i 4x6 inch coaxials in custom door panels. It wasn't much, I eventually added a CD changer in the form of a KCD-C610 I think it was. All of that gear except the changer is still working and servicable although mothballed. The whole stereo was only about 940 watts of total power but it would reach a measured 128 dB. That was needed because that little truck was NOISY!

I learned alot in those first few years and it just led to home audio stuff. The real benefit there is that with all of the skills I picked up wiring amplifiers, repairing crossovers and installing head units, I got good at tracing and fixing circuit problems and reading schematics. Needless to say, some of my nice home audio gear I bought broken for peanuts, spent some money on parts and made it work just fine again.

On top of that, the whole time I was having fun, I had no idea I was giving myself a basic circuits and physics lesson. When I got into school, I realized that I had my first year of circuits aced. I just had to pass the mid-term. Otherwise, the whole term would be weighted mostly on the final project which was to design and build your own circuit that actually DID something! Hey, I was IN! I already had a crossover network I built! I just had to draw up the schematics and make sure I could build it with the stuff I had available in the lab!

There isn't so much involved in car stereo stuff anymore. With all the ready-made stuff, not many people get into it farther than a pair of wire stripping multi-tools, a panel puller and a screw driver. It's nice that you can do it all so simply now but it loses alot of it's allure because so many people will consider themselves experts because the called Crutchfield and got a stereo they installed themselves. It's like alot of the skill has left the industry and unless you go to the shows, you won't find too many people with the skill or even the drive to do more than write thier local Best Buy a check to put a stereo in thier Honduh.


Wow, that was longer than I thought it would be. Oh well.

MacLeod

Jstas wrote:

There isn't so much involved in car stereo stuff anymore. With all the ready-made stuff, not many people get into it farther than a pair of wire stripping multi-tools, a panel puller and a screw driver. It's nice that you can do it all so simply now but it loses alot of it's allure because so many people will consider themselves experts because the called Crutchfield and got a stereo they installed themselves. It's like alot of the skill has left the industry and unless you go to the shows, you won't find too many people with the skill or even the drive to do more than write thier local Best Buy a check to put a stereo in thier Honduh.

There is a lot of truth in that.

I remember when I first got into car audio 4 channel amps were extremely rare and you could forget about bass boost or low pass filters. Time alignment? HA!

exalted512

I got started about 11 years ago when I was 9...My brother had bought a bunch of RF gear and an eclipse head unit and needed some help installing everything. We had no idea what we were doing and he nominated me to do the radio and he would do everything else. This way in an 89 chevy pick up. The one with the equalizer in the center of the truck and the radio itself in the dash.

So I start taking apart the dash looking for a plug that looked similar to the one the shop had given him. I pull the radio out first. Nothing there. I trace the wires to what looks like is going to the equalizer, so I pull that out. Still no sign of a plug. I finally traced the wires to the factory amp in the dash. But I still didnt see the plug. The one they have me had 4 different parts all in one plug. I finally figured out that you only needed 3 of those parts and the factory amp had em separate, but you could still plug them into the plug. It took me the whole weekend to do that and it took my brother about the same to install 4x6s all the way around and a 2 sub/single amp combo up. I was hooked ever since. And now I can do those radio installs in about 20 minutes...lol.

By the time I was 15 and knew what kind of truck I was going to get, I already had a radio (old JVC, doesnt everyone start out with a JVC?), 4x6s(kenwood excelons) and a box for 2 12s. I found the polk subs on crutchfield and they came with free computer speakers for purchases over $250. Well, the subs were $279.95 each so i ordered them separately and got two sets of the computer speakers. Still have one set, the other set I gave to my brother for letting me use his credit card and i just paid him back. By that time I was 16 and had the jvc radio, aftermarket 4x6s and a couple of the original momo 12s on a RF BD10001. The next step was the mm6s and the RF power 5002.

A bajillion steps later, here I am with a 5 year old pioneer radio, same old 4x6s, and nothing else...lol
-Cody

spwuinmk67

I started when i was like 15. My friends just started driving and got a power acoustik amp with 3 visonik 12" subs. I thought it was the coolest thing. I was installing a stereo in my car before I had my license. Been hooked since.