The interior of the rack is home to even more equipment. The hideaway brain for the 5.1 processor and the Alpine TUE-T011A TV tuner are stashed there on wooden shelves along with another Soundstream amp, the four channel Rubicon604, and all of the passive crossovers for the Soundstream Exact component speakers. Five Monster Cable Intelicap-1 farad capacitors and power distribution blocks also take up some of the space along with all of the system's RCA interconnects, hand made Monster Cable M1001XLN. To keep things cool four fans pull air from the sides of the box up and out along the back wall of the truck through the 1" thermal vent behind the Tarantula. Each end of the centerpiece, exposed when the rear doors are opened, is covered in factory matching Moonlight Dust vinyl panels. More of the same vinyl accents each of the fabricated speaker locations and continues the gray-on-blue theme throughout the vehicle.
Having already taken care of the system's ".1" low frequency effect channel Shawn turned his attention to the other five channels. None of the current speaker locations in the truck are what Toyota had in mind. Since the stock rear speaker locations were blocked it was decided to put the rear channel speakers (used primarily for movie playback only) in each upper rear corner of the truck. This meant more fiberglass work as pods were constructed to hold the Soundstream Exact6.2 coaxials.
If the rear speakers were a step away from stock the front speakers were a leap, necessitating an entire rebuild of the factory door panels and fabrication of custom kick panels. Each front door holds a pair of the Exact6 6.5-inch midbass drivers to anchor the front stage. The stock door panels were disassembled and used as templates for the fiberglass build up that now holds the speakers. The stereo midrange and high frequencies are handled by a pair of Exact4.3 separates in the kick panels, further bolstered by an additional Exact1 1-inch tweeter. When installing the 4-inch mid and two tweeters Shawn knew the kick panel location would give the most accurate soundstage, but he still spent many hours fine-tuning the speakers' final mounting angles. "Since we new the truck would be used for music and movies we were very aware of the importance of proper speaker mounting for the front left and right channels. These speakers can really make or break a system," says Shawn.
The final components in the front speaker array are a matching set of Soundstream Exact4.3s. This set handles the center channel duties for movie playback. The drivers are mounted in a pod that extends from the lower center of the dash. Again a factory panel was used as a base for the fiberglass and wood construction and it was then treated to the same paint and vinyl work as the rest of the truck. To expand the center image the speakers are angled to fire across the vehicle at the opposite listeners and are further accented by an Exact logo at the pod's center. To complement the paint work on the center channel and front speakers Lon had the dash trim shot with the same Indigo Pearl Blue. The remainder of the work on the truck was done under the hood.