Thirty-three-year old Steven Head remembers when he was in high school and audio systems were all about bass. Run DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys were the craze at the time and if you didn't have the bump, you were nobody. Well, who in the world wants to be a bumpless nobody? Certainly not Head, so he outfitted his vehicle with a couple of Pyle Driver 15s and the rest, as they say, is history.
Head has learned quite a bit since his old school days. The days of impressing friends with a booming system are gone. After attending a few sound-offs, Head realized that what he wanted was to build a competition car of his own. "With this vehicle, I wanted to try and obtain the best possible sound ever reproduced in a car," states Head. This meant that he would have to dig down deep inside and put his years of experience to the test. "Creativity and a little insanity are also part of what you see here," chuckles Head.
Today, you can find Head in the competition lanes of an IASCA or USACi event. He spends his time at these events with his 1994 Honda Civic EX. The installation in Head's car is extremely unique. For instance, with most vehicles, the premise of the installation is to build the system around the car. Head's idea was to build the car around the system. That meant that the interior needed a complete overhaul.
Computer Age
Running the system is a Sony CDX-C90 detachable face head unit. The faceplate is no longer part of the main chassis as it now sits in a different location than the CD mechanism. In order to accomplish this, Head used computer ribbon cable to facilitate the relocation of the face to the center console lid. Faceplate brackets were ordered directly from the Sony parts department to allow the unit to utilize its detachable feature. The main transport is mounted in a custom rear section of the backseat. This was done for two reasons, the first to minimize signal cable length (to the processor) and the second to maximize security.
The signal from the head unit then flows to a Sony XDP-4000X processor. The unit has been sunk into a color-matched fiberglass pod (which matches the exterior color) in the rear side panel. A nine-pin serial cable was custom made and concealed by a molded fiberglass bridge over the processor face. The serial cable interfaces with a portable PC mounted under the passenger front seat. Sony's Digital Sound Center DSP software runs in Windows and precisely sets gains, four-way digital crossover, and 10 bands of parametric equalization. To ensure the highest level of signal is being passed through, Kimber Kable Toslink and Stinger Dream Series RCAs are used between the amplifiers and the Sony processor.
The PC is an Intelliworx VoiceTablet Touch screen running Windows 98 with a Pentium III processor and 100MRAM. A fixed LCD and touch mouse aid the tuning process while sitting in the listening positions.