There's a scripture painted on the back of San Diego Charger Kassim Osgood's tricked-out '02 Cadillac Escalade: The Lord is my Light and my Salvation. Whom Shall I Fear? When you face 250-plus pound linebackers and mercenary safeties on the field every week, you have to have this kind of Biblical faith. But a subtext is implied by the vehicle itself-from the multicolored detailing to the unapologetically powerful sound system to the bumper-to-bumper body and paint mods-Osgood is not afraid to announce who he is and go after what he wants. With Kenny Albertini and his shop, SounDeluxe Car Audio, Osgood found the right means to make his statement.
Let It Ride
Osgood's Escalade was customized from the ground up. It rides on 26" Pirelli Scorpions strapped over DUB Big Homies with six spokes custom-painted to appear blue or green depending on the way the light hits them. On the chassis, Custom Nation provided a meticulous paint job-a deep, glossy, sparkling blue with highlights of all colors running along the car's lower half. (The engine pieces and headers are painted to match). You'll find Baer Rotors for brakes, Volant intakes, a Flowmaster exhaust and Helwig sway bars for suspension. Grillcraft's sick grillework, a perfect suffusion of wire-mesh baleen (if there is such a thing), seems to eat up the road before it. But that's not the reason this Escalade stops traffic.
The Sound and the Fury
It may be a truism to say that sound must be felt and heard to be appreciated, but the numbers of Osgood's sound system are eye-popping. For starters, the power rating is 3,600 watts at 4 ohms and a whopping 14,000 watts at 1 ohm for the subwoofer system. Forget the lightning, this ride is all about thunder!
The rumbling of thunder starts with an Alpine IVA-D310 source unit mounted in a modified dash kit allowing it to clear the shift lever. Signal processing, including the active crossovers for the system, is handled by an Alpine PXA-H701. This feeds signal to three Alpine PDX-4.150 amplifiers mounted flush in a removable, suede wrapped fiberglass panel over the sub enclosure, and the two bass amps at the rear of the vehicle. The first of the PDX amps runs the 6.5" Alpine Type-X component set mounted in painted inserts within the front door panels with each of the component speakers powered by a dedicated channel. The second amp runs the rear tweeters and mids in the same fashion.
In addition to the front and rear speakers, Albertini added a center channel up front and additional midbass (toward the rear) powered by the third PDX-4.150. Two of the amplifiers channels were geared toward the center channel that consists of an Alpine Type-X 5.25" component set. These were molded into the top of a completely re-fabricated center console that has removable panels to gain access to the external fuseholders. The last two amp channels power four 6.5" Alpine woofers in ported 0.77ft3 enclosures with custom molded ABS rods for grilles.