Not every multimillionaire athlete wants the flashiest car and system around. Sometimes your average rich guy just wants something that sounds good. Of course, a little flash wouldn't hurt, but Boston Red Sox Julian Tavarez' main concern when he commissioned his friend Jose Rodriguez to upgrade the system in his '01 Mercedes S55 was to get better audio quality.
Tavarez had the right man for the job. Rodriguez works at JL Audio and knows a thing or two about car audio. Naturally when he thought about the install he selected products from his employer. He may be biased, but he couldn't go wrong with an all JL Audio setup.
Both owner and installer decided to keep the factory source and concentrate the labor elsewhere on the system. Rodriguez used JL Audio's OEM integration unit, the CleanSweep. In fact, there are two in the car, the CL441dsp and CL-SS1. The latter is a dedicated signal-summing interface that sends the audio to the 441, which performs the response correction.
Two amplifiers power the system, a 1000/1 for the subs and the 4-channel 450/4 for the front and rear speakers. The amps, located in the trunk in a custom amprack, are mounted in a staggered fashion and highlighted under an acrylic screen that's backlit with blue neon. Total system wattage is 1,450 at 4 ohms.
Rodriguez used the factory locations for the JL Audio ZR650-CSi component speakers, only modifying the opening of the baffle to accommodate the driver. For rear fill the factory locations were utilized again, this time with the 2-way XR650-CSi.
The factory theme with the factory source and use of OE locations for the speakers is turned upside down in the trunk with the custom subwoofer and amp setup. Two dual 4-ohm 10W6v2-D4's are in a bandpass enclosure and handle about 600 watts of power. As Rodriguez explains, the Mercedes already had a fairly well sealed trunk, so by porting the bass through the original sub location he allowed the low-frequency information to be directed to the listening area up front.
For rear seat entertainment, a SAVV DVD player is in the glovebox with 7-inch headrest monitors for passengers in the back. A NAV-TV interface was used for video switching and a visor monitor is in the front for the passenger.
But the best part of the new system is, of course, the audio. Tavarez drives the car extensively during the off-season, listening to his favorite music, salsa, merengue, and bachata, a genre of music native to the Dominican Republic, his homeland. After a decade and a half in the big leagues (including a World Series ring with the Red Sox), Tavarez could drive any car and have practically any system money can buy. So you know his Merc, with this simple but SQ-oriented system, provides this major leaguer with big league sound.