With 25 years of experience behind him, Gary Summers uses a critical ear to make sure a movie sounds just as it should. The rerecording mixer has brought his audio skills to a laundry list of movies, and he's even bagged some Academy Awards (for work in Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Saving Private Ryan, to name a few). Clearly the man knows his way around a mixing studio.
Summers also knows how to adjust an in-car EQ. "Since my teenage years, I have always been an audio enthusiast and lover of all kinds of music," he relates. In the car, that enthusiasm didn't get serious until he decided to step up the OE system in a '90 Volvo 780 coupe back in 1993. Years of competing inIASCA events came to a close when he torethe Volvo apart for a fourth and finaltime with an intention to build a 5.1 system.
"In the motion picture industry we have been mixing in the 5.1 formats since the mid-'80s," Summers says, "so I am very familiar with a wide variety of 5.1 program materials." Unfortunately, car audio equipment in the '90s was limited in terms of processing for surround sound. Summers and installer Aaron Braverman had to look elsewhere. "We decided to take home audio products and modify them to work in a 12-volt system in order to decode the 5.1 digital audio formats," Summers reveals. But before they could complete the project, all the equipment was stolen. Summers called it quits, but the idea never left him.
In 2006, Summers purchased a Mercedes-Benz C230 Sport, deciding to give an audiophile-grade 5.1 system a go once again. "With today's technological advances in car audio electronics," he explains, "it is a more feasible task, requires far fewer components, far less space, and most importantly sounds better." For the job, he rang up old friend Braverman and Scott Babson at Kustom Car in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Brains Of The Operation
Obviously with a life so obsessed with sound, Summers had very specific ideas about the system and masterminded the layout. Like many hard-core audiophiles have done before him, he hit up Alpine's F1 components to serve as the brain of the operation. A pair of PXI-H990's regulate the feed from an Alpine DVI-990 DVD player, which Babson and Braverman cleanly set into the center stack. The sedate head unit looks right at home in the C-class' unfussy dash, even with a TMI-M990 monitor installed above it.
1 Of 500
Another specific choice was the Morel Elate Limited Edition speakers. "Morel will sell only 500 sets of these speakers worldwide. I have the first to be installed in the U.S.," Summers proudly reveals. The limited edition three-way serves as the front left and right speakers. Summers found the Mercedes factory locations more than adequate for the midbass. After deadening the doors with Dynamat, stuffing any rattle-inducing cavity with foam, and adjusting the panel, Kustom Kar set the 6-inch woofers in place.
Although the door panels needed modification in order to seal in the 6-inchers, they weren't half as intensive as the A-pillar pods that house the higher-frequency speakers. "Using MDF, fiberglass, ABS, Bondo and CA [glue], Scott fabricated pods to the OEM A-pillars, and the CDM-88LE (midrange) and the MT-24LE (tweeters) were mounted," Summers reveals. At first, the install team didn't get the angle down just right. But with a little tweaking, the fabric-covered pods hit the exact angle Summers desired for "uniform coverage of the critical listening position."