I. C. E. again

John is on the hunt for a better I.C.E. system and looks like Alvin might be tempted to upgrade too. Perhaps I'll upgrade to a 3 way and upsize the sub woofer. We'll see. Not a priority for me at the moment.

Justin installed a mid on his dashboard and I believe he is now running a 3 way set up. Here are some pictures.



For audio setups, the wires are concealed most of the time and more importantly, the position of the speakers need to be locked down so as to prevent the sonic sweet spot from be "knocked" out of position. With a flexible mount, the imaging/staging will be affected wheneven the speakers are adjusted. This will make it more difficult to tune the setup as you need to take care of the speaker position as well as the tune up setting. Then again, audio systems are a very personal thing. As long as the owner's requirements are met, then that's all that is to be said about it.

I've always like a 2 DIN head unit as it's a cleaner presentation. But the current set up is not ideal for me yet. However, most of the 2 DIN units cannot meet my requirements, we'll have to see what comes along. I saw something from LG that might work in the interim period. But it's only available in 2007. One interesting thing to take note about head units in Toyota Cars. It usually protrudes out as the slot is wider than most other cars and the with the adaptor in place, most installers don't recess the unit backwards.



For example, the Panasonic CQ-TX5500W actually has a plastic face plate that fits around the head unit so that it sits squarely into the extended Toyota slot. The head unit will then be flushed with the control panel, like the way it was originally meant to be. Lazy installers will just tell you that it's meant to be like that and clueless consumers wouldn't have realised the difference. Shame!

Anyway, John has posted up a series of interesting links which I added here for reference. Check out his links!

www.mobileaudio.com

FAQs on Battery & Cables:
www.motolite.com

Forums:
www.carsound.com
www.elitecaraudio.com
www.caraudio.com

Install Showcase:
www.mp3guy.net
www.damnloud.com
www.cardomain.com

Product Reviews:
www.carreview.com
www.caraudio.com Product Reviews

Cheers,