Motorsport Nationals 2009 Super Show is approaching quickly. We will be having a 3X Show for all THREE Major sanctioning bodies and only TWO WEEKS before MECA and USACi’s Finals.

Make sure and pre-register before September 4th so you don’t have to wait in any long registration lines at the show. Pre-Registration closes on September 4th. For car registration head over to www.motorsportnationals.com and for tickets head over to any Ticketmaster retail location or go to www.ticketmaster.com.

We will also have a return of Car Audio Nationals at Motorsports Nationals. This will include cash prizes and a world class judging staff. Visit www.caraudionationals.com for more details. CAN is sponsored this year by www.motormusicmag.com. Pre-Registration information for Car Audio Nationals will be on the CAN website.

We have returned back to the Garage area that IASCA Finals used to be held at. This will make sure that plenty of electricity is available and the noise floor will be MUCH lower than last year.

Click Here for the Site Map with the Car Audio Area Highlighted.

You will want to take advantage of the amazing deals that Motorsport Nationals has worked out with AirTran and numerous hotels in the area for your travel needs. For a list of hotel deals please visit www.motorsportnationals.com/fall-2009-event/travel-information/hotels.html. For information regarding air travel discounts please visit www.motorsportnationals.com/fall-2009-event/travel-information/air-travel.html

If you have questions about Motorsports Nationals, please email info@motorsportnationals.com. For ANY car audio related questions, please email ben@caraudionationals.com

For those that missed Steve Cook’s show last year, here’s your chance.

For those that did attend last year, you don’t want to miss the show this year.

Last year we watched Steve blow his windshield on the van, and Tommy “King of Bass” McKinney demo his truck with “In the air tonight” at volume levels I’ve never experienced before. It should be interesting to see what Steve has planned for this year. So bring your car and compete in either the SPL or SQL classes, or just come by and hang out. Here are the details. 

 MAY 17, 2009

A few shots from the show last year:

Steve’s beautiful Avalanche….yes there’s a truck in that first picture.

Deep South Nationals - 2009

Deep South Nationals is a Top 25 Sound Quality Money Round. It will be held in conjunction with Scrapin the Coast in Biloxi, MS at the Gulf Coast Coliseum on June 20th  – 21st  2009.

Several manufactures have already pledged support of the Prize Pot that will go directly to the winners of the Top 25 Round. There will be at least $1000 dollars at stake and I will make updates as more money comes in. Last Year I gave away $4000!!! Also, the winners will receive stunning awards. The 1st place trophy is a 4’ custom painted surfboard. The awards for 2nd – 10th will be custom built metal and plexiglass sculptures, and 11th - 25th place will be 13”x10” full color plaques.

Web Site: http://www.deepsouthnationals.com or http://www.scrapinthecoast.com

Contact - Rick Sellers (601) 590-0419 / rsellers@mc.edu


Scrapin the Coast

•   2007 Mini Truckin “Show of the Year”
•   The Largest & Wildest car show on the GULF COAST.
•   June 20th  & 21st , 2009 at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, MS.
•   Scrapin 2008 had over 2000 car show entries.
•   Seconds away from Hotels, Nightclubs & Casinos.
•   $10,000 in Cash, Trophies, and Prizes.

Deep South Nationals Rules:

Because of the overwhelming interest in Deep South Nationals Top 25 Money Round, we anticipate there will be well over 25 cars vying for a chance to compete in Deep South Nationals (DSN). 

This year we will take Pre-Registration starting April 20th and the packets including Judging CD’s will be sent starting May 15th. The only requirement for registration will be entering either the Usaci SQ event OR the Scrapin’ the Coast car show. The cost of registration will be $85 for pre-registration and $100 for on site.

Deep South Nationals will have a designated parking area under tents on the beach front parking lot at Treasure Bay Casino. Every competitor will be assigned a space at check-in on Saturday night.

DSN check-in on Saturday the 21st  will began at 5 P.M. and end at 6 P.M.  There will be NO exceptions. Judging will began promptly at 6 PM.

DSN will have six top-notch judges. 3 pair’s of judges (6 score sheets) will evaluate every car from the Driver & Passenger Seat (2 Seat Judging) and will score the car to the best of their ability. Every competitor’s score sheet will be totaled, and the low score will be removed from their final score.

DSN’s judges will use a custom disk made for the event with tracks selected by several judges, competitors, and myself. Steve Head has been nice enough to record the CD’s on a very high quality disk. Each judge will also choose one track from their personal disks (commercially available, no CD-R’s) to evaluate each car. This will allow the best cars to rise to the top by being adaptive to all types of music.

There will be power provided in the DSN parking area. Competitors will be allowed to use power supply’s during judging, but are responsible to bring extension cords, battery chargers, and duck tape to secure wires to the ground.

Window coverings other than tint will not be allowed on the windshield or the front side windows.

Deep South Nationals is not responsible for equipment or vehicle malfunctions; this is the competitor’s responsibility. If there is a problem, 5 minutes will be allowed to make repairs.  After 5 minutes, the vehicle must be judged or given a score of zero by that judge.  Repeated repairs will not be allowed. Absolutely no refunds will be given. 

DSN will have one of the best judging staffs assembled in many years. All judging decisions are finals…NO exceptions. There is no appeals process; again, all decisions are FINAL.

Rules are subject to change without notification until Monday, June 12th 2009. At that time event rules will be locked in place

Written by Rick Sellers

Here's a little flashback of the show from last year.

Rick took special care of the competitors Saturday evening.

The event trophies were works of art!

in the forums!

This is a test

Alpine’s F#1 Status Head Unit and processor are hands down the best I have used in a car. They are flexible, reliable easy to use. Until it comes to adjusting the units.

You basically have two choices when making adjustments, using the head unit or a computer. Jeff Smith prefers the first method if you have a video monitor connected. It tends to be in real time and works well. But if you don’t have a monitor, that method is horrible. It takes days to make adjustments and heaven forbid you want to adjust volume or change tracks, etc. The PC method is the one I prefer, but until recently my success rate on the PC has been about 30%. (Meaning 70% of the time it fails..) And I know talking to other F#1 owners, they have similar stories to tell.

In the H900, the precursor to the H990 had an RS232 port, which is also called a COM port. They are increasingly possible to find on common laptops. So for the H990, alpine outfitted the processor with an USB port. But behind the scenes, they left the RS232 plumbing there. (Which in my opinion is where all of the problems in getting the unit to work are.)

After a little poking around, they use technology from FTDI who are specialists in converting legacy peripherals to Universal Serial Bus (USB).  They utilize two drivers, a Virtual COM Port and a Direct Driver, both provided by FTDI.

So with all of that rambling on, here are the directions on how to successfully install H990 on BOTH Vista and XP. The drivers here do NOT work on 64 bit machines, so if you have one of them, these won’t work…

1. Copy the Contents of the H990 CD to your hard drive.
2. Delete all of the files and folders except the one called setup_English
3. In the same directory, create a directory called New Drivers.
4. In New Drivers, create two sub directories again. One called D2XX and one called VCP.
5. Download Version 2.04.14 from the FTDI Website for the D2XX Driver. Copy that file to the D2XX Directory. http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/D2XX.htm is the download location. Run the file after it is downloaded to extract all of the contents.
6. Download Version 2.04.14 from the FTDI Website for the VCP Driver. Copy that file to the VCP Directory. http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm is the download location. Run the file after it is downloaded to extract all of the contents.
7. With the H990 off, plug in the USB Port to the Computer and the H990. Turn on the H990.
8. It will now find your device and look for drivers. Select Advanced and the point Windows to the D2XX Directory First. After the D2XX Driver is installed, it will find another device. With that device, select the VCP Directory.
9. These are NOT signed drivers, so Windows will alert you to that. Click Install when it warns you.
10. Run Setup from the english_Setup directory.
11. When the Setup has finished and the H990’s welcome screen comes up, select the highest COM Number Available. (i.e., COM 5, or there about…)

You should now have a fully functioning copy of the F#1 Software working on your laptop.

Robert Petty is one of the more technical team members of Team SoundDomain in 2008. Scratch that. Robert is THE technical team member of Team SoundDomain in 2008. His background in electrical engineering has helped out many of us on the team and paid off for him. You can see his install complete with his kids helping with his install on the SoundDomain forums. http://forum.sounddomain.com/ubbthreads....part/all/gonew/

He won despite his Alpine Head unit failing in the lanes and having to wait to cool down. With a full compliment of Zapco amps, Morel Front Stage and Image Dynamics subwoofers, his Do It Yourself install did awesome.

I know I personally am excited to see what he has in store for the 2009 Competition Season.

• In 2008 he won the following awards:
• 2008 Rookie of the Year
• 2008 Alabama State Champion
• 2008 MECA Amateur World Champion

He placed in the Top Ten at every top 30 round he attended.

He was the highest scoring member of MECA in the Amateur Class with a high score of 57.70 which is an awesome score. Robert also went undefeated In MECA, which included the following shows:

• 4th Annual AL Sound-off Trail Kick-off Party
• Audio X Nationals
• 2nd Annual HiFi Buys Summer Nationals
• 4th Annual Thunder On The Mountain
• Elite Summer Nationals
• Alabama Sound-off Trail
• Georgia Soundfest - State Finals
• Alabama Soundfest - State Finals

Congrats Robert!

Hybrid Audio Technologies is pleased to announce that, for a limited time, you will receive a guaranteed 60% of the original value of your present Hybrid Audio Technologies speakers or speaker component system, irrespective of age, when you trade-up to new Hybrid Audio Technologies speakers or component system.

Hybrid Audio Technologies is now offering a trade-up program with for their existing customers and a trade-in program for their competitor's products, according to Scott Buwalda, the company founder.

"To the best of my knowledge, Hybrid Audio Technologies is the only car stereo manufacturer that guarantees the value of their product," said Scott Buwalda, founder of Hybrid Audio Technologies LLC. "We have just launched our trade-in-and-trade-up initiative that provide, among other things, a mechanism to buy back and trade up Hybrid Audio Technologies products."

Hybrid Audio Technologies is not only making the trade-up program available to dealers and consumers, but they are also offering to buy their competitor's products in their trade-in program.

"We are positioned to buy our competitor's products in our trade-in program and offer a considerable trade-in value for non-Hybrid audio product," Buwalda added. "This offer will be extended to consumers, as well as dealers that have old stock on their shelves that they can't sell."

David Edwards, marketing manager for Hybrid Audio Technologies noted that "the market has changed and we as an industry must be willing to show value to our customers; Hybrid Audio Technologies is going to lead by example by not only guaranteeing the value of our products, but also by offering to give a solid trade-in value for our competitor's products."

For details on the trade-in-and-trade-up program, please visit the Hybrid Audio website.

Sean got some great pictures of this unit at Spring Break Nationals and was able to pass on some information on this processor. (Click here for more information from Sean) From everybody I have spoken with, this is probably the most anticipated Integration / Processing Pieces out this year.  (And unlike the other one we have been drooling over, this one is shipping now.)

Well, last week the BitOne Pieces started shipping to your local Audison Dealers! Here is one of the Official new pictures of the unit.  So head on down to your local Audison dealer to audition and purchase one!

David Edwards of Virginia goes undefeated in his first year of competing in the MECA organization using front-stage speakers from Hybrid Audio Technologies.

Dave's car was one of my favorite cars to listen to at MECA Finals. His center was so strong, I kept looking for the center channel in his Camry.

It doesn’t happen very often that a competitor wins every show he attends in a season. Dave Edwards did that in his 2006 Toyota Camry – eleven shows in total – and win every competition, including the MECA ModEx Finals Championship, and seven “Bests of Show” awards throughout the year as well. What makes this achievement even more unreal is that Edwards accomplished this great feat in his first year of competing, with a “DIY” installation, in the highly-contested ModEx class in MECA.

Dave used the Legatia L631-3 component set, which includes the L6 midbass in the front doors, Legatia L3 midrange in the factory dashboard locations, and the Legatia L1 in custom-fabricated a-pillars. This great sound quality was achieved using almost all of the OEM speaker-mounting locations.

I am looking forward to seeing what Dave Edwards has up his sleeve next year for the Camry.  Congrats to Dave on his Perfect Season and winning MECA's ModEx class!

After having my system done in my Audi A4 for about 4 years, it is time for a refresh. There are some parts of the system that I love and some parts that have driven me nuts. And then to top it off, I blew a couple of the caps in my ancient Phoenix Gold MS Series amps. So instead of patching the system together, the decision was to redo the majority of the system to remain competitive in the classes that the car competes in.

Since my family moved recently, taking it back to Benchmark Audio in Upstate NY wasn't practical. It went from a 6 hour drive to a 15 hour drive, which isn't going to happen. So after looking at a ton of shops, the decision was made to take the car to Acoustic Images in Mooresville, NC.  The crew at AI is a number of veteran competitors including Bryan Wilkinson, Jason Syner, Mark Worell and other well known industry installers.

In addition, JL Audio, Second Skin and AudioControl have all helped out with the project. We will be covering each of those sponsor's products usage in the rebuilt system.

The goals of the system were pretty easy:

1. Run the front stage 100% Active, getting rid of the Alpine F#1 Passive Crossover Networks
2. Install New Subwoofers
3. Replace Existing Sound Dampening Materials

Over the next couple of weeks look for pictures of the trunk being redone, the kicks and doors being rebuild and some general rebuilding of the car happening.

Precision Power back in the day made some of the coolest amps that I used to drool over on a regular basis. The Art Series was one of the coolest looking amps with the ability to tap into the hollow areas of the top and bottom of the amps to run them water cooled and get some additional creativity points. Here is the A600.2, which was 150x2 and was a benchmark back in the mid 1990's when it was released.

They have been in the Directed line of brands since Directed bought a/d/s several years ago.

The brand is now at Epislon Electronics, Inc, which already owns some well known 12 volt brands such as:

Epsilon Electronics acquired all branding rights and existing inventory. Warranty service for qualified product sold through the DEI channel will continue to be processed by Directed.

I hope that the new owners will return PPI to it's Sound Quality roots.

This is your chance to vote for a winner in this very cool contest. BLVD Customs from Florida is competing with Brabus, RennTech and Legendary Motorcar. This site on the Mercedes site has a ton of details on the contest. If you like the BLVD Customs GLK, text GLK25 to 48457 from your cell phone. Here are some pictures of the finished product. You can also catch more pictures and the entire build process on the BLVD Customs website. http://www.dupontregistry.com/blvd/Finished.aspx 

The BLVD Custom Urban Whip was unveiled at the Wynn Casino & Resort in Las Vegas on November 3rd by Mercedes-Benz at a press event with over 100 world-wide media attendees. The Blvd. Customs Urban Whip quickly stole the show, and has been receiving press and praise for its aggressive blend of cutting-edge styling infused with the classic Mercedes Benz inspired design. Blvd. Customs didn't hesitate to push the envelope on the Urban Whip design and proudly display our GLK with signature Blvd. Customs styling cues including a one of a kind widebody kit, motorized speedster cover, hand-crafted mesh grille collection, 26" wheels and tires, and custom stereo and interior just to name a few of the modifications. With a build theme required to 'turn heads and rule the road' it seems to be unanimous that we did just that!

The winner of the SEMA GLK Tuner Challenge will be decided by a combination of online and mobile phone voting which runs from November 3rd through November 30th, with the winner being announced this December 2nd, and BLVD Customs is the only tuner that specalizes in the whole package, including the 12v system. Blvd. Customs is competing against some well-respected competition (one competitor has over 350 employees!) and every vote will make a difference in helping us with our bid to win the 2008 GLK SEMA Tuner Challenge. Show your support for Blvd. Customs by clicking on the link below now, and making your vote count for the Blvd. Customs Urban Whip GLK!

Video after the jump!

Founded in 1972, Tweeter was a national specialty consumer electronics retailer providing home and car entertainment solutions. Just two weeks after CEO George Granoff has parted ways with the chain, Tweeter was purchased by a liquidator Thursday night after closing all of its distribution centers and pushing all inventory out to its stores, TWICE is reporting.

Schultze Asset Management Group acquired the former Tweeter Home Entertainment Group for $38 million in a bankruptcy auction last year. They employed more than 2,400 employees and operate over 100 stores under the Tweeter, Sound Advice, HiFi buys and Showcase Home Entertainment names.

It looks like they have already started a clearance on stuff over on www.tweeter.com with the ability to search on each of the store's clearance stock.  I wish all of their employees well. Several fellow competitors worked at Tweeter and we hope that they land on their feet.

A new company is coming to the US, with a very familiar management and product set.  Maestro Badenia has announced that they will begin to do business in the U.S. mobile electronics and marine markets under the brand name German Maestro offering high quality, high performance amplifiers, speakers, component speaker systems and subwoofers.  (You can read a recent review of the speakers at this link.)

GermanMAESTRO is a premium audio brand founded by members of the management and leading employees of the German MB Quart Enterprise. GermanMAESTRO will continue the proud tradition of best-in-class loudspeaker design and manufacturing in our renowned Obrigheim, Germany facility

Maestro Badenia is a new company headquartered in Obrigheim, Germany comprised of industry experts who were the marketing, engineering and manufacturing strength behind the original German-made MB Quart products when that brand enjoyed significant market share, great brand image and a loyal consumer following. Maestro Badenia occupies the original MB Quart manufacturing facility.

German Maestro expects to ship products in December 2008.

The products for Car, Marine and Home Audio can be viewed at their website at: www.german-maestro.de

I was over at Sound Sensations today to grab James Stanton and drag him to lunch. (Oh yeah, and check on the Acura too!) While walking through the normal installation bays, Jeff pointed out to me a new contraption that Pioneer just sent their dealers. At first, I thought it was some of the installers having fun. It looked like a sub mounted to a cardboard box.  And then when you tapped the box, it was solid. Then Jeff pointed out the FM Modulator on the back of the bottom box.

Pioneer designed this to give consumers a test drive of some bass in their ride. You put a CD into the CD Player in the unit and tune the customers radio and then hook up the sub. The sub is sized just under a cubic foot.  Was one of the slickest things I have seen in a while to demo to customers. What do you think?