The Trax show at legendary Formula One venue, Silverstone, has varied enormously in its time and while they have always had a section where they plonked ICE exhibitors, they never ‘branded’ a piece of the show for audio as effectively as they did this year.And whether it is because of this better marketing of the show to the audio industry, or better labelling of the layout for the punters, or most likely, a lovely sign of some sort of thaw in the pain of the recession in our world, it was still one of the best years ever for car audio at the show.The main ICE exhibitors’ area was down by scrutineering at the Silverstone pit garages/paddock zone but we had the whole of the top bit for us. They even opened up the little posh shower/loo rooms that are used by Formula One drivers and entourage on race days. As even the most massive opening-up F1 pantechnicon corporate entertainment trailers do not have mains water supplies to offer showers to ten folks! And even in a Winnebago a chemical loo is still not something you want to use. This is where they park up the land yachts and set out little fenced areas for the bosses and drivers’ R&R and these cabins function as little out-buildings to said huge Winnebagos and half-million quid coach conversions.Leah Loves Bass

I had to take a pensive moment in one such shower/loo cabina-for-one right next to the ridiculously loud FOUR stand with the Hertz Panda, Hertz SPL Golf from Source and Smoke & Mirrors from Highdown all playing hooked-up. And while trying to work out if my camera had a fault or not, the damn cabin’s walls and floors were vibrating so hard I was getting panel-shout while on the throne!

Sorry for the pictures in your head…. So, we had a line up starting with Pioneer, who had their Brabus Smart and the then-not-yet-launched ‘Project X’. A 122mph Vito Dualiner with an M.E.N. Installer of the Year Gold (and Silver) award-winner Paul Richardson install within it. It features two of the ultra-rare actually-were-used-to-make-170dB weapons-grade fifteen inch Pioneer subwoofers in it. Sadly, they couldn’t afford to put four amplifiers on each woofer as they are designed to do… but the whole thing is delicious! I caught up with it at Mercedes Benz World a week later and have the full skinny to reveal soon in its own feature.

The Pioneer/Subaru Pro-R special edition cars were present, showing the refinements to the Stage Two and Stage Three installs and next to them, Clarion, with a huge and handsome hexagonal E-Z up with the Peugeot IRC rally car and the bonkers K1 attack car underneath and the mobile showroom as the apex of the exhibit. Punters could walk up, drool over the K1, look longingly at the rally car and then mess about with the new generation of Clarion’s kit.

Onwards and we had the big old Fusion inflatable with their Mazda RX7 and mad pickup fanboy demo cars. They had a demo stand rocking in the dome as well.

Next was the FOUR area, which was large and way beyond impressive. They had Jonno MC Fed (I think that’s what they call him) on the Pioneer CDJs, pumping huge tunes so loud and clear that they got noise warnings.

For being too loud versus normal Formula One racing sounds…

It was epic and as I am ex pro audio and know folks at pro PA company ENTEC Sound & Light who can do you the lighting, I can tell you that I can happily broker these vehicles’ hire as PA for your party! I’ve spoken to the owners and it’s just a matter of where you’d want them and for how long. But you do need to have a venue where you could set up a full-on rock and roll PA rig…. Just PM me by name on the TA boards system.

Back at the paddock action, the Car Audio & Security folks were there, clustered with the Kenwood Scirocco and the Alpine Passat. Two of the lads played a driving video game on a TV in the boot of the fabulously over the top Subaru JBL demo car. There was a wicked four-JL Audio W7 estate-car install there too but John Griggs of Celsus’ fame had parked his JL Audio Passat over at the top end of the Audio Zone where I was working for the EMMA sound off guys, who had a roaring success, with league trophies sponsored by Celsus UK’s Dynamat brand, which they were chuffed to bits by.

The Vibe artic rig was there at the end of the row, with its mighty bass tunnel and a promo lass who just didn’t seem to be quite as good at acting all ‘sunny-disposition’ as some they have had in the past… but they gave Good Car as they always do, with demo car systems from all their main flavours in effect.

The most bonkers one was a Little Legends race car, like Terry Grant drives. Tiny wee, monstrous motorbike engine with huge power and in this case, a mad little install of two six by nines and a subwoofer on a baffle panel in the rear of the car. Oddest of all, there were two used-up monster slick tyres sat in front of the car, on either side and when you looked, you realised that each one was in fact the enclosure for one of the new pro-PA style compression driven horn dual-concentric with linen-edged mid driver assemblies. A coax from hell to shout at people at shows with!

The only real sad thing for me is that the dB Drag thing is so bastard loud that they have to put them right by the entrance, as far from anywhere else as they can. We got some visitors over the other side at the EMMA area, despite it being a mile round trip on foot and will be forever grateful for Helen Hircock’s generously naughty fridge cake ration I had delivered from the dB Drag zone, where she and her man Daz were looking for in excess of 160dB. Definitely worthy successors to Rob & Sue Hammond, who were a previous generation’s mad folie-a-deux bass heads. I love ‘em!

Natalie is so regretting pulling a face now…she’s normally pouts a little…

All in all, it was a vibrant and busy show, despite the grey weather and even that brightened right up for the end of the day to leave us all with lovely memories and hopes for as good a show next season. Here’s an epic walk though on video of the whole Ice paddock. It’s been on the front page window as well, so don’t bother if you follow that, you’ve seen it.

I was there at the behest of Andrew Ackerley and EMMA UK, for this event saw the sound off finals for the whole UK 2011 season. Hence the league trophies being sponsored by Dynamat through Celsus. I was at events throughout the season with a microphone in hand to explain what in hell was going on to passers by at Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Brands Hatch, Donington and finally here at Silverstone. Andrew even hired Natalie and Laura-Jane of previous TA video and stills fame, to be official EMMA UK promo lasses.

It’s been the most fabulous season for sound off in years and its vibrancy has even tempted some old stagers like Mr. Dave Legg back into the game, who stopped some years back. Also a lot of new blood from the simple publicity and fully modern use of social networking has helped. But a huge “Bravo!” from me to the whole of team Ackerley, especially Andrew’s dad as he has had to be chauffeur of the Battle Wagon with its vast Earthquake sound system, everywhere. Sometimes from the small hours starting in the North East, to get down south – like our own T19 meeting in Oxfordshire. And also to a goodly few demonstration events where they went with no need for full judge and prize-giver staff but still did the miles and set up the tents and so forth. I know Andrew specifically wanted to offer his own deep and heart-felt thanks to the lovely people who helped out and formed EMMA UK’s crucial backroom and judgement team.

One little addendum, is that this effort has been largely self-funded by the Ackerleys for 2011 and it’d be really cool to see them break even in year two, for them – 2012 -as it were. So a vast and loved-up cheer to the Dynamat guys for coming through and supporting the soundoff scene for the finals and also a BIG UP to the oddly cool and sweet blokes behind top detailing product brand Dodo Juice. These guys swagged EMMA folks around two hundred quid’s worth of their finest stuff, just for the entrants’ free raffle. On four events, including the finals, I was able to swag out £60+ packs of high Carnauba-wax content polish and some lovely washes and unguents, as well as a baby-face grade polishing cloth and some costly-quality window decals to three lucky winners per event. Except I did once disqualify thejoose for his Project Big Black as it is matt black rather than shiny…

I utterly loved being back at my roots with the Ice action, rather than taking the bucks on the main stage pimping glamour models to the crowd…(mind you, even though it was simply hell, I did bloody love it to death) and particularly impressed by how relaxed the whole EMMA scene was. No IASCA event ever would allow a random punter to simply slip informally into the SPL lanes as we did with about six cars. The ESPL was being done and with a small wait, they just got slotted in to find out how loud their car was for fun and more importantly, hopefully to inject them with Deadly Purpose for next season.

I had a blast, taking video and stills and abusing hard-suspended modded motors on the last bit of the back road in from Dadford by overtaking them on a bumpy-but-straight-and-narrow section on the way in that morning as they paraded up the tarmac, chuffing and pooting. I’m such an old ****.

ICE T19

Like an old but loved Christmas Bauble, the ICE-T meet write ups always start with this bit pulled out of the box…

“The Ice T meetings have a long and illustrious history for Talk Audio. For as well as meets up and down the land and those on the beach, there is the yearly bash held in a field near the hub of the Car Audio Direct operation in deepest Oxfordshire. This year’s was the nineteenth, hence T-19.

You can feel it getting posh on the M40 entering Oxfordshire as you drive across that horrid cut through the downs the environmentalists tried to stop. We headed into the wilds following our Googlemaps and sat navs and arrived at the Field Of Dreams. A site that apparently holds steam rallies and the like, the locals seem to be both cool and far enough away to make it all possible.”

Well, that was until last year…

For last year, we had reached the tipping point in bass where it goes suddenly LONG RANGE. Below a certain frequency, around 30Hz, the wavelength gets really big. It’s all of twenty five feet at the 45Hz ‘Bass Boost’ frequency used by most consumer bass amps for cars but at 30Hz, it’s nearly 38 feet and at twenty cycles it’s a massive 56 feet six inches. So the energy just keeps flowing. Elephants talk across the Savannah with deep bellows and an adult Lion can be heard basso-roaring from five miles. So a few hundred yards of Iceman and Am Singh together dropping deep into one sixties and at seriously below 30Hz for Iceman, meant the neighbours were unhappy.

Our Guru on Talk Audio is not a man who enjoys a confrontation and was ready to take a sad-but-necessary step of cancelling the whole event after said neighbour summoned the help of both Environmental Health (for the sound) and the county’s events officer. In the event, both attended but as we had curtailed the boom cars’ permission to boom, by way of it being conditional to even hold it this year, we had a group of people in cars meeting in a field. The chap with the sound level meter was more used to dealing with local objections to things like major outdoor festivals (like a wee one called ‘Reading’) and admitted that we really didn’t pose a problem. However, wanting to remain stress free for us and the nearest property, we kept it doors-shut only and mostly boomless.

One thing that I really loved about the T-19 meet was in fact one of the boomers, well SQL-head, really, who showed up. A chap from a goodly distance oop North from Oxfordshire, he has been at every ICE-T meet I have been at and is a well known bloke on our forum boards. A committed photographer, he has one of the most extensive libraries of Ice images from years back and has had to scrimp, save and commit carefully to achieve his dream system. (And stay married!) It’s taken some time and as soon as his video, below, was shown on YouTube and linked to the dude’s Facebook account, the comments sprouted. These include the usual experts who know better, know best and start into explaining what he did wrong. Fact is, the system merely started up gently on tick over and I bloody swear, I could see a ripple in the turf, spreading out towards the distant worry-house. I had to run over and point out that even at tick over, at no level at all, the thing was dropping really low and was going to upset The Man.

It was Sam Ellis, freshly finished his bonkers mega-box install, yet to complete the pretty-up bit but entirely justifiably chuffed to have it finished. Sam’s a long term major poster on TA and has had some serious stuff before but this is something else and is going to catapult him to legendary status. Here’s an interview with Sam Ellis, with him sat INSIDE his bass box…

We had a row of cars from Paul Richardson of A1 Audio Designs and the quality as ever was delicious. It was very bright and the camera struggles in places, plus the wind was blowing and you can tell from how often I mindlessly repeat what Paul was saying that I felt the audio was being lost by the microphone. I remain astonished at how good the mic on the Canon I use actually is, so forgive the fat bloke muttering and listen to Paul explain the systems and what’s where and why on the three cars. I love the fierce loyalty they all exhibit for Paul.

It’s always an event for clearing stuff out and bring and buy…

I took a bundle of Fusion swag to award to some lucky souls. There were inflatable aliens and a few of the cute desk sets of paper clip holder, pen holder etc, again with aliens upon them.

We also had the EMMA sound off being held on site with the Ackerley father-and-son team in attendance, having driven through the small hours from the North-East to run the event. Here’s Andrew Ackerley calculating who has won what.

That said, we have a stalwart selection of Scots who drive bloody huge mileages to come and participate. Here, I finally catch up with Ian Edgar and his dad, who together, installed this beautiful SQ system into their company wheels.

And here’s a couple of images of the van…

And although I royally mis-identified the Toyota van as being someone else’s, (and thanks for the gently-put correction-prompt I got on YouTube. Always nice to have someone help me take my foot out of my mouth, rather than let me ram it in to hip-deep!) this monster-woofered install was running towards the end of the day, with the doors shut and was getting something of a crowd around it to experience the sheer violence.

What they were looking at was how the vehicle was literally being shaken to death. Just check out the rippling, flexing metalwork on the thing in the video below!

It was a lovely chilled event with familiar faces…

And a rare chance to meet the guys who sponsor the event, the Car Audio Direct chaps…

Always a good event, just for the social and the cars assembled…

And this year, especially cool to have a full-on round five of the EMMA sound off in our midst. Here’s the deserving winners, who can be found out about in detail as to scores, classes and placings by checking out the EMMA website here: http://emma-uk.net/

A huge thank you to Car Audio Direct for their continuing support of the ICE-T meets, it is hugely appreciated by the Talk Audio forum folks who come along. We’ll keep you informed if we have to change venue for next year!