2004 Scion xB

Car fanatics don't need much. They're already motivated to express their fanatical passion for cars, they just need an opportunity to do so. Take Ty Cota-Robles, "While I was [at the 2005 SEMA show] a good friend of mine had his Mustang in the Alumapro booth. It just so happened they were looking for a second car for their CES booth, which was two months away." In that short time, Cota-Robles' $16,000 '04 Scion xB became a fully functional lava-orange objet d'art. Watch out MoMA! Cota-Robles knew exactly where to go to ensure that the job was done right: Speaker Works in Orange, CA. It was here that lead technician Paul J. Rivero was supported by industry veteran Patrick Holdaway, while Holdaway's brother Eric (and CA&E contributor) did the system tuning and final setup. The sound system alone took 150 hours of work and cost $25,000. This is the motivation we were talking about.

A Sound IdeaThe project starts off straightforward enough with an Eclipse CD8454 mounted in the factory location using the Metra kit. Then there's the 6-channel Phoenix Gold TLD66 preamp with an 8-volt line driver hidden in the dashboard behind the radio. All of the cables and wires are Phoenix Gold. Now it starts to get interesting. Up front, a Rainbow SLC 365 Kick 3-way component system consists of 20mm tweeters in the front A-pillars, 4" mids front-mounted on custom-built, custom-painted speaker mounts in the dashtop locations, and 6 1/2" woofers custom-mounted in the door with lava-orange trim rings. In the back, there are two more pairs of Rainbow components: one pair mounted to fiberglass speaker pods in the rear doors (color-coded to match); and one pair in the rear subwoofer enclosure.

The Down LowThat enclosure is the wicked creation from the sick and twisted mind of master installer Rivero. Quite simply, it's a multifunctional piece of art. It uses an MDF skeleton with multiple layers of stretched fiberglass for skin and holds two Alumapro 12" Alchemy subwoofers, the rear satellites, four Zapco I-Force amps, a Phoenix Gold fuse center and an Alumapro 15-farad cap.

Making It SoundYou don't need to be a sound tech to know that, left to its own devices, sound bounces around, gets swallowed up and has its various wavelengths unevenly distributed. It's a sweet little innocent acting on pure deterministic instinct. And so, if you're investing a lot in a car stereo system, you better take care of those surfaces - as of course Cota-Robles and friends have. This car's interior is stripped to the ground, with Cascade Audio Engineering's superb vibration and sound control materials being used throughout the entire vehicle. VB-4.5 barrier material wraps the floor and firewall; VB-2HD visco-elastic damping material is on all vertical surfaces (and is being used to replace the vapor barriers on the doors); and VB-2 MAX coats the ceiling to dampen the control-panel resonance of the roof panel.