Road To Tulsa - Day 3

By: Ben Vollmer, Car Audio Nationals/Team SoundDomain

So today started again bright and early. I went to sleep early on Day 2 and I think Rick and Andy crawled back into the room around 3AM after a solid night (morning?) of tuning their cars. We left the hotel that morning and headed over to Mobile SoundStage Engineering for the second day of Mark Eldridge's Sound Quality training.

Yesterday's training was done in the studio next to Mark's shop. Today's training was done in the shop, which is better setup for working on cars. One of the coolest things in the shop is Mark's trophy presentation. There are a TON of trophies spanning back through the past 10-15 years.

Today was an awesome day. We spent almost 75% of the time in cars and the remaining 25% on one of the most important things tasks for setting up an SQ car: creating proper gain structures. After talking about gain structures, Mark showed us how to use an O-Scope to properly set our gains on all of the components in a signal path, which for me was personally VERY valuable.

The next step was working on speaker placement. With some mono pink noise and some fabricated enclosures, we sat in Joe's Mustang and played with speaker placement. It was interesting to see how moving speakers by even 1/4" could change the imaging dramatically. Here is Andy and Rick sitting in the car with the top down moving speaker pods around to get the best sound. I never would have thought that pink noise could ever have been this useful of a tool without a RTA!

We all also got a chance to listen to Mark's competition car. Since Joe and I will not be judging the Expert Class, I spent some great time inside listening to this amazing car. Here is Joe's reaction once he got out.

 

We also have some awesome videos of us getting in and out of the doors on this NASCAR race car, which pose challenges for some of us more full figured folks. Once inside the car, it is very comfortable in there. Below is a picture of Andy and Rick closing their eyes to "concentrate" in the car.

We ended our day stopping by CarToys to meet the team there and get ready for the big day tomorrow. Now we need a car wash, and a quick trip to Kinko's is in order. :-)

Stay tuned for our the next installment!