Road To Tulsa - Day 2

By: Ben Vollmer, Car Audio Nationals/Team SoundDomain

So today started bright and early. We left the the hotel after a few hours sleep and headed over to Mobile SoundStage Engineering for the first day of Mark Eldridge's Sound Quality training. As soon as we entered the room, we spotted some great gear set up for use during the class. 

Some vintage JBL 15 inch pro woofers, and Mark's old Altec 802d compression drivers on some nice JBL horns, all in 5 cubic foot vented enclosures, and lots of clean power to drive them all.  Everything got really loud, and sounded very nice. Listening to music on his equipment was nothing short of awesome. Mark also had some Genelec monitors with a JL Audio Fathom 12-inch sub, along with some other manufacturer's speakers. We had a good selection of equipment to for Mark to demonstrate many different applications and acoustical issues.

One of the coolest exercises of the day involved dual equalizers. Mark shut off all of the speakers except one, and selected one band on the equalizer and moved it.

Road To Tulsa - Day 1

By: Ben Vollmer, Car Audio Nationals/Team SoundDomain

Today started early with my son deciding to wake up at 4:00 am.  After packing some of my favorite CD's and heading to the airport, the trip had officially started. My plans were to fly from Atlanta to Memphis, TN, where I would meet up with Andy Jones and complete the rest of the "Road to Tulsa" trip by car. After a less than an hour I in the air, I landed in Memphis where Andy picked me up and we headed to right to Neely's BBQ for legendary barbeque.

After stuffing ourselves at Neely's, we headed over to Memphis Car Audio in downtown Memphis. Memphis is one of the oldest brands in car audio that I can think of. They have many industry "firsts", including the first 4-track player, 8-track player, to name a few. Amiee and Jimmy of Memphis set us up on an awesome tour of the facility, and a peek at some of their new products and current products. Memphis is one brand under the Arthur Fulmer Companies, with the other one being  the Fulmer Motorcycle Helmet Company.

The Road to Tulsa - Pre-Day 1

By: Ben Vollmer, Car Audio Nationals/Team SoundDomain

So Four of us from Team SoundDomain are headed out to one of the largest Car Audio shows this year (as Murph posted here yesterday!). Since the drive to Tulsa is long and boring from here, we are going to be giving you daily updates from the road. I won't be competing in the show, but will be there to judge the USACi portion of the show on Saturday.

Wednesday is the first day of the journey for us, and we have some exciting things lined up. Look for some posts on the shops we pass along the way as well much more. We'll be meeting up in Memphis to start our caravan, and the fine folks at Memphis Car Audio have agreed to open their doors to Team SoundDomain for a visit their offices and meet with some of the Memphis staff.  So while doing a road trip may be boring, we'll do our best to spare you the yawns and do our best to bring you only the highlights. :)

Stay tuned for more, and see you in Tulsa!

Product Test Drive: Griffin RoadTrip

We recently received a box of Griffin iPod accessories in the mail to test out and give you guys our opinion. Griffin is kind of new to me, and my first experience with their products was at CES this year. My initial impression from CES was that they had simple and clean designs, and looked to have a relatively high build quality. Griffin's product offering is quite large, so we thought we'd start out with the most common iPod devices for the car: the charger and the wireless FM transmitter.

Our first test drive is the Griffin RoadTrip, a slick-looking iPod charger and wireless FM transmitter combo. This little guy features a very bright white display, simple design, fully adjustable gooseneck and swivel display, and an audio/video output jack. The RoadTrip is compatible with the iPod Classic (80GB/160GB), Touch, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation iPod.

I was fairy impressed with the functionality and simplicity, and the swireless transmitter's sound quality was pretty strong and clear. Check out the full review after the break for detailed product photos, installed photos in a couple different cars, and our thoughts on the functionality and features.