‘Ere Me Nowww!
Adam Rayner reminds folks of where it all
began and why the old style acoustic parcel shelf still rocks…
Once upon a time, way back when your momma was a girlie, the car was a place for having a nice sing song on the way to the seaside,or playing that game where you look out for phone boxes and pillar boxes on the
way to Grandma’s house, called Knock-Knock, Ring-Ring. Then, the mighty electronic doodad called Transistor was invented and it meant we could all have a tiny wee radio to listen to popular music with, such as was
broadcast by those trendy fellows in Luxembourg.
The transistor also meant that power amps for audio didn’t have to have those silly light bulb tube things in them any more to make it all louder. Pile those transistors
up enough and these days, with a “Class D” power supply, you can buy two thousand, five hundred thudding, brain-blasting watts for driving bass dustbin lids in your car for around a thousand pounds.
In the early days of car sounds, we really had only the few watts that were fibbed rotten about on the cassette deck’s fascia. Just headunit power; “4 by utter bollox” it should have read. The fascia of car radios still has
the daft ‘peaketty-peak-peak’ rating used, but the numbers have gone up from 15w, to something like 70w x 4 on some big beastly ones.
In fact, some Japanese headunits even have what are called MOSFET power amplifiers
crammed into their insides, meaning that you can actually use their rear channels set up just to run a bass speaker, a subwoofer, without needing an external power amplifier between your CD deck and subwoofer speaker.
Of course, ‘back in the day’, it was reckoned that a good way to get some level and decent sounds rocking in your ride was to replace the rear shelf.
You could hang big old round or oval speakers, or even a subwoofer or two,
(as long as it was ‘free-air’ rated) in the thing and rock it like a nutter. However, the early replacement parcel shelves needed a cover of grille cloth and the experienced tea-leaf soon discovered that pukka grille cloth rather than
fuzzy stuff coating to your shelf could easily mean a pukka sound system well worth breaking the window for. Of course soon after that, journalists like myself were raving on about decent speakers up the front, a subwoofer in a
box to the rear, with no rear speakers at all, or else merely what are called rear fill speakers to imitate a bit of room-reflected sound, as the only ‘proper’ way to do things. The Acoustic Shelf was now seen as old school and no longer relevant.
The cunning stuntmen at Auto Acoustics can of course make you a perpangular, fully Brachiospheric fifteenth-order, seven-chamber bandpass sub bass enclosure, using 32 inch subwoofer speakers; you just supply the accurate drawings and dimensions
and they’ll CNC cut all the panels you need to fix together to a squillionth of a mm accuracy. It’ll cost you a bit and you might want to patent your design with them. In the meanwhile, if you were to buy a simple box for a subwoofer from any number of dealers,
whether it might say Kenwood or Pioneer or one of many other brands on the front, the box is often an Auto-Acoustics OEM item. They are the acknowledged Daddies of this market. However, even the cheapest box takes up space in your boot and you’ll need
to anchor it down properly or the damage to box and car can be quite impressive if you actually go around corners and suchlike.
The modern parcel shelf replacment is called a Stealth Shelf and takes full-on, close-up scrutiny for anyone to decide whether it is a speaker shelf or not. Every curve, carpet-look and strengthening ridge is faithfully reproduced except that this shelf is a suitably solid place to mount your speakers. (Rather than being a flimsy, wobbly bit of compressed fibre and carpet alone.) For the low-cash buyer, you can say bollocks to conventional theory; I want my car to spank, to thump, for folks to hear me coming! A shelf will let you do this, especially as you can order it with the speaker cut-outs you need ready-done, leaving the carpet in place to hide your toys.
The sheer number of cars, variations in carpet colours, shapes and sizes of these shelves means Auto Acoustics have to stock a slew of stuff and have an awful lot of CNC programming stashed away, should you ask for a shelf for say, a Volvo 340! Costing less than many a loaded box and fitting with utter perfection, an Auto Acoustics shelf is an investment in protecting original trim items and in getting good sound. Apart from anything else, ask any really knowledgeable ice hound about the quality of bass from a decent pair of 6x9’s and they will tell you it is good stuff. Tight, thumpy and accurate. Not even a single ten inch can be quite as good for bass quality as a pair of thumping ovals. That said, one of the best bass systems I ever heard was four tens in an Acoustic Shelf – the owners of the Golf had filled the boot with polystyrene beads to measure the volume so as to divide it up in theory and work out which woofer from the Rockford range would work best with what they had. It was awesome!
So be you an entry level thumper with no cash who wants to pull up next to his mate and wipe him out for both bass and sheer long-distance sound broadcastability, or perhaps you are a surround sound fanatic with a DVD deck in the car and actually have a Dolby Digital or dts decoder in your system, you’ll need the shelf install to offer up stereo rear channels and maybe even a 6.1 system with a centre speaker both fore and aft for those space-ship overhead moments; the humble but perfectly-fettled MDF parcel shelf still has plenty of mileage left in her yet.
Shelf up and let the bass line blast!
Adam Rayner.
