Back in the day i had eight kicker 12”s in my 94 ranger, in a wall setup. I hot hooked up with Orion (when orion was a good mfg) and got a hold of a prototype 450 HCCA “cheater” amp and they wanted me to beat it to death. So it ran the eight 12’s, the 2 10’s( subs) in each door, the 8”woofers, the set of 6.5 mids x2 in each door, and two modded Image Dynamics horns that replaced the sun visor locations. All off a dual alt setup (2 x 250 amp custom wound) and a stinger capacitor bank and a a bank of 10 batteries under the tonneau cover. I hit 161.2 and 162 flat and the amp was running at a .12 (sometimes as low as .07 during burps) ohm load and got so hot we had to run active cooling with a handmade copper evaporator coil that ran the freon through hand bent and soldered tubing between the channels in the heat sink. Basically turned the trucks AC system into an amp cooler, and destoyed the heatsink on a prototype amp. They were not happy. But this was in 95-96 when you had Team Gates leading the SPL wars, i watched Alma and her team hit 170+ but it was considered unofficial because nobody had ever seen anything like that beautiful PPI build. They just didnt have standards for mic placement , you had to use IASCA or USAC test discs and the judges were ruthless and biased against innovation. My DB drag runs were in the “outlaw” or “unimited” category but i was DQ’d because they couldnt clamp my power supply or even figure out my ohm load. But the mic didnt care about all that crap. They didnt even have rules as tk mic placement. It was the wild west of car audio. And my god it was a blast!!! (Literally, esp when caps or amps or batteries would explode!!!) EVERYTHING was on the table. We had dbDrag, outlaw classes, that was when car audio was about feel. We didnt have computer modeling of enclosure performance, we blew stuff up and started all over from scratch. I think with my latest ranger, my spock powered 3.0 wheezer is gonna get 4 JL 10’s a 1 ohm stable kicker sub amp, and a set of 3 way components up front. And call it a day. Car Audio isnt much fun anymore now that epsilon owns all the old skool brands that were so innovative. And As much as Id love to run an all old school setup like my Soundstream setup or my PPI SQ setup, im too afraid to run that old hardware without recapping the boards. Or run my a/d/s and McIntosh stuff i have in storage. I Still have 4 recone kits for my 160’s, and the first gen tank of an amo, the Tarantula.
I miss the good old days of sq setups running pure class A amps, the warmth, the depth, creating a virtual sound stage not with digital trickery but with pure placement and know how. Getting old sucks!
