Manville Smith's 1984 Celica GT at the IASCA Finals (better audio)
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- Опубликовано: 2 апр 2013
- A short video from the very early days of IASCA Competition showing one of the four Speaker Warehouse vehicles that won 1st Place trophies at the 1989 IASCA Finals in Tempe, Arizona. This 1984 Celica won 1st in the Pro 251-500 Watt class. In this video, the owner takes us on a tour through the entire audio system.
This footage was shot on November 17, 1989 by Ed Smith behind one of the buildings at the Precision Power factory in Phoenix, where the team prepped the vehicles before the event. 
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The golden age of car audio. Miss those days.
Wow, I'm blown away at the level of detail in that install! Old School at it's finest!
BigDWiz - OldSchoolStereo-com
I remember flying to Phoenix to the those IASCA finals in the late 80's and early 90's. All the buzz was about those cars from Florida. You guys and Lucio Pepperoni were stars. Thanks for showing the world what was possible. Amazing cars and memories!
when a judge says "holy cow" I think its a good sign.
One of the Brightest minds in CarAudio, there's a reason why he's the VP of JL Audio now, and competitors should be glad that he's not in the lanes anymore... Thanks for posting the Video Manville.
I sure miss the fools ol' days of IASCA! Man, what amazing craftsmanship, thanks so much for sharing this legendary system!
That was a killer set up! What outstanding vision and work!
Epic, even by today's standards!
Awesome, those were the days.
I miss seeing isobaric setups or setups using AP membranes correctly. Who had the red rx7 back in the day out of NY? They were a couple who ran isobaric kickers in the trunk? Seeing this car again brings back great memories. This car, the ODR Impala, the novice guy drilling a perfect rta in an s class benz. I never remember the names, but remember the cars for sure like the dude who liked roller coasters and built a slick a/d/s fiero. There's really nice cars today with great access to equipment but back then lots of creativity was truly necessary as ppl who forging the way for a lot of what is standard gear today.....time delay units (for rear stage), exotic dampening dots and the occasional fish tank lol (I suppose the tank doest count) lol.......
BOOMIJUST SHOTYOU I totally agree with you about iso and aperiodic. Always wanted to try those but lack of knowledge kept me from trying. I have a mint set of a/d/s components and a trio of JL 12W3v1-d6 just waiting for the right vehicle to come along. Just need those PPI Art series for power!
Like Richard Clark using 15" for midbass in that Grand National, and everyone had those image dynamic horns that I thought sounded like shit. The days of MB quart and Audio Controll and PPI amps.
Nice….. that was a great install
Oldschool rocks !!
So cool man !!
Anyone who doesnt think this is an awesome setup must not understand or remember how much quality equipment cost back then and how cutting edge this was and how good it sounded compared to the cheap chinese components today. And all this with low wattage amps.
I agree 💯 the average guy could not buy this off the shelf . I would go to shops and just drool over the equipment. That system looked amazing
Hes in the 251 to 300 WATT CLASS. that doesnt mean hes only pushing that. I didnt see what amps he was using but if he had 1/4 ohm or 1/8 ohm stable amps hes probably pushing in the range of 1000 to 1500 watts of clean power
@@stratkiller2531 , this particular system did not use cheater amps. The M series PPI amps struggled to stay cool even at 2 ohm, so this system was 4 ohms on the main channels and 8 ohms on the subwoofer channel... so the total real power was 500 watts. The speaker efficiency made up for the modest power. The car would do consistent 134 dB SPL runs using the IASCA SPL track (L'Daddy by James Newton Howard).
That’s a lot of dome tweeters. Lol. Love this build. I miss the old days of car audio.
This guy had that speech memorized.
Excellent work. I'm sure it still works flawlessly today.
Sadly, I sold the car to a friend around 1993 and he drove it for a few years (with the system) and after that, he removed parts of the system and the car is long gone now. :(
+Manville Smith Sorry to hear that. Your Celica is a fantastic example of tasteful workmanship with an emphasis on sound quality, attributes sadly lacking from most of the flash/walled systems being built and admired by young people today. This really brings me back to my college days, and the heyday of IASCA - thank you!
You are lucky to have video of this. Thanks for posting.
DIY at it's finest. Thanks for sharing, Manville.
Waw, the old school installs are very interesting!
That is amazing how this looks
God I'm a hopeless old geek. Here I am again like I'm watching Oppenheimer explain the first atomic bomb or something😞
Nothing better than 80's and 90's sq set ups very clean !!!
Dam that looks good
Beautiful setup! I cannot imagine the build time of a setup like this!
Nice set up man
Awe inspiring work.
Kids today would respond: "But can it do the hair trick?" and "my Boss amp that I paid $159 from Walmart is will do 3000 watts".
How sad the state of our hobby today, when it started out with so much quality and creativity and attention to detail.
Excellent work, but why so many speakers up front, and why so many tweeters? That seems like the highs would be piercing.
Dud this was awesome even for now
So nice. Old school at its best.....
For those who don't understand what he is saying.... he knows his shit.
The tweeters low in the door more for blending? They could not have been helping your staging. I know things have come a long way and I have competed and have a first and 5th place in IASCA. My buddy has won a couple world finals. My Team Captain has the best sounding system I have ever heard and I have set in Chris Pates Extreme Center Seat Civic and Mark Eldgridge's Nascar. Very cool setup.. very few ppl understand the effeciency of an 8ohm driver..not as much power is needed. How did you time align this setup?
i dont think he use any time aliment ,he said tweeters cross at 5k at those frequencies, delay has very little effect on localization.....
The Audax Tweeters - most poplar in it's time , we used to install those like hot cakes.
I had the same car wondered what’s the deal w JL PRECISION POWER, the or shop started carrying them, FAN ever since!! Still got my pro mos 25s , even today AMAZING SYSTEM here
The level of the background music is reduced in this version to improve the intelligibility of the dialog.
I never understood the mounting of the eq's in the rear were they could not be easily adjusted from the listening position. I understand most of these were tuned with an rta but I still prefer to do it by ear.
Hi, you are correct that the EQ's were not mounted for super-easy access, but they could actually be tuned from the front seat by turning around and reaching. The passenger side EQX tuned the front speakers and I could reach it without too much contortion. For casual, temporary adjustments, the car had a 1/2 DIN eq under the head unit.
Manville, can you explain the reasoning for so many tweeters? Wouldn't that many cause frequency steering and T/A issues? I seen a lot of other cars with numerous pairs of tweeters, I've never heard any exp,ain't the reason behind it as it doesn't seem to be in the trend anymore.
If you could elaborate, I'd appreciate it very much!
Primary reason: Efficiency. The car only had 2 x 50w to drive the front speakers, so I used a pair of JBL 2105H 5-inch mids on each side, in parallel (4 ohms). Each of those mids was 94 dB @ 1W/1m, so the pair were 97 dB @1W/1m. The use of two in an array gave me good dispersion characteristics and more output. The tweeters were little 10 mm Audax TW51A's and htey had to keep up with the output of the mids. Each one of them was only 91 dB @1W/1m.. they were 4 ohm tweeters, wired in three groups of three, each group wired in series (12 ohms) and then the three groups in parallel (4 ohms). Together they reached 99 dB@1W/1m so I could pad them with a resistor network to match the mids. The little Audax tweeter had a bad reputation among many people for being either fragile or harsh sounding (or both). This was mostly due to people overdriving them or asking them to play too low. In this application they were only playing above 5 kHz and each one only saw a very small amount of power (having 9 to spread the power out on each side). So they were smooth and sounded really great.
Now, as far as localization and multiple sources, etc. At high frequencies, it's really all about amplitude. Phase does not really drive localization in this range. Six tweeters on each door and three on each side of the dash actually created a very nice stage, in both seats.
Hope that helps... sorry for the very delayed response. :)
StraightWire is pricey these days.. I wonder if its the same company. My Enccore LL RCA were 165$ with my team discount. I am curious if you got a true center point staging as I don't recall if they had time alignment back then? CD player in 1984... damn! This setup was so expensive. Thank you so much for posting this video. For those of us who compete in IASCA and MECA today it's nice to see how it was done back then. So cool. EDIT... not sure if you said StreetWire or StraightWire..
This was "Streetwires" not "Straight Wire".
Miss these times. 18 tweets up front!!! Yikes. I'm sure ya needed new alt & batts, Those PPI. Are power hungry. I love the old set ups having grown up & was at a influential age when this car was out.
It was only 500 watts (for real, no cheater amps) and it would be fine with a single battery, but the rules back then required additional batteries to maximize points, so it had three batteries and big ol' Chevy alternator.
Nice. I use to be sponsored by drivers den in alb.
that old school
toucheslapper: Hahahaha.... yes, I'm an idiot and the design is stupid. This car only won two consecutive IASCA Finals Championships in the Pro 251-500W class, back when lots of cars competed in IASCA. It also placed 4th overall at the Masters Invitational tournament, with olympic style judging and all power classes competing together. So, it worked pretty darned well, and there was some good thinking and a lot of testing behind the speaker system design. DIYMA's benchracer opinions don't really mean anything to me. I actually know how it sounded.
Bigchuck678: The midrange speakers in the front were JBL 2105H 4 inch drivers. These are very efficient 8 ohm speakers (94 dB @1W/1m). Two of them were used in each door, closely mounted so they would work as an array. This meant that the efficiency was 97dB, which was a good thing to have being the whole front stage ran off 50W x 2 @ 4 ohms. The Audax tweeters were mounted in two 3-tweeter arrays in each door, plus 3 tweeters distributed in the dash on each side. Each 3 tweeter group was wired in series, and the three trios were then wired in parallel, to achieve a 4 ohm load (each tweeter was 4 ohms). The door tweeter arrays were placed to control stage width and height and the sheer number of tweeters was needed to match the efficiency of the midrange speakers (remember, this was all passively crossed over), without having to pad the mids. There were also two Redline midbass drivers in each door, which were a little weaker than I would have liked, but nothing bigger would fit, so I made do. To answer your question, the frequency response was very flat, smooth and linear. It sounded great, at all volume levels, and it could get quite loud without breaking up... without a lot of power driving it all.
+Manville Smith do you think you can bring this car and compete and win some trophy today ? and what do you think about car audio (SQ) today with all the processor and stuff....
Cars today are being built mostly for one-seat judging. With modern DSP this is not much of a challenge, compared to the 2-seat cars we were building back in the late 80's and 90's, without any DSP.
There are some good-sounding cars out there today, but many of them aren't as fun to listen to as the old cars were. My Celica could flat out boogie, play loud and really clean. Jamming Pink Floyd or Dire Straits it was amazingly fun to listen to.
can you do the same to my 98 Lexus GS ? hahah ..... thinking when i have the time ill try to build something similar like yours... wonder do you run anytime time delay because all the tweeters are not mounted at the same distance ..
Yes, good observation about the tweeter distances. Keep this in mind... they were crossed over at 5 kHz (12dB/oct.)... at those frequencies, delay has very little effect on localization. Amplitude is dominant. Also, the dash tweeters and lower door tweeters had very similar pathlengths. Only the upper door tweeters were significantly different on the near side.
In the lower midrange, phase is the dominant localization cue. In the upper midrange it is arrival time and amplitude.
those JBL 2105H must sound amazing ! I'm just so amaze how efficiency is the sound system, i have Morel speakers 8 inch in doors playing from 80hz up to 2500hz and tweeter in factory location playing at 2500hz up , Morel like a lot of power ..! Quick question are you still into car audio stuff? and where is this toyota Celica now ....
Nothing like listening to elevator music while looking at a bass system 😓
Not really a bass system. I listened to a lot of different music with it, though. It could play just about anything really well.
300W amp for the subs, wow. Back then, when you got 300W when you paid for 300W.
And the cool thing about many JL speakers is that that many have a lower impedance so that helps the amp step up the power. Not all old school amps were created equally. Back in the day, Pyramid used to make amps and they sucked. JL, Rockford Fosgate, PPI, Linear Power, McIntosh and Soundstream used to make some really nice amps, especially some of the Class A ones for mid's and high's. My McIntosh 400 watt amp used to have a .005% THD. The sound quality was exceptional! The Linear 500 I ran was able to push 1100 watts RMS. It would run those JL woofers like nothing.
@Chad Wilkins JL was founded in '75 which was almost 50 years ago. Bose was only founded about ten years earlier.
When I said you paid for 300W you got it, you're probably right to say that if you pay good money today, you get good stuff. There is just so much cheap crap out there these days (and for the last couple decades)... you buy a "1000W" amp that will start smoking at 250W or just sound like garbage if you push it very hard.
@Chad Wilkins I used to sell JL speakers in the early 1990's and had woofers and amps back in the 1980's. All of the amps in my original message mentioned those old amps and nothing about the newer JL amps. I talked about the JL speakers. I love all of this stuff. I just hate it every time I change cars and have a $5,000+ stereo system to remove.
Ahhhh, the days before all the great audio companies sold out to China.
Zapco
Rockford Fosgate
Kicker
Precision Power
MB Quart
Just to name a few. Even Phoenix Gold was still around.
Yep. I used to see many people using PPI amps at bass contests. I ran MB Quart speakers as well as A/D/S back in the day... even Boston Pro's. They don't make stuff like that anymore. Now all the stuff comes out of China. I miss those old days. Whatever happened to Zapco? You would think that after the pandemic and with all of stuff Trump has done, companies would start making stuff here again.
Notice how he says his entire door panel is constructed out of wood. Why? Because fiberglass sounds like shit!
18 tweeters?? YIKES.
20, if you count the ones in the rear coaxials. :D
talk talk talk talk, but no demo. booo!
I know this guy thinks he’s clever, I guess we’re going to find out he’s not Enjoy your holidays.