For automobile audio expert K. Karthik, no sound could have been more heart-warming than the cheering applause from peers — assembled at Tesco Lotus, an ubermall in Bangkok — for his top-prize winning installation.
The 26-year-old Chennai lad displayed his prowess in a Toyota Celia, and won the 2010-11 Thailand edition of United States Autosound Competition International (USACi).
Beating the odds
Given the hassles and costs of transporting audio equipment and cars to overseas venues, USACi allows its competitions to be conducted in various countries through local chapters. Karthik chose Thailand for two reasons — India is out of the USACi radar; and, only in Thailand did he have a friend — Robert Liu — who would let his car be “tampered” with.
A typical USACi competition has two categories: Sound Quality Level (SQL) — where the ability to reproduce sounds faithful to the original recording in an effective manner scores; and Sound Pressure Level (SPL) — where loud and booming music scores.
For a long time, Karthik — who has been running the car performance-enhancing solutions company Speedfreaks for five years — equated good music with loud music. This bias was partly due to the fact that many of his customers were youngsters trying to spice up their car-driving experience with attention-grabbing features.
Audio appreciation
After a couple of courses — one in sound engineering at SAE and the other in ‘automobile audio' at an institute in Australia — he began to appreciate audio that had greater clarity, and did not cause ear fatigue.
For the USACi competition in Thailand, he chose the SQL category without hesitation. Camping in Bangkok for 10 days, Karthik and his assistant — 21-year-old Bhuvanesh — put together a ‘quad amp set-up' directed at giving passengers a sense of music swelling up in front of them.
“It consists of a three-way component with front staging. The idea is this — when an occupant of the car closes his eyes, he should feel the music rushing to meet him,” says Karthik. “The arrangement comprises a six-inch mid-bass driver, a three-inch mid-range driver, one-inch tweeter and a sub-woofer under the dash, all of which are powered individually by different amplifiers, lodged in the rear trunk.”
Considering that an audio installation is evaluated for 70 parameters, Karthik can sound off about his achievement!
