Alpine's Steve Brown, Application R&D Engineer, Product Promotion Specialist, and Project Car Designer extraordinaire.

Steve Brown is an Application R&D Engineer and Product Promotion specialist for Alpine Electronics of America. As part of his job, Brown conceptualizes and creates demo vehicles for Alpine's Marketing Department. In 2002, Brown and project car legend Chris Yato teamed up to create a jaw-dropping, center-drive Honda Civic Si that was universally proclaimed the most radical car A/V installation ever.

Crutchfield Advisor Car A/V Editor Todd Cabell and Crutchfield Managing Car A/V Editor Michael Sokolowski caught up with Brown at Alpine's headquarters in Los Angeles in August. Brown and co-designer Mike Vu (with Chris Yato's departure, the newest member of Alpine's project car team) were hard at work on the newest Alpine demo vehicle, which will be unveiled at the 2004 CES show in Las Vegas this coming January.

Crutchfield Advisor: Are you from Los Angeles?

Steve Brown: Actually, I grew up in Washington state. I lived up there through high school, on the eastern side. I went to school up at the University of Washington, on the west coast. You know, time to get away from the parents.

CA: Yeah right.

SB: So, I moved to Seattle and did that. I studied mechanical engineering and was actually also doing a lot of stuff with my car. I had a '76 Toyota Celica. You know, just an old "beater."

CA: Nice.

SB: You know, it was the car that I had in high school and through college. So it just kinda worked out that I started competing in IASCA. Turned out that in the mid '90s there were a lot of IASCA shows in the area. Canada was really big into IASCA, so I'd go up to Canada a lot — you know 2 hours, 3 hours away. And you could hit all the shows you wanted.

CA: Up in Vancouver?

SB: Yeah, Vancouver, sometimes you'd cross the ferry. Sometimes you'd go over in the Bremerton area, sometimes Tacoma, sometimes south as far as Portland — you know, a couple of hours, 3 hours away. I went to 14 or 15 shows in 1994, and it turns out that one of the Alpine reps, Jeff Jones, saw my car at one of the shows. I talked to him and we kinda hit it off and about 3 months later the job came up. He didn't really have my contact information, so he called IASCA and got my number. So, long story short, I'm in my apartment when I get a call at 7 o'clock at night. 'Hey, this is Jeff from Alpine. You wanna come down for an interview?' Literally two days later, I'm on an airplane coming to LA — first time I'd ever been to California, much less Los Angeles.

CA: Were you still in school then, or had you finished up?

SB: Yeah, I was. I had a year or a little over a year left. I was getting to the point where I wasn't really liking it and I was thinking about switching over. So it kind of came at a good time for me — it was something I was really interested in and, obviously, I was doing it already.

CA: Were you spending more and more time working on your car?

SB: Exactly.

CA: Were you doing installations for other people as well?

SB: Yeah, some, but for competition stuff I focused mostly on my own car. I just honed my skills on that car and really tried to do new stuff and try new things. That's really where I learned some of the initial fiberglass skills that I use now. I was able to take that car pretty far — I took second with it in the '94 IASCA finals. I actually drove that car from Seattle to Dallas and back.

CA: That's awesome.

SB: Well, it was pretty crazy. I mean a three-day trip, so.

CA: What kind of gear did you have in there?

SB: Let's see, I had Quart speakers, PPI amps, and Sony source units — a changer and a head unit. What else did I have in there? I had an AudioControl EQT, and I think I had some Coustic crossovers in that thing, some of the old Coustic active crossovers. It was one of those things, I had pieced it together, bought stuff on sale when I could, you know, but I tried to get good equipment. So I didn't have any weak links in the system, and I redid the system a lot as far as the way that the car was laid out. So every time I'd do something, I'd try a new skill. I'd try vinyling or try painting or try fiberglassing. You know, try curving or shaping things.

CA: So you were doing the whole nine yards on them? You were doing the exterior paint and...

SB: Well, I wasn't doing as much paint then. I was dabbling with it, but I wasn't doing as much. I didn't really start doing paint 'til I did the Legend. Basically, I took that car to the finals in '94 and then it actually ended up in the Quart booth at CES [the Consumer Electronics Show] in '95. Oddly enough, that first day that I was at CES was the first day I started at Alpine.

SB: So of course I was really working at Alpine, but I had my car in the Quart booth.

Alpine of America's Headquarters in Los Angeles, California and a few of their many awards.

CA: That's pretty funny.

SB: Yeah, it's just kind of a weird story. I was there with Quart, and they put me up and paid for my trip out there. And again I drove the car from Seattle down to Vegas.

It was funny because it was snowing on the way down and one of the drain plugs in the bottom of the car had popped out. The whole floor got wet and the car started to stink — you know how they get that kinda musty smell when the car gets wet? So the whole show, the car was just rancid if you stuck your head in there.

[laughs]

It was terrible! But they way that they built it, this was an old, you know, pretty junky car. It was fairly rusted out on the fenders, and you know it was old and it had lived a pretty rough life. They had a sign above the car that said, 'If we can make this car sound good, imagine what we could do for your car.' That was their whole strategy on it.

CA: That's great! It's an excellent angle on it.

SB: Yeah, so they had this piece of junk car sitting in their booth with a really nice system in it.

SB: Once I got the job with Alpine, I decided, 'Well, I need something a little better if I'm going to be visiting dealers.' So I bought my Acura '88 Legend and started competing with that. I built a system in it in about three months and the first system I ever built in it, I took to the finals in '95. I actually won the first year out with it, which I never expected to do, especially in the Expert Class. It wasn't as competitive then as it is now, but there were still some pretty decent cars back then. That was another car that evolved and changed a lot as I went — I rebuilt the dash, and the trunk pretty much stayed the same most of the time. I rebuilt the seats and just kept doing more and more things to it as I kept it.

CA: Was that your personal car, or was that also an Alpine car?

SB: That was my own car. I was a Product Specialist, and a Product Specialist's job is to drive around to dealers, hand out literature, technical advice, you know, that kind of stuff — system help. So I was logging quite a few miles, driving it a lot. I did that in Seattle for a couple years, and then I moved to the Bay Area, San Francisco, for about 3 years and worked there. Eventually the job came open down here to build demo cars full-time.

Now keep in mind, I was building demo cars the whole time I worked for Alpine, but I was only doing it around CES time. Usually the last two or three months of the year, I would come down here [Los Angeles] for about three weeks at a time, stay in a hotel, go back home for a couple days, and then come back. So that's how we used to build 'em. Chris Yato was really the only in-house guy that worked in the bay full time. In 1999, we changed it to where I came down full-time, and that's when we started producing some of the more premier cars, like the [2000 Ford] Excursion. My BMW was one of the cars. That was, still to this day, the longest time we ever spent on an installation. That was about seven months. That was even a little longer than the [2003 Honda] Civic.

Once Brown moved to L.A. to work full-time, the quality of Alpine's demo cars accelerated big-time. Case in point: the 2000 Ford Excursion demo vehicle.

CA: The M3?

SB: The M3. And, you know, that was a project that Chris and I really enjoyed because it was the type of car that we like. We both love that car. I always wanted that car, as long as I can remember. It first came out and when I was finally able to buy one, I was like 'Ah, this is great.' So I was stoked and you know, Chris and I started working on it. We designed the system like we would want it, like we would want our own car to be. So it's not all paint, you know, there's a mix of different materials. There's a lot of leather, it's more classy, it's a little more high-end, but it's still sporty. And of course, that was the debut of F#1 Status. That was the first car in the world, really, with F#1 Status in it. So we got a chance to really tune, to design this car for sound. We set it up and did a lot of work on the speaker positioning before we even built the car. You know, we welded panels into the firewall, and into the fender — it was pretty elaborate. There's a lot of work in that car that you don't see, that's behind the scenes. We were really able to make it sound good. That car, I mean, it does some things I've never heard another car do, as far as impact and tonal balance, it's really, really...

CA: I got a chance to sit in it. It was awesome.

SB: It's a really nice sound. It's really enjoyable. And the best thing about that car is you can drive it. I took it for trips. I took it to Arizona, took it to Vegas, you know, six-hour trips no problem. It was truly, you know, a functional audio-type car.

CA: Was that your personal car at the time?

SB: No, I actually sold it, just recently sold it.

CA: That was your personal car?

SB: It was my personal car, too. I sold the Legend to buy that car. I sold the Legend to one of our local dealers that wanted a demo car. I took that money, bought the BMW, and then we started working on that, and then we did about one year competing with that car. We took second at IASCA in 2000, and that's pretty much the last year I really competed at IASCA. We used it a little after that for demos and shows and things like that.

CA: But by that time you were doing full-time install work here in the bay?

SB: Exactly.

Hard to top — Alpine's Civic Si always draws a large crowd, as here at the Los Angeles Hot Import Nights.

CA: And is the majority of that time spent on doing the demo car for the CES show?

SB: Well, yeah. For example, the Civic was about a six-month project. So we started it in June, and finished it in January. The car we're working on now we actually started a little before June. I think we got the car late May. So we started a little before. But it's even more elaborate than the Civic as far as the modifications done to the car itself. So, it's gonna be, you know... we're looking to top it, and some of the concept for the car is much more radical.

CA: Cool.

SB: We always try to push it, every year, do something a little crazier, a little different.

CA: Is that stressful? Everyone's like, 'How are you gonna top this?'

SB: Yeah. You know, you get that a lot. But I'll be at CES thinking about ideas for the next car. I'm always just trying to come up with some new concept, or some new way that I'll want to do something, or a new idea that I'll want to design into a car.

CA: And where do you start? I mean, do you start with the car itself — do you think, 'What car do I want to use as my template?'

SB: Not usually, which is kind of a weird way to think about it, but usually I come up with the basic concept of what I want to do, and then we find a car that fits. But then you have to modify the idea sometimes to fit the size of the car. The first car that we talked about building this year was a miniature, like a smaller SUV. And the first idea that I'd had would work in that car pretty well. But then we got a unique opportunity to go a different way. So we did, and we were still able to do it. We had to modify it a little bit, change some of the details, but the basic concept is there. And I think it's really going to work well. So, it's gonna be, it's gonna definitely be radical. Definitely radical.

CA: So with the Civic, for example, your basic concept was center-drive, with wrap-around components?

SB: The two basic concepts were center-drive — we actually wanted to do center-drive on the [2002 Acura] RSX also, but we only had about 4 months to build that car. Plus it had to show up at SEMA. So we had to stop, do the dash and the doors, stop and put everything back together, you know, and finish all that stuff, then send it to SEMA, bring it back, and finish the rest. Normally we'll get all the parts made, and then go through and prime and paint and sand everything at the end. Just get everything built, then fit everything together and make sure it all works together, and then do all the painting at the end. It actually took a little extra time to build that car that way, so we didn't have time to do it on that one. We could have done center-drive on that car just about as easily, because the platform is just about the same as the Civic. A lot of the pieces and the mechanical stuff are really the same.

On the Civic we had about six months, so we decided 'let's tackle it.' And really, the center-drive on that car was easier than we expected. It only took a few weeks to get everything working mechanically — to make it driveable and useable. So we were able to do that and then, of course, we started doing all the paneling and the glassing and all that.

I remember where I was when I had the idea. I was on a plane, and you know just drawing out... sometimes you know, you're bored just sitting on the plane. So I started sketching out ideas of what I thought the interior should look like. And I thought about a cage set up to where everything's in front of you. But it's floating. Originally, we were going to put head units up there, one on each side, and then you know, maybe gauges above it. But when you have ideas like that, you kind of have an idea of what you want to do, but what's going to go on there, you kind of leave it loose.

Well, when we started looking at the car, we figured out that the headunits were going to be way too big for the size of the car. They would have had to be a lot bigger than we wanted to make them. So we decided 'let's do gauges,' which was perfect because the whole front dash of that car is all monitors. And that was the other idea that we wanted to do — a row of monitors. So, we did that in the front, but for the gauges we thought, well, let's put all the gauges in these wraparound arms, it'd be cool. But then we thought, well, how are you gonna get in and out of the car? So that's when we came up with the idea of motorizing it back — because then it gives it a functionality. I don't like having a motorized thing just for the sake of having it motorized. I'd rather have something that's designed to work that way because it has to be that way to allow the car to function correctly. And that's a perfect example: you know, it pulls back, you get in the car, and it wraps back around, so you've got your gauges in front. So, you know, it makes ergonomic sense.

Those were the two main ideas in that car. You know, all the details kind of worked their way around it as you go as far as speakers, and sizing, and you kind of put what fits where it'll fit. You kind of have an idea in your head of how things are going to go, but then you get in there and you look at it and you think, 'well, that's not going to fit the way it would look best.' You know, you don't want to have to squeeze stuff in or make it look like it's forced in there. You want things to look like they naturally flow. For example, if you look at the speaker array in the front of that car, it has a natural, progressive shape. We originally wanted to do a 15" [subwoofer] in the floor, and we could have easily fit it in there. We thought that would have been cool, but it would have made it go like this: [makes an asymmetrical shape in the air].

CA: Right.

"Flow" — for the speaker arrays in the front of the Civic Si, Brown had originally wanted to install a 15" sub, but opted for a 12" sub to maintain the progressive shape of the enclosures.

SB: It wouldn't have flowed with the whole theme of the car. So, we decided to narrow it down to a 12" [sub] and now it gives you a nice flow. So when you look at the side it just goes — it swoops up in a sweeping motion. So it gives it a lot better flow. And same in the rear: we wanted to match the 12" with a 12" in the rear, but it wouldn't look right. We didn't have the vertical height to do four speakers, so we said 'well let's just scrunch it down to three, do a 10", a 6", and a tweet.' That way you get your nice progression again, but in a little bit shorter package to fit the area that you got. You gotta do that kind of stuff, it's just the nature of the beast. Especially in those small cars. You always end up trying to cram a lot of stuff in there and it doesn't always want to fit, you know?

Even Brown's table saw has been "customized."

CA: Can you walk us through the general steps you take when you're designing a project car? First, you come up with the idea, and then you get your car, and then....

SB: Yeah, I come up with the idea. And we have to, we come up with a direction I guess for the car. So we decide 'well, where do want to go with it. Who are we trying to make this car appeal to? ' And the last couple years we've gone towards the Gen-Y, youth-type consumer. So, if you look at Hot Import Nights, what would be a hit car at Hot Import Nights? The first thing we do is get a car that we think is gonna be hot. The RSX was a no-brainer. When it first came out, everybody knew that car was gonna be big. The Civic is always a perennial favorite of anybody that's, you know, into Hondas — they're always popular. It's kind of the initiator of the whole import scene.

The new Civic actually worked out well because it's a hatchback. We like doing hatchbacks because it gives you an open area to do what you want. A trunk car is very much more difficult because, not only is it more difficult to work on, to get things in and out of, but you can't create a flow as easily. For example, in the BMW, we were able to make the console flow through the car. But a lot of people, unless you look down like this, and look through it, most people don't even notice that that thing goes through there 'cause you've got that trunk lid in the way. So we try to do hatchbacks whenever we can, just cause it gives you a lot more options to do what you want to do.

So, we picked those cars based on that, and then in the case of the Civic, you know, the first thing we do is strip it. Get everything out of there, including the dash, the heater, you know, the AC, all that stuff. So we can look at it and see what we got. And then, you know, we knew we wanted to do center-drive, but we didn't know how easy or hard it was going to be. Well it turns out that in that car, the floor is completely flat. The only thing is, there's a little hump in the front near the firewall, where the catalytic converter was. Well, since it was a show car, it doesn't really need to be street legal. So we got rid of the cat, flattened the hump in the floor and made it, you know, completely flat and smooth. So that way, your feet can go down, and you have, you know, a viable center-drive alternative. So then, we had to, the first thing we did was to convert all the mechanicals. So, you know, we moved the brake and clutch master cylinder inside the car, had to re-route brake lines, figure out how to get all that stuff to work. You know, plumb all that stuff.

CA: Did you already know how to do all that work? Or did you have to learn a lot along the way?

SB: I've been doing it for a long time, cause my dad's actually a hot rod builder. So yeah, I grew up around cars and knowing how to do this kind of stuff. I mean, it's one of those things. So that kind of stuff is really not that difficult. You can teach anyone in a few minutes how to bleed brakes, and a lot of it's common sense. You just kind of learn how things run, and how they work, and....

Steve Witt (Vice President of Marketing for Alpine): Excuse me. I don't know if it's being recorded, but he doesn't leave anything stock. It doesn't matter what he touches.

SB: That's true, actually.

Steve Witt: Our table saw is not stock.

SB: Yeah, I have a bad habit of modifying my own cars heavily, so... but that's another story. But anyway, so we got the mechanical stuff, the pedals and the steering, done first. The pedals were really the hardest thing because to move the master cylinder inside we had to make custom bracketry and mount everything, get all the pedals working correctly. Once we did that, we figured out the steering. The steering in that car really was pretty easy because it comes out of just left of center of the firewall. So we were able to use the stock steering knuckles and just extend the steering rod, and we actually moved the seating position back about 20 inches. So when you look at the car, like where you would sit in a stock Civic, it's back about 20 inches from that. The reason is, we wanted more space in the front. But we also wanted it to look, kind of more reclined, so you're not way up in front of the car, but you look like you're really sitting back in it. that allowed the steering geometry to work a lot better, also. So really, in that car it wasn't too bad.

A look at the cockpit of Alpine's 2002 Honda Civic Si, which many within the industry consider the greatest project vehicle ever built.

The shifter was probably the most difficult thing. That car has a dash-mounted shifter. So we had to mount the shifter on the floor, next to the center seat. Of course now it's off to the side. We used the stock shifter mechanism but we had to extend the rods, and it really wasn't too bad. But there were a few little things we ran into. So, we got all that stuff working, and after we did that, you know, we drove the car just on a bucket, just driving around the parking lot, just to make sure everything worked. And once we knew we had a car that worked and ran, then we started working on the rest of the stuff. The first thing I guess that we built in that car, we worked on the seats, you know the fiberglass seat, which we had to make. We actually have a box underneath that car to hold extra amps. 'Cause there's really no way that three amps are going to run the whole system. They're all mono sub amps, so it doesn't make any sense. So we have six amps mounted underneath in a steel box that's ventilated. And that was another thing, you know. A lot of guys try to show all the product that's in the car. We only show the stuff that we think is going to add to the visual appeal of the car. Because again, if it's too cluttered, it actually detracts. If we tried to show six amplifiers in that little car, the way it's set up, it just wouldn't look right. So we said 'well, why show them?' — and we actually got this idea from Rockford, believe it or not, we were looking at one of their cars — it was their Xterra — at CES. You see one amp in that thing.

CA: Yep.

SB: And, I'm talking to Brian Schmidt, I said 'well, how does that all work?' He goes 'well, that's not all of the amps. All the amps are under the car.' I never even thought of doing that. You don't really have to show all the product. Up to that point, we had everything visible. But a kind of light bulb went off, and it's like 'duh, why do you have to show everything?'

CA: Yeah, they had a bunch of batteries in that car, too, right? In metal cages underneath.

SB: Exactly. They always build stuff steel, underneath the car. And so, we thought 'well, that'd be great for our car, 'cause that way we could do our amp rack the way we want.' The amp rack, you know, it's that three-tiered rack?

CA: Yeah.

SB: There's really no room to do any more amps than what we did. So if we would have had to try and do anything else, it just would have looked cluttered. It would have been too wide to fit in the car.

CA: One thing I didn't understand about that though, all those amps in the rack are actually powering stuff?

The Civic's amp rack seems to almost float in the rear of the car.

SB: No, those amps aren't... they could. Because the way the amp rack works, we have a wire set up that kind of zigzags, so it allows it to move with it. So you could wire 'em, I mean it would be a lot more complex, and we decided well, what's really the point?

CA: Right.

SB: The other problem is, if you have to pull one, it's a lot more difficult to pull everything apart rather than just jack the car up, pull the cover off, and everything just slides straight out from the bottom. So it's really a lot easier to take stuff out that way. That was the main reason that we didn't use those amps. I mean they're functional amps, we just decided not to hook them up.

CA: They are powered?

SB: They have power, just lighted.

CA: The voltage LED.

SB: Exactly.

CA: Have you ever blown any of the amps in that car?

SB: No, never have. You know what's funny, and I still do not know how this happened, but we had the worst possible combination of factors to destroy the amps in that car, because they're in a metal box. They have a fan on 'em. Well, what happens if the fan shuts off, and not only if the fan shuts off, but if the holes that guide air in and out of the fan are closed? Now you got all these amps sitting in a steel box, completely sealed.

Well, that's what happened. And I think what happened is the shipper looked under there, saw holes, and decided 'well, let me plug these.' So he put duct tape over 'em. Then the fuse — the fuse block is underneath the seat in that car. Somebody pulled the fuse for the amp fans. Now I don't know if it was 'cause it was loud and they were trying to sound test it, or maybe they needed a fuse and they pulled it and nothing went off so they figured it's OK, but basically there was no fan going. So these amps, they played for a good three hours at Hot Import Nights. And we're talking just blastin' on the system. And finally, the 4-channel amp just started shutting off. And I'm like what's going on, you know? I noticed a smell, an odd smell, and I didn't know what it was. Well, it was the undercoating on the box getting hot. That's what I was smelling. And so I looked under there and I saw the tape. Pulled the tape off, and thought 'great, the fans aren't working'. So, at the time, I thought the fan was blown. I pulled the cover off the bottom of the amp rack and we ran it like that for the rest of the night. And those amps came back on and played, no problem the rest of the night. And once I figured out it was the fuse for the [fans], they've been fine ever since.

CA: Nice.

SB: But talk about a torture test. I don't know how hot it must have been in that box, but I mean the outside of it was really warm.

CA: Three hours!

SB: Yeah. It was unbelievable. And I've never — I have never gotten an Alpine mono amp to shut off 'cause of thermal. No matter how much you wail on them, they just don't get that hot. So, it was impressive. I was really amazed that they lasted.

CA: So do you, do you guys use AutoCAD to do a lot of your design work?

SB: No actually, it's really low-tech to be honest with you. It's a matter of — first of all it's a matter of working really well with the guy that you work with [Chris Yato, Mike Vu], and being able to see things in the same way, and communicate ideas so that you can bounce ideas off each other. 'Well, that's cool. I like that'. Or 'Well, maybe we could do that, or do something different, change it a little bit'. And we really just come up with stuff, I guess, kind of off the cuff. Draw out some things, and kind of work it as you go.

You know basically what you want to do when you start the car. You know where you need to go with it. But things have to change as you go. There's always things you run into: space issues, fit issues, things that dimensionally work in your head, but once you get in the car, don't work quite as well as you expected. There are a lot of things that, you know, have to get modified and switched up. And a lot of times you'll have an idea that just plain flat won't work in that car.

So you say: 'Well, it's a good idea, keep it for the next car and do something else.' Because any time I look at one area in a car I think of four or five ways I could do that. I could do it this way, or that way, but what's the best way? And the best way is how it looks best in the car, not 'I really want to do this idea, I'm going to force it to work in the car.' You have to try and get away from that and just say, this is really what's going to look best in here.

CA: That brings up something else I wanted to ask you about: How do you balance your objectives — because obviously sound quality seems to be the guiding principle behind your stuff, but there's also the issue of appearance, and then performance too?

SB: Right. It depends on what kind of car you're building as to what the definition of performance is. For example, the Civic. Nobody ever really sits in that car and listens to it. The car actually sounds really good, but we didn't really try to make it sound good. All the speakers are in their own enclosure, so that's a bonus. I mean they're Type R speakers, which is kind of a middle of the line speaker. It's not the best speaker we make. And I honestly didn't expect that much out of it sound-quality wise. But it really does surprisingly well. I think part of it's because of the center seat. You know, you're so well positioned in the car. But I sat in it, tuned it for a couple hours, and I was shocked at how well it did. But, really all it has to do to show is be loud, be tonally pretty close, and have a lot of bass.

CA: Yeah.

SB: That's the three main factors. So when people listen to it they go 'oh yeah.' Because nine times out of ten it's going to be outside the car. So it has to be fairly loud outside the vehicle.

CA: Right.

SB: If we build a car to focus on sound quality, like the BMW, it takes a lot longer. Because you can't just throw speakers in the car and expect them to sound good. You really have to experiment and try to get the best possible combination of angling, and enclosure size, damping, that type of thing. It definitely takes a lot more time. On the BMW we spent over a month just testing speakers, and angles, to get the best sound.

CA: Wow! So it depends on who you're building it for.

The top of the line Type X speakers, inspired by Alpine's BMW M3 demo vehicle.

SB: Yeah, that's right. And the other thing is with that car... that was actually the impetus for going with our Type X speakers. At the time, we didn't have Type X. And we didn't know what we were going to use to provide those speakers. We knew we didn't want to use the same company that we use for our entry-level stuff. So we said, well, let's investigate some high-end companies. We looked at Focal, we looked at Vifa and Scanspeak, we looked at Morel, we looked at Dynaudio, and we tested a bunch of different speakers in that car. The Vifa speakers were the best. And that was the reason we went with Vifa for all of our Type X, and then, of course, with Scanspeak, as the parent company for our F#1 Status speakers. It was cool being on the ground level of that design, and being able to really, you know, influence the product.

CA: Yeah, that's a nice example of where the demo car actually influenced the product line.

SB: Exactly.

Next week: Part II
Be sure to check back next week to read about Steve's favorite project car designers, his picks for hot cars on the circuit today, and his advice to aspiring custom car designers. Plus, you'll also get to check out pictures from the Advisor's peek behind the scenes at Alpine's installation bay to see where Steve and Mike Vu do all the work on Alpine's project cars, including a sneak preview of Alpine's 2004 project car! It's all covered in Part II of Car A/V Installation Masterclass: Crutchfield Advisor interviews Alpine Project Car Designer Steve Brown.

Steve Brown and Mike Vu (the project car team's newest member) in front of Alpine's top-secret 2004 project vehicle. Can you wait?