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.