Christmas of 1993, sophomore year, I started slowly paying my parents back with allowance for an all in one boom box like no other, the Sanyo MCD-Z75. It was a grey streamlined turd-shaped all-in-one with a drawer loading CD Player, dual auto-reverse cassette deck with AI-recording, and I think about 25-30W of power. Sleep and alarm/wake-up functions were nice too. Everytime we went to Walmart, I had to play with the demo unit. They were $299, and way too much money for a young adolescent in High School that wasn’t old enough to work yet. By comparison, the all-in-one shelf systems felt cheap, and their speakers were featherweight, and the Sanyo actually sounded better to me. It had dual 4” ported wideband speakers, and looked similar to the Eminence Alpha4 with a mylar silver dustcap. I have never tore it apart, thinking id break it, but ive wondered if there wasnt a small 4” sub in there somewhere being what it could do. The ports are really long. I paid off my first loan experience with my first paycheck a couple years later. That was a learning experience, and I loved it and still have it.
About 5-6 years prior the above, dad blew the Lloyd’s speakers’ 8” woofers out (with smoke!) cranking the Pioneer 60W receiver all the way over during Jan and Dean’s Drag City intro. After 2 revs, the woofers were gone, and the cone tweeters were screaming. He found later what looked like guts from a 12” cheap prosound pair and rasped holes into the faces to make them fit, wired the 4x10 horn and woofer in parallel with the input and still working cone tweeters. They did not sound the same, nor as good as before, and made me wonder why. I’m sure this is what pushed me in this direction for hobby, life, and general interests on top of already loving music.
Year after high school or so, about ‘98, with my not worth a whole lot ‘87 Cavalier after-prom door prize car, I bought a White Westinghouse in dash CD Player for $100 from K’s Merchandise. That was the cheapest I could find one. The wire harness colors didn’t match, and my cousin helped me put it in. Afterward, I realized a 6x9 was rattling. I bought the $100 Radio Shack 3way 6x9s on sale for $50, and dad helped me swap them out. I put a pair of piezo tweeters in the front dash. I found a 3” #10 nail resting on the cone of the stock unit inside the fabric cover. No wonder it sounded like crap! My uncle heard me coming down the road to a gathering on that setup playing Circle of Dust’s Course of Ruin, which just made me smile. I added a 25x2 Radio Shack amp and a pair of Isobaric Realistic DVC 8” in a free wood box from work to round out that system. I eventually blew one of the inverted 8”, and swapped a Pyle CAST 8” and homemade PR for the quad, followed up with an MTX Blue Thunder 752 and a Panasonic head unit in my next car, a Ford Tempo. All said and done, I had a pair of Soundstream EXACT10s and Soundstream B52 front coaxes on the doors running of an Xtant 3150C from a Kenwood DMASK KDC-X715 head running as a dry deck. I had that system running until bought the Magnum in 2009.
I have not done a car system since. I did keep the gear though. The sub box is useful, because I can run 8”, 10”, or 12” in it facing inverted.
