In a Ford Falcon XR8, your right foot controls a 200kW throbbing V8 engine. And in the Sony Australia XR8, your left hand controls a sound system with 1440 Watts (RMS) of power and 148Db of sound pressure…

It never ceases to amaze just how much ICE some people can squeeze into a car, but for Stuart Jackson there was very little option.

Stuart is the product specialist for Sony’s Mobile Electronics division Down Under, which means he gets to play with all the latest and greatest car audio equipment from the `One and Only’.

So fitting out a new demo car therefore, meant that as much of the current top of the range line up as possible had to be squeezed in. After all, there’s no point rocking up to a show somewhere, only to make excuses about the latest gizmo not being in the car.

But Stuart wanted to demonstrate the capability of Sony’s new XM-7547 four-channel amp, so there are only two of them in the Sony XR8. Yet would you believe that these two amps power a total of 32 speakers including eight XS-L1050G 10" subs. Hmmm, now that’s impressive.

Oops, lost the air conditioner…
The system begins with Sony’s CDX-M700R head unit complete with the ‘active black’ control panel. This has been mounted as you’d expect in the centre of the dash, although in this case the entire centre dash panel was hand made by Theo Louskos, an installer and car audio instructor based at Strathfield Car Radios in the Sydney suburb of Concord.

While Stuart designed the system you see here, it was essentially Theo’s job to turn ideas into fact.

Theo and Stuart both agreed that a TV should sit near the top of the dash, but to do so in the XR8 would see the air conditioning controls be blocked off while the TV was out.

Bad ergonomics. The solution was to completely re-manufacture the centre console and give the air conditioning controls a new home. It sounds easy, but took hours of careful shaping and moulding of auto putty around an MDF framework, before adding the final fibreglass resin and painting.

Speaking of which, Theo also colour coded quite a few other little dash and trim pieces just to add some extra touches to the cosmetics of the car.

Getting back to the actual sound system components and that CDX-M700R is a dual function control unit.

With its front black panel closed, the unit can still be operated via remote control - hence the ‘Active Black Panel’ terminology. When turned off the panel just looks – well - black, which is a great security feature.

Press the open button however, and the black panel revolves around to reveal a fully functional control panel with it’s own display - funky! Other neat features are three preouts including a dedicated sub out and an HX (Hyper Expression) digital signal processor for improved sound staging control.

Incidentally, the TV used in the Sony XR8 has just been superseded in Japan, but you can be sure that the newest model will be in there as soon as Stuart can lay his hands on one.

And also guest starring…
Of course, any head unit is only as good as its supporting cast.

In this case study, a CDX-737 10-disc CD stacker, DVD player, MDX-65 Mini Disc stacker and an XTL-6100 Mk2 rear monitor provide plenty of additional audio and visual stimulation. Apart from the additional monitor, all of these items have been aesthetically positioned in that awesome boot display, although really observant readers might be wondering why we’ve only mentioned one CD stacker when it appears that there are two in the photos.

Fact is that the one on the left is just the outer casing - put there for visual balance.

Another point of interest is that the DVD player is a home player and required a DC-to-DC converter for use in the Sony XR8 Ford. The converter simply reduces the car’s 14 Volt maximum supply down to 10.5 Volts for the DVD player.

Audio signals are ultimately enhanced by those magnificent XM-7547 amplifiers and this is where we come to the part about just eight channels powering 32 speakers.

If you’re all sitting comfortably boys and girls, we’ll begin.

To start with, each front door carries one set of 5" XSH58 mids with the tweeters discarded and two pairs of 6" XSHF78 mids with the tweeters used. So that’s three mids and two tweeters in each front door.

Up on either side of the custom rear shelf live two XSHF58 packages, while two XSV1635M three way sets have been mounted on the underside of the boot lid. All up that makes a total of 10 tweeters and 14 mids - not forgetting the eight subs to make a total of, you guessed it, 32.

Now comes the easy bit
All the tweeters are run in parallel from two channels of the left hand side amp’, while the remaining two channels of the same amp’ run all of the car’s mids, again in parallel.

The right hand side amp meanwhile, has had its four channels bridged mono into two pairs, with each pair of bridged channels powering 4 subs in parallel.

One of the key features of the XM-7547 amp is its ability to be loaded down as low as 0.5 Ohm stable. Not many amps can run to this specification and those that do usually cost a whole lot more than Sony’s offerings.

The benefit with such a low loading is that it allows nice healthy power figures to be run and although no-one was giving too much away, it is believed that the four pairs of subs are presented to the amp’ as close as possible to 0.5 Ohms.

Obviously, this would require some trick combining of series and parallel wiring, while allowing the amplifier to produce as much as 600 Watts RMS. Total power for the system has been stated as 1440 Watts RMS and with over 140Db on tap too, there’s no denying the ability of those XM-7547 amps.

It’s worth giving the subs some credit as well however, as they’re designed for small enclosures and fairly rough treatment - without loss of sound quality of course !

The sub box in the Sony XR8 is 6-cubic feet in volume and fully sealed. No matter which angle we tried to view the subs from though, it was difficult to figure out how exactly they were arranged to produce the best acoustics. Some secrets will obviously remain as such.

Lights, perspex – and clever motorisation
While there’s certainly no denying the excellence of the system configuration, there simply is no getting away either from the perfection of the actual install - not to mention the associated cosmetic touches.

The door buildouts, for example, consist of an MDF framework with fibreglass resin and more hand moulded car putty being used to produce the final shape. What’s not so obvious though, is that each door pod carries 60 LEDs carefully positioned to produce that red glow.

Yes - 60 in each door! These have been wired up to a voltage regulator in order to run off 12 Volts.

It’s a similar arrangement up on the back shelf, although the shelf now on board is a fully custom affair made up by Theo using the original shelf as a template.

There’s been plenty of perspex used in the Sony Ford too, all of it laser cut to produce those stunning ‘floating’ Xplod logos on the door pods, rear shelf and especially on the rear of the sub box in the boot.

If you get the light and angles correct, the effect is actually quite 3D on the back of the sub box and with careful red and black painting, the perspex work is truly stunning.

But the crowning glory as far as the installation goes is the motorising of those amps.

Each amp’s movement works independently, because if the amps worked together they’d actually ‘crash’ into one another.

Hidden under the black vinyl next to each amp is a magnetic pick-up unit and when a special magnetic key (kept on the driver’s key ring) is placed over the pick-up, the amplifier begins to rise out of the depths.

The system uses two distinct stages, the first of which employs an actuator to lift the respective amp up out of the boot via a custom scissor lift mechanism.

When this process is complete, a Honda Prelude electric window motor kicks in to slide the amp out and over the rear guard. This is achieved by mounting the amps’ on the base of what was once a filing cabinet drawer!

As a complete package, the Australian Sony XR8 Ford is one awesome demo car and generates a massive amount of attention wherever it appears right around the country.

Before bringing this article to a close, we have one more person to thank and that’s Adrian Infirri, Sony Australia’s hard working mobile electronics rep’ in Western Australia who went out of his way to ensure that the Sony XR8 was available for us when the car recently visited Perth.