Audio System

"You put a stereo system into a GT3?!!??!" I've seen the eyes roll. I know it's a sin to add weight to a car which was engineered to be light. I don't care. I drive this car on the street and the puny stock radio just wasn't doing it for me. Besides, the weight of the system is roughly what I ought to lose from my gut. In reality, even with the extra weight, the car is plenty fast for DEs and track days.

So I went to see Joe Parker at Earmark Car Audio in Addison, TX. I had looked around online for some local recommendations and his shop consistently had positive comments from Porsche owners. I asked him to propose a setup and promise me I wouldn't be disappointed. Long story short, I'm not. At all :)

Here's what we wound up with:

• Head unit: Alpine CDA9885 with iPod interface/controller


• Tunes: iPod Classic 80GB (currently half full i.e. >8000 songs)


• Mid amps: Alpine PDX4.150 (150x4 Watt digital)


• Subwoofer amp: Alpine PDX1.600 (600 Watt digital)


• Speakers: Boston Acoustics PRO60, NEO-M


• Subwoofer: JL Audio 8W3V38

The system is absolutely out of this world...in terms of both sound and price. One other remarkable thing about the whole setup is the installation. Earmark's Josh built some beautiful custom fiberglass enclosures for the doors and covered them so they look like they came from the factory. The subwoofer cabinet is custom built to fit the car (right under the rear window) and couldn't be more subtle. The whole thing took a couple weeks to do, but the results are second to none.

The digital amps are great because they're tiny. They fit under the race seats, which is perfect.

Alpine is a leader in their iPod integrations, but I'm still not blown away by their solution. It's nice to be able to stick the iPod in the glovebox and then totally forget that it's there. Controlling via the Alpine head unit is very doable (browse by playlist, artist, etc) and they even have solutions for dealing with large music libraries (you can jump 20% forward or backward in any list). The problem is that with 8000 songs, 20% granularity still leaves hundreds of title to scroll through and it takes a while. My other complaint is that you can't rate tracks like you can on the normal iPod interface. This may sound silly, but since you can't delete tracks from the iPod interface, I use a rating of "1 star" to mean that the track is crappy and it should be deleted next time I hook it up to my computer (i.e. I can use iTunes to group all the "1 star" tracks and then wipe them away). If I can't rate the track, then I can't remember which ones should be removed.

While he was installing the system, Josh also hid my Traqmate inside the console (i.e. under the head unit in front of the shifter) and put the Traqmate's GPS receiver inside the dash. I couldn't have asked for a more elegant solution.