Our North Vancouver client had recently bought this Volkswagen Bus and brought it to the shop in beautiful condition and completely silent. A vehicle of this age never had a system worth speaking of, and this one had nothing at all. He wanted proper sound front and rear plus a subwoofer — and he wanted the bus to look, when we were done, exactly as it looked when it arrived.
That second requirement is the whole brief. Everything else follows from it.
Working around somebody else's woodwork
The bus came to us with a custom wood interior the owner had already had built. That changes the job from "where should the speakers go" to "where can the speakers go", and the answer is not always the acoustically ideal one.
For the rear, the location that worked was the panelling around the rear bench. Acoustically it is a compromise — it is low, and it is behind the listener. Practically it was the right call: there was room to mount the drivers cleanly into the timber, and enough space behind the panels to run and conceal the wiring without cutting into anything that showed. In a cabin this open and this hard-surfaced, sound gets around anyway.
We used Rockford Fosgate's Prime series front and rear. It is the sensible choice here rather than the extravagant one: this is a vehicle that will be driven with the windows down, and the money is better spent on getting the mounting right than on drivers whose last ten percent will never be audible over the road.
Hiding a subwoofer in a bench seat
The subwoofer was the interesting problem. It had to be concealed, and it had to take up no usable space. Working through it with the owner and his interior design, we settled on the inside of the front passenger bench — a hollow void that lives under the cushion and does nothing else.
That location chose the product. We fitted the Rockford Fosgate P3008P, which carries its amplifier inside the enclosure. With no separate amp to mount and no rack to build, the entire subwoofer system is one box that drops into a space nobody will ever look in.
How it turned out
The bus now plays properly, front to back, with real low end underneath — and there is nothing to see. No boxes in the load area, no grilles where grilles do not belong, nothing that dates the interior. That is the whole point of doing it this way.
Have a classic you would like to bring modern sound to without spoiling it? That is one of our favourite kinds of job. Come and show it to us.