This is the best audio system that anyone has ever done in any car I know
it for sure. And there's two of them.
-- How long did the project take?
Almost two years. 10,000 hours
My name is Matthew Figliola and i'm the owner and founder of Ai design.
Ai Design is an automotive customization studio in the New York metro area.
I'm more comfortable with more complexity than with less. I prefer the work to be
complex. I don't like it when it's simple. Our craft is tailoring a vehicle to its
owner, and we do it like no one else
My goal has always been to do much larger projects, more significant
projects. One very notable project is E45, which is really two vehicles.Two Cadillac
Escalades, model year 2015 that were built for one client to be used one on
the west coast and one on the east coast built identically to the same spec.
They both are really exquisitely appointed limousine conversions, but that's really
junior to the more senior aspect of them, which is this incredible audio system
that has never been attempted before anywhere. It's just it's it's nothing
that can be compared to anything that's been done. Cost was of no concern. The
budget was not discussed and there literally wasn't anything spared expense
wise. The client gave us great freedom to really do whatever it was we needed to
do to get the goal met which was just to get this incredible system just the way
he wanted it we went back and forth on this quite a few times with a with a
bunch of revisions and we got to a point where he was happy with you know this
type of speaker and this type of amplification so when I when the new
Escalades came out you know we were tasked with sort of taking what we
learned and putting it into these new cars which were very different than the
old ones so we had to sort of invent new things to accomplish that you know this
is broken down into sections like this is the source and control over here so
and his network you know there's a sophisticated wireless network in the
car which can speak back to his home based IT department he has a six
terabytes of high-res music on board which can sync up with his library at
home so as he adds music to car or home the two parts sync together so to do
that there's a very sophisticated modem that has this incredible bandwidth it's
actually a VPN it's not even a modem anymore it's a it's a Virtual Private
Network you want to have a device that can take four different data plans to
have really good sort of uninterrupted surface service you'd want to take a
plan from Verizon from t-mobile from AT&T from Sprint you get all four right
and you would what they call bond them together by having these different
carriers no matter where you are for the most part you will sort of benefit from
one carriers geographical advantage he prefers to listen to most of his music
content from Spotify and Spotify has a fairly new feature called Spotify
Connect and Spotify Connect basically allows you to control your music
selection from your device at the same time as the actual music file coming
from another device we don't want the music to come from your iPhone because
there's gonna be a degradation and signal from that we want the actual
music signal to come straight off the lan and we want it to go directly into
our really seriously high-end media controller that's in this and at the
time there was only one real company that had a super duper high end sort of
you know high fidelity part to do that with and that's why we chose this yellow
box right here which is a company called name out of the UK and it you know the
proof is in the pudding it really works I think the biggest
challenge of the whole car was the doors the doors themselves house the most
important speakers in the system it was probably I estimate it was 60% of the
job to do all eight doors on the two trucks that we worked on you know we had
to cut the whole inside of the door out we had to fabricate a tubular aluminum
frame to make the door more rigid to get the most out of any speaker no matter
what we're talking about you don't want anything the speaker's mounted to to
move any vibration counteracts the vibration of the speaker itself it's
actually cancels each other out so if you can make the mount for the speaker
infinitely rigid you would get the best result out of that speaker so that's
sort of the goal because when you do that if you just can get that one
physical challenge out of the way you've just made everything sound better by a
factor of ten it doesn't matter what you have you can put the worst speaker in
there it'll sound 50 times better than it ever could but
then it had to be trimmed to look like a Cadillac door which was really really
hard 70 percent of the rear doors were 3d
printed parts and probably 40% of the front doors were 3d printed parts it
just took a long long time but you know we pulled it off