Kenwood Sponsor Iceman

Regular readers will know that Panasonic Car Electronics chose Talk Audio magazine to be the channel for release of the sad news that they will no longer be selling ICE in Europe. Ian ‘Iceman’ Pinder was sponsored by them with a CD tuner and a DVD tuner, dash-stacked up in his since-the-Eighties style of multiple headunits and multiple sources. He used to have CD, Cassette and DAT digital audio tape in separate headunits with different settings per source and crossovers in the dash. It was amazing.
However, all those digital functions (and goodbye to Compact Cassette f’rever!) can be done these days by a pair of single DIN decks and the Pannys served Iceman well, shaking many a girlie’s hair. But he is a walking, driving Prime Site and as such, there was no way I could leave him with a sponsor who is no longer in the UK market.
So I called up Mike Edwards, a stalwart of the Kenwood Electronics company and one of the best liked top company executives in the whole industry and told him about Iceman’s year ahead exhibiting with Armour and in particular how he had been asked to do the Gadget Show on Channel Five. Mike came through with a DVD deck, navigation system and another CD player – a bloody top one as well – to sit right underneath the motorised screen.

This gives him iPoddery and navigation and DVD playback as well as the separate CD that he can switch to like a turntableist. Plus of course there’s the USB hole, which is a good way of getting around the vibration issues over 153dB at 23Hz. The Panasonic was a bit more resistant to the mayhem but the Kenwood DVD deck Iceman now has in the dash is awesomely high end and along with the state of the art nav, he’s in seventh heaven. It sounded wicked right out of the box as it was fitted the day before filming and Iceman hadn’t had a chance to do all the setting up, (it’s DSP city) so I can’t wait to hear it fully tweaked
In all honesty, I don’t think that Ian really knew quite how far to the high end that Kenwood went.
He does now.