ANOTHER "Scuderia Audio is Great" Thread (long)

I am not the first and I certainly won’t be the last to sing the praises of Scuderia Audio and Mike Niday…but I feel the need to add my voice to the chorus.


Where to start? I had seen posts about SA on this 360/430 forum for a while and at first thought it was a quaint enthusiast driven ‘artisanal’ enterprise. Indeed Mike is absolutely an enthusiast and artist, but also so much more.

When I got my current 430 spider in 2022, it had a crazy custom sound system install (from about 2013) that wasn’t working. Rather than trying to reverse-engineer and fix it, I decided to go back to Stock-Plus, the 'Plus' being Scuderia Audio upgrades. I reached out to Mike and he was super generous with his time and guidance.

I can be a bit anal with my questions and research. Mike was always patient and supportive. I ended up with his 430 door speakers (including his great carbon fiber tweeter pods) his Super AMP and his 430 Spider JL Audio subwoofer package.

Starting with the subwoofer, Mike's upholstery is oem perfect! I have black with white contrasting stitching and the leather work is indistinguishable from the rest of the interior.

The more I have seen about Mike’s work the more I see an over-the-top passionate engineer at work. The design iteration process, the build process and quality, and the obsession with the user experience. At twice the price, I don't think Mike could ever recoup his hours (years) of effort to make this stuff. This is clearly not a pure bottom-line driven enterprise, but a compulsive passion project. And not just passion for the product, but for our cars and our community. Any buyer of his stuff is a beneficiary of this. Even folks who don’t buy his stuff benefit just by Mike being a leader in an active, vibrant maintenance and upgrade culture for these cars that are now up to 25 years old. Nobody is making cool stuff like this for a 1999 Ford Taurus or 2000 Pontiac Aztec.

Next the Super Amp. Even after I bought it, I thought Mike simply bundled two little existing amps with a new molex connector. I was so wrong. Yes, the core amps are well respected Mosconi units, but the package is a totally bespoke design for 360/430 with a proprietary custom manufactured circuit board and features to allow it to be dialed in for a variety of owner needs. I didn’t really understand all that until just recently when I was contemplating installing the newly popular Power Acoustik single-DIN head unit. The Super Amp can accommodate a simple, direct plug-and-play approach, or an RCA line-in approach and then allow settings for multiple speaker configurations. All in all, the Super Amp is another work of art both in fit-and-finish and functionality.

And, even two years after my purchase, Mike is still just as generous with his time and guidance to help me set up my system. Where else do you get that kind of service??? Unheard of.

Finally a brief mention on the door speakers. All of the above design and quality comments apply. This is not simply a repackaging of really good 3rd party components (Audison or Focal) but again, a custom engineered package to turn off-the-shelf components into a tailored Brioni suit. The tweeter pods (especially in carbon fiber) are brilliant. High frequencies are very directional and the oem tweeter triangles do NOT point towards your ears. Mike’s do and they un-muddy the sound and create an actual sound stage in the car. The CF matches my oem carbon “drivers zone” perfectly and could (should!) have come from the factory.

I apologize that this post is so long, and embarrassingly gushing! I almost never write reviews. And never to this extent. But Mike and Scuderia Audio are a unicorn and we are lucky he is out there doing what he does. My score = 5 prancing horses

-mark (aks fossilfuel) in austin

 

No pics yet - still undoing PO’s system (a spaghetti dinner has nothing on this wiring). I’ll do before and after pics when she is wrapped up.


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