Who We Are.
Why We're Here.
Hello, my name is Nick Apicella. I am the owner/operator of ResoNix Sound Solutions and Apicella Auto Sound.
Apicella Auto Sound was my primary business where I specialized in high-end car audio installations but also handled automotive electronics, general custom automotive fabrication, PPF, and of course, automotive soundproofing. But, as of April 2023, I walked away to focus my efforts on ResoNix full time. Part of executing a high-end car audio system is the sound treatment that goes into the car, ensuring nothing rattles or resonates. To our clients, this is a big deal. No one wants to spend five, sometimes six figures, on a high-end, sound quality focused sound system just for the car to rattle and make funny noises while enjoying said sound system. These considerations mean that what products we use and how we use them is critical.
By the way, the name ResoNix comes from a play on the words and the idea of “nixing” resonance.
About the Owner of ResoNix Sound Solutions: Nick Apicella
Hey everyone! Many of you may already know me. For those that don’t, my name is Nick and I am the founder and owner of ResoNix Sound Solutions. A little about me, I am an audiophile that gets most of my sonic perfection addiction fix in the car. Starting back in 2010, right before graduating high school, I became obsessed with car audio after hearing one of my best friends new sound system. This obsession very quickly evolved into the specific niche of high-end sound quality focused car audio. Anything that had to do with making a car audio sound system sound great, I wanted to know it inside and out, and be able to do it myself. Anything from installation and fabrication techniques, speaker location pros and cons, acoustic measurement software and techniques, DSP Tuning, OEM integration, and you guessed it.. sound treatment.
This obsession grew to an insane level where it consumed my life. I worked at a shop in Manhattan on and off over a couple of years during this time. Eventually, in 2017, I started my own company, Apicella Auto Sound, working out of my parents driveway doing sound quality based sound systems for those that were familiar with me from internet forums and groups.
Soon enough, I had my own shop and was becoming well known around the world for what I did, and was serving clients and building their cars after being
shipped in from every corner of the US and everywhere in between.
Outside of car audio, I’m relatively simple. The only obsession that is more important to me than car audio is snowboarding, which I have been doing extensively since I was 6 years old back in the winter of 1998. As a kid I had dreams of being a professional snowboarder, but as my body started to not handle injuries well, I turned towards snowboarding videography and photography. In winters I worked for the local mountain as well as a short time Transworld Snowboard Magazine before their closure doing photo and video work. All of my photos are still shot on my trusty Sony A7Rii that I used for these jobs. The closure of Transworld Snowboard Magazine is actually what solidified my decision into going all in into the car audio industry and getting my own shop. Between snowboarding and car audio and operating ResoNix, you can most likely find me hanging out at home with my two sphynx cats, Gustavo and Peter, or occasionally blowing dust off the Xbox (now PC) playing Halo 3.
Where did ResoNix Sound Solutions come from?
Before ResoNix Sound Solutions, we were installing a particular brand independently tested as the best CLD available (Sound Deadener Showdown) for the projects done at Apicella Auto Sound. One day, early in February 2019, the owner emailed me after I placed an order to let me know that he was retiring and that his products would no longer be available. Frankly, this worried me since it was known that nothing else on the market could come close to the performance of their product. We even attempted to purchase the brand from him to keep it alive, but we had no luck as he did not want to sell it. After trying a few other products that also independently tested relatively well, we realized nothing was coming close to the performance of this previous product we were accustomed to.
Eventually, I thought to myself, “Screw it. I’m resourceful, and I’m knowledgeable on these products and automotive sound treatment as a whole. I’ll just make my own to supply the shop with the high-quality product we need”, and here we are. Being well-educated on how these products worked and why they worked gave me confidence going into this. I set out to find manufacturers that could make high-quality products of various types to our specifications, which was much more difficult than I could have imagined. It took six weeks of 1700+ phone calls, countless emails and texts, and testing various samples before realizing that this might not pan out how I had thought.
Not only did it become evident that finding manufacturers to partner with that could fully meet our criteria and standards would be seemingly impossible, but I also never imagined that the actual manufacturers themselves would push the same blatant lies, false marketing, and typical salesmanship that almost every other customer-facing sound deadening brand pushes. I was ready to give up, but I finally got ahold of someone at one last manufacturer. They were surprisingly the first to say, “hmmm, we’re not sure if we can make something that performs better than the product you currently use. Send us a sample of your reference product and let us see what we can do”. That stuck with me. No lies or promises right out of the gate, just factual information based on how the products work and what can be made based on our requirements, which is precisely how we do things here.
A couple of weeks later, a box of samples showed up. To this day, the same ResoNix CLD Squares you can buy on our website today were included in that sample box. After going through our own in-house testing to verify that it was up to our standards, we realized it was not only matching in performance, but was much better than we could have hoped for, and we are still proud of its performance to this day. There was only one problem. Minimum order quantities were still too high to make sense for a single small-scale shop to use on its own, which is why the ResoNix online shop was born. So others would be able to purchase it and help it make sense for us.
Now that the hard part of finding and making a high-performance CLD was done, we needed to figure out products that support it in the quest to have the quietest vehicles on the road. We needed to find the ideal decoupling foam and a supplier for a Mass Loaded Vinyl noise barrier. When looking for MLV, we very quickly realized that there was no winning and having the best product for the best price. This is because nothing is redeeming about MLV besides its weight; at that point, it just comes down to its cost and shipping cost. We were not going to beat Amazon, so we tabled that idea until we came up with our current ResoNix Barrier much later. For the foam, I started researching different types of closed-cell foams and what to look for in a specification sheet that would fit our needs. Soon enough, Butyl Rope was added to our list, and so on.
At the end of our startup chaos, we ended up with a limited selection of great options that outperformed, and still outperform, the rest of the products available today. Now, only a few short years later, we have a wide array of products that cover the most extensive and high-performing selection of automotive sound treatment products available today.
Not only do we specialize in offering high-quality sound treatment products, but we also offer Remote DSP Tuning Services, and we distribute two lines of high-end car audio products within North America: Accuton Automotive, and Micro Precision.
