Emran Alborno of Car Tunes Atlanta: From Sweeping Floors to Escort's Biggest Dealer

Car Tunes Atlanta has been installing car audio in Atlanta since 1978. It started with eight-track players. Today it’s the largest Escort radar and laser dealer in the world, a Brabus dealer, and the shop Throttlecast host Grant Brewer has sent his Lamborghinis and Porsches to for years. Emran Alborno started there in 2005 sweeping floors. Now he co-owns it.

Grant and Dave Codrea sat down with Emran at The Ride Lounge in Peachtree Corners. They covered how a small stereo shop lasted nearly 50 years, why big builds get expensive, and the 911 he drove in on.

How Car Tunes Atlanta started with eight-tracks

The founder was an accountant who was bored with his corporate job. One of his clients sold eight-track players and needed an installer, and he figured he could do that. In 1978 he opened a shop on Roswell Road with a partner and a couple of installers. They sold eight-tracks and speakers and did expediter work for car dealers, installing systems in dealer inventory. The shop later moved a short way south, near Roswell Road and I-285. The founder still remembers how heavy those eight-tracks were.

The business changed with the technology. Before Emran arrived, car phones were its bread and butter for years. Car Tunes was one of the bigger mobile phone dealers in Atlanta, installing boxes that weighed about 50 pounds. When handheld phones took over, that business went away. When Emran started, Bluetooth was the install everyone wanted. Now it’s CarPlay.

The hard years were Y2K and 2008. Car Tunes sells a want, not a need, so that’s always the last dollar a customer spends.

From sweeping floors to owner

Emran graduated from high school on May 5, 2005, and started at Car Tunes on May 15. His dad knew the man who is now Emran’s business partner and asked if there was any work for his son. There was: sweeping floors, and driving customers’ cars around as the valet.

The shop still wrote invoices by hand. Emran knew computers, so he helped move it to a point-of-sale system, email, and a website. In 2006, while at Kennesaw State, he set up the shop’s first Facebook page, back when a page still needed a first and last name. He moved into management around 2010 and became an owner in 2015. He still runs most of the store’s operations.

The team is 25 people, and many have been there more than 10 years. Emran runs it hands off. Nobody gets yelled at, and a mistake isn’t the end of the world. “At the end of the day, they’re just cars,” he says. “They can be fixed.” When a tech breaks something, the shop tells the customer, pays for it, fixes it, and puts them in a rental if needed.

Escort’s largest dealer in the world

Radar and laser protection is the core of the business today. Car Tunes carries Escort and a few other brands. A relationship with a finance director at the Hennessy dealer group opened up that entire dealership network, and volume took off. Car Tunes was already one of Escort’s top two dealers. Now, Emran says, it’s the largest in the world. The next-closest group owns 40 stores and does half the business Car Tunes does from one location. The record is about 80 systems in a month.

Every car is different. A Ford dealer knows Fords. Car Tunes has to know Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, and everything else. Dealership technicians still call the shop to ask how to take apart a panel that isn’t in the book. Plug-and-play installs, Emran says, are really plug and pray.

His case for a detector isn’t about speeding on purpose. It’s the moment you’re on the phone, a little distracted, in a car where 100 feels like 70. One customer called to complain that his detector never went off. Mid-call it started alerting, and he realized he was doing 105 on GA 400. He didn’t get pulled over, and he became a believer.

The $60,000 Alpine F1 Status build

In 2021, Alpine relaunched its F1 Status line and planned 25 systems for the world. Car Tunes flew to Las Vegas to see it. The package was $60,000 before installation: eight speakers, two subwoofers, a DSP, and a special receiver, delivered with an unboxing ceremony. A Car Tunes client heard about it and committed on the spot.

It went into a BMW M8. Alpine sent people from Japan to help tune it, and the team rebuilt the doors, front, and rear of the car. It also got an Akrapovič exhaust, stealth PPF, and a carbon hood. Emran says only three shops in the country did F1 Status builds. The goal wasn’t volume. It was to feel like you’re sitting in a concert.

It also shows how big builds grow. A job starts as four speakers and an amplifier and ends at $90,000 to $100,000, with every door and panel reworked. “The power of addition still works in car audio,” he says.

Brabus runs in the family

Car Tunes is a Brabus dealer, and that comes through Emran’s family. His father helped launch Brabus in the United States and is president of Brabus USA, based in Newport Beach, California. Car Tunes has built a Brabus C63 600 and E63 700, several G700s, and a couple of G800s.

On his last Brabus factory tour, he saw what the company calls a level six hurricane simulator: 180 mph wind and rain from every angle. Almost every car goes through it after modification to check for leaks. Car Tunes has one of Brabus’s new all-carbon shooting brakes coming to Atlanta. It starts life as an AMG SL 63. Everything goes except the headlights.

Emran’s 911 Targa 4 GTS

He drove in on a 2026 Porsche 911 Targa 4 GTS with the new 3.6-liter T-Hybrid. He was unsure about a hybrid 911 until he drove it. The electrically driven turbo, he says, makes 10 psi at 500 rpm, with virtually no lag. “Porsche is not a car company first,” he says. “They’re an engineering company first.”

The car wears GT3 side skirts, custom three-piece wheels, and his own Escort radar and laser package. Inside is a Focal system built specifically for the 911 in a numbered run of 911 units. A Soul Performance downpipe and charge pipe give it a blow-off valve sound, and Car Tunes is becoming one of the largest Soul Performance dealers in the Southeast.

On a car like this, a sound system runs $6,000 to $20,000, from mild to wild. His comparison: Porsche’s optional matrix LED headlights cost about $7,000 and barely light the road any better. A real sound system is night and day.

What’s next for car audio in Atlanta

Emran doesn’t expect radar and laser protection to ever come from the factory, so that business isn’t going anywhere. Better sound won’t either. If regulations ever try to cap how loud a system can play, he’s against it. He’d rather tune a system to the owner than let an engineer decide how it should sound.

He plans to stay at one location. More stores would mean less quality control, and he thinks the job would get more corporate and less fun.

Rapid fire

• Best factory audio system: the Mercedes S63 with Burmester, bass shakers in the seats included.
• Favorite Porsche generation: 993.
• Most complicated car he’s worked on: an Aston Martin Zagato.
• One upgrade every enthusiast should consider: radar and laser protection.
• Dream three-car garage: a Mercedes 190E Cosworth, a 993 Turbo (ideally a RUF CTR2), and a car that doesn’t exist yet, a 911 Turbo S Targa.

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Emran Alborno is above and on YouTube. Part two is a walk through the shop itself: the Car Tunes Atlanta shop tour. Find the shop at Car Tunes Atlanta.

Throttlecast is recorded at The Ride Lounge, a private car club with climate-controlled car storage in Peachtree Corners and Midtown Atlanta. Members keep their cars in monitored bays with battery tenders, ready for the next drive or the next build. Schedule a private tour.