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dB Drag Racing
Exedore writes "For a paltry $80,000 outlay, you too can fight back against the punk kids blasting gangsta rap from their Honda Civics. Enter the strange (and rather loud) world of dB Drag Racing and join a small group of dedicated competitors in their quest for the loudest car sound system possible. The numbers: 130,000 watts output, 177dB, 10,000 lbs. of equipment (including the vehicle and all the sound insulation needed to protect those nearby). It might not be quite up to Disaster Area standards, but it's not far off."
Nah... I'd prefer a Herf Gun
Capable of "stalling cars at a distance"...
perfect
These guys have to be starting to bump into limiting returns... the maximmum possible dB in free air is 194 IIRC. I wonder if it would be legal to pressurize the vehicle to achieve higher max dB's...
Why doesn't someone build/sell a small EMP weapons? You know, enough to reboot anything electronic CD player/radio within 20 feet?
Hell, i'd camp out at the store the night before to buy one of those.
Bowie J. Poag
I still have my stereo in my car from the 80's when I did the SPL scene...
I absolutely love having some wannabe pull up with his sky-hook wing and blasting ICP and trying to look cool... when I look at them, put in ear plugs and Blast them hard with either whiney country or something else that they would find horribly obnoxious... (Pointer sisters works great!)
I produce a tiny 112DbI but then I have only 1000 watts in 11 year old amps and rockford fosgate speakers in that convertable... but I completely drown out the stereo they are listening to in their car.
you CANT beat a custom 7th order isobarik subwoofer box.... the off the shelf junk is just that.... 100% junk.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've always wanted to see if one of those boomboxes on wheels would shake itself to bits if it were to play the right frequency of infrasound.
Jimmy Cauty aka Rockman Rock of the techno act The KLF allegedly had an interesting mobile sound system, courtesy of the British Army. From the KLF FAQ:
... [Cauty] first tested it at a Wire gig on Hungerford Bridge in May. ... ... A fax from Mr. Smith, the Head Of Commercial Exploitation at Advanced Acoustic Armaments, was sent to The Maker. It read : "The test took place to establish the parameters of the new vehicle solo and in tandem with its sister model, SS 9000K+L. The test featured new software generated for our latest commercial client, EXP LTD, and is described by Mr. Cauty as featuring 'the ultimate battle between sound and commerce ending in the death of all musicians and their ascension to rock-n-roll heaven or hell as befits them.' Yesterday we received communication with ex-Government employees who, in the Sixties, worked on audio weapon development with an offer of help and some ex-classified equipment. We regret any such death or damage that has resulted from our tests, but there are casualties in every war. The Triple A Formation Attack Ensemble will perform 'Foghorns Of The Northern Hemisphere' as part of an educational programmed supporting our research shortly."
Q: What's Jimmy's sonic weapon?
A: Jimmy purchased two Saracen armoured vehicles at a scrap yard for ukp 4,000 and found equipment in them which he thought could have been used for sonic warfare. He has tried to assemble the acoustic gun from information he found on the Internet. Installing huge amplifiers and special speakers to cope with the very low frequencies cost him tens of thousands of pounds.
The 25,000-watt sonic gun can project sound for around 7 miles, and Jimmy annoyed his Devon neighbours by testing it on Midsummer's Day, 1996. Jimmy said: "I moved to Devon six months ago for a bit of a rest and this is a project I am taking an interest in. I do not see it as music or art." He said that he aimed the gun away from homes and it seemed to have no effect on sheep.
The Melody Maker said: "He was testing his two Audio Weapon Systems in a field near his new home. 'He alerted people to the fact that he was doing this by setting off some military flares. Then he
tested his Audio Weapons System for an hour for a very select group of scientists and friends. The Audio Weapons System is not designed to kill people."
In January, Panasonic [ the "Finnish conceptual techno nutters"-NME] borrowed one of the Audio Weapons Systems for tests on how sonic waves affect the human body at Brick Lane in London.
Most of this is probably scam, but Cauty has recorded an album of sonic waves for Paul Smith's Blast First label under the name AAA. The album is in the hands of lawyers who are trying to clear some of the samples used on it, and has yet to be released (07/96). It appears to be a Cauty solo project.
More recently, Jimmy teamed up with new Asian-techno group, Black Star Liner for a _happening_ in a field on Dartmoor. Jimmy chartered a 'chopper to take BSL and assorted journos out to Dartmoor, where he intended to remix the Halaal Rock track in his tank. Apparently, BSL bumped into Cauty on London's South Bank, while he was driving about in his tank, he got hold of their album, and said that he wanted to work with them. Anyway, the chopper was grounded by severe fog, so everyone was put on a convey of buses. All the journos were given _orange_ jackets to wear. They eventually arrived at a field full of military vehicles, and people in _yellow_ jackets, wearing goggles and ears protectors, doing some form of formation dancing. The journos were lead to the ir seats, and had large floodlights shone into their eyes, while the yellow jackets let of flares all around them.
There were a load of goats skulls on sticks around the field, and a whole pile of fireworks let of towards the end of the mix, when Cauty was mixing in some Jimi Hendrix. However, this d
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Wired Magazine did an entertaining story about this a couple of years ago. My favorite part was the description of riding around West Palm Beach with one of the guys, setting off car alarms with sound pulses:
Summernats Sound Off Entrant
The interesting thing is here that he has his windscreen strapped on, due to the extreme volume shifting the air in the cabin enough to dislodge it.
What were the skies like when you were young?
Well. Seems in the absence of big v-8's tearing up the streets, it's sound competition which has taken the place of "who's got the biggest prick contest" I picked up, what I thought was a modest used Orion amplifier, only to find it's some kind of competition amp, capable of driving some serious bass. Maybe I'll get around to putting it into the car, but between 1 farad caps, heavy guage wiring, fibreglass panels and absurdly huge bass drivers, I've finally got a clear picture of what people are putting into these Civics.
I'm just glad I survived my youth with most of my hearing still intact.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If I'm not mistaken, the US Army has developed a method of using sound for crowd control.
I really don't care to think of what would happen if a persons resonant frequency was "accidentally" broadcast.
As for the radar, back when I was in the navy, we used to light up our master chief's vw bug as it came down the road.... sputter...sputter...sputter...
I'm grateful that we had a rather limited radar capability, (ssbn), so as to not actually HURT the man.
I've actually been to one of these dB drag races, and I must say, it was rather disappointing. I sat around for a few minutes, and all I got was low end bass. Barely audible, and extremely boring. Something I wouldn't purposely go watch again.
-Boo
'Give me one more medicated peaceful moment'
Even worse, whenever a kid shows up for the medical wearing a walkman, he is automatically rejected...
You think I'm kidding??
I'm dead serious.
Here's two of the units in reserve.
And notice, the cases left at the curb after I stripped two of the
microwaves are in the foreground picture of the kids that I'm gonna HERF.
And even better, a few days after I took those pictures, THOSE KIDS threw away
a working microwave. I walk across the street after dark and grabbed it from the curb.
It worked too. They just bought a newer model I guess but now I get to HERF them with their own microwave!!!!
Bwhahahahaha!!
The problem with this is that a square wave has harmonic frequency content outside the response range of the driver. You'd get 50hz, 100hz, 150hz, and so on, and the first 10 harmonics are very significant- even more at these power levels.
One thing you could do is have the relay drive a pi-L network with the drivers as the series-L's in the circuit. You could tune the caps so that the resonant frequency of the network falls at the natural frequency of the driver and to match the load impedance (short) to the amplifier output impedance. That would give you some serious current through the drivers.
...that is, Alma Gates, sixty something year old owner of the infamous "Beast" and two time world champion. She's also a friend of mine, and an honored member of teamROCS.
She ain't no punk either. One reason she got into car audio was to "get even", but then she found she loved the competition, the friendships, and the enthusiasm of thousands of young adults. That's when she formed Team Gates. She has been featured not only in Car Audio and Electronics, but has been featured in Wired (10/2000, pg 260), and named in nearly every major media outlet (Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Times, MSNBC, TechTV). Hell, she's even been on ESPN2! Let's see Lawrence Lessig or Linus Torvalds get that kind of coverage!
The following article describes using sound as a lethal weapon in the form of an invention by Norris called "Hypersonic sound".
(This has been discussed on slashdot before, twice.)
Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times article: "It gives you the equivalent of an intense migraine headache," said Elwood G. Norris, the company's chairman and inventor of the device. "It's just totally disabling."
Decibles are a measure of the perceived loudness of a sound. The way to convert from decibels to Watts/square meter is to use the following formula: dB = 10*log(Intensity/threshold of hearing) where the threshold of hearing is 1e-12 W/m^2 0 decibels is the threshold of hearing. 120 decibles is known as the threshold of pain. In short, decibels are the way of expressing the wide range of loudness that human hearing can pick up, while the intensity level (measured in W/m^2) is a measure of the amount of energy in the sound wave. And yes, for an increase of 10 decibels (or every bell), the intensity doubles.
A better solution:
Invoke the DMCA. No, Seriously. Playing music that loud is obviously a circumvention measure that allows "theft" by people who would not have otherwise heard the song.