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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."
"Protect those nearby"?? Isn't the whole point of these things to annoy the hell out everyone in a 10 mile radius?
I choose to fight back with an EMP :P
do you need to win a dB drag race?
Those guy's don't stand a chance against my overclocked athlon, that thing sounds like a jet engine, and I mean it, it can even hum tunes if you adjust the fans real fast or with an automatic controller. Promise ;).
http://funstuff.digital-bless.com/
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...
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.
Who all looked at the subject and thought, "Gee, I wonder how postgresql does against Oracle?"
OK, and who all thought, "How do you get a db into a dress??"
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
dB drag racing
Boy, did I ever read that wrong:
"Aaaaand they're off!! It's DB2 in the lead with Oracle11i gaining on its heels and SQL Server a few furlongs back..."`
The coolest voice ever.
I have permanent hearing loss in my left ear due to a dual 500w Urban amp setup (yeah, cheap, but I was in HS at the time) with two Dr. Crankenstein subs.
It's really not funny.
Dodge Caravan represent!
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:
Go to www.4hv.org, go to the buy and sell thread, and ask someone if they will sell you a HERF unit, and tell them what you need it for.
From the article: "every 10 dB increase equivalent to a doubling of perceived sound."
In high school physics, I was taught that an increase of 3dB doubles the intensity/amplitude of the sound. My teacher concluded that +3dB would mean you hear a sound twice as loud. Then he went on to explain that P (power) is directly proportional to 1/d (the inverse of the distance squared).
I know that the Richter scale works on the idea that an earthquake of 6 on the Richter scale is double the strength of one of 5 on the Richter scale.
But have I been mislead? Is "perceived sound" different from amplitude/intensity? Did I really get staight 'A's in pyhsics?
Mike
Tux, myself and my lady regularly engage in 3somes - over the home network.
The technical term is "the brown noise". :-)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
The sound control works on a mixture of sheer volume and psychological effects; strictly speaking it's not a directly physical effect.
I really don't care to think of what would happen if a persons resonant frequency was "accidentally" broadcast.
Only in Star Trek does everything have a resonant frequency. "People" do not have resonant frequencies; we are too soft and too squishy. In order to have a resonant frequency there must be some kind of resonance, which arises because the waves (whatever they are) are sharply and cleanly reflected, and can reinforce each other. When they are mushed up, they cease to resonate and you get more normal, mundane effects.
Certain parts of the body, mostly bone, can have a resonant frequency, but everybody's will be different. In fact, if you try, you can probably locate your jawbone's resonant frequency. Every once in a long while (on the order of once every couple of years), something will manage to hit one of my bone's resonant frequencies loud enough to be very unpleasent, generally construction equipment. Even so, my bones didn't crumble for various reasons, including the fact that even bones don't have very good resonant frequencies, and it's embedded in a soft goo.
So you can't simply broadcast some magical noise and watch the crowd dissolve. Of course you could kill them with pure power; an explosion's concussion can do that. But that isn't really "sound" in the traditional sense (no real periodicity, just one burst, maybe two or three significant oscillations (for nuclear-sized blasts), and that's it; the essense of "sound" is the wave nature).
Star Trek really promotes some bad science here; really strong resonance, strong enough to hurt things, is not an every-day, everywhere-you-look phenomenon. Simple observation will confirm this fact; despite the wide variety of noise in the modern world, things conspicuously fail to blow themselves to smithereens because something was hit by its resonant frequency. It's the exception rather then the rule. You need a very regular structure that's also very hard, which doesn't happen much in nature. The reason we see any significant effects at all arises from our tendency to build regular and hard structures, like Tacoma Narrows or your shower (a rectangle box lines with tiles? Show me something like that in nature!).
A similar answer to this message's grandparent: You can pulverize some things with sound, but mostly just hard things. The technology is pretty simple and if it's easy or useful, it's already being used in industry somewhere for something. You don't sound used as a pulverizing weapon because it's useless for that purpose. Generally, if you're trying to pulverize something it's easier to just hit it (not being sarcastic), but I've seen some exceptions (and even that is just "loosening" things with sound, it's sound plus "conventional" pressure and some rotation that all comes together to do the drilling).
Wait a second... Is this the same slashdot that got so pissed off when the sentator from Utah thought it would be a good idea to destroy file traders computers?