The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
kottke.org
kottke.org
Most competitors just buy a lot of batteries, amps and drivers and call it a day. However being a broke high school student I had to figure out how to win on a budget, so I went deep on the physics. If you go deep enough you start to really get into interesting work on the physics of acoustics and harmonics.
One of the things I learned about was the testing and sound suppression work that went into the Saturn V. A genius acoustical engineer named John Hilliard [1] was a main driving force for designing the systems that would protect the Saturn V from it's own reflected sound waves. Not only that but also creating long range signaling systems for the US Military.
In order to do the testing he needed to do, he had to build a driver that could simulate the SPL of the Saturn V. That meant figuring out a way to go past the 183 dB limit for sine wave in normal atmospheric conditions. You can't actually do that with the standard inductive-coil driver, because the wave becomes "clipped" and effectively turns into a square wave, which will cause the induction coil to burn up very quickly. So they needed to create a new driver that was based on air passage.
Anyway, fascinating engineering work. Unfortunately it wasn't anything I could use in my car but I learned a lot about sound.
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> One of the things I learned about was the testing and sound suppression work that went into the Saturn V
I must admit, I first thought you were talking about “A different kind of company. A different kind of car.” Saturn[0], and not this one[1].
The trick is to try and couple all of it, so that there is a resonant point in the environment which matches the resonant point of the Enclosure and the enclosure matches the FS of the driver. If you line up all of these then you can get the whole world to shake on a tiny amount of power.
It's possible that the Kenwood driver just accidentally did that for someone's house and it all lined up. There were tons of old wives tales like this.
Wattage is misleading too. If all your frequencies are dorked up and you have standing waves and cancelling waves all over the place, then you have a sonically chaotic environment no matter what the power you are pumping is.
Quite a peculiar experience!
I can do a deep voice, and I've found I can resonate in a small room like a toilet or bathroom.
I don't make a habit of trying though, haha.
0) https://www.google.com/search?q=an-ten-nae+warning&ie=utf-8&...
On a more serious note, I did see a band once that I later found out were infamous for their loud gigs. While most in the audience had gone prepared with earplugs, I had none, and for their "finale" (which incidentally didn't feature the band actually on stage presumably because it had become too loud even for them) I had to go outside of the main room and keep my hands over my ears. Even now I sometimes worry that night might have permanently damaged my hearing. The stupid things some people do when they are younger.
My hearing is actually OK, because at some point, I decided to start using hearing protection (and still do now when I roadie for my son's metal band), but the tinnitus I think could have easily been averted by just not exposing myself to those sorts of volumes at close range when I was young. The damage is permanent and not worth the few seconds of 'coolness' to stand at the front of the stage at a hideously loud live gig.
(NB: My best friend at high school was deaf, and a favourite party trick of his at concerts was to turn his hearing aids off, then stick his head into the cone of any exposed speakers at the front/side of the stage for a minute, then back off and watch other kids come up and try it. In hindsight, that probably permanently damaged the hearing of MANY foolish kids who tried it out of peer pressure or wanting to outdo him, and not something to be proud of upon retrospection.)
Anyway they would set up these massive speakers and absolutely blast the music. There was one guy who would occasionally show up, tripping hard on god knows what, and dance with his head pretty much buried in the cone of an 18" driver. I mean like non-stop for 5 or so hours.
As we got to know more of the regulars we learned that he was deaf, and by doing that he could feel the music and all it's intricacies running through his body. Always made me smile after learning that. Never got to meet him though, because he was always, well, way off in space so to speak.
Have some (very light) permanent hearing loss and tinnitus from that night and I completely regret it. I'm just grateful it didn't do even more damage
Looks like they have a pretty broad "danger area".
On the one hand, you have a shockwave of pressure differential travelling out from a central point of release, and on the other you have sustained stimulation due to a high-volume controlled dump of potential energy.
That the consistent oscillations of the Saturn V can melt concrete and set fire to grass at a distance by disturbing the air and conveying thermal energy through kinetic collisions alone doesn't really seem like a useful correlation to an impulse event that reverberates across the entire atmosphere.
If I had my druthers, though, I'd wager that the gravity waves of a supermassive black hole merger, as detected by LIGO, would likely make for a better analogue to the Krakatoa event.
The Saturn V engines are loud, but the nature of the concept is probably better modeled by the fact that you can boil water with a high-end kitchen blender or similar food processing appliance.
> But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.