prochobo
10+ year member
Sedan Sleeper
It's definitely not a marijuana leaf.
The King of Bass Makes Forbes Magazine!
- Thread starter Incriminator
- Live activity
- Replies 29
- Views 2K
prochobo
TeamPSI
10+ year member
Super Pimp VIP Member
post the article ***
snoopdan
5,000+ posts
Banned
joe's gonna get jellous //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/laugh.gif.48439b2acf2cfca21620f01e7f77d1e4.gif
docutech
10+ year member
NC Native
but missin' a pimp cup!
Tempe
10+ year member
FI Car Audio FTW!!!
http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0521/065.html
//content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/confused.gif.e820e0216602db4765798ac39d28caa9.gif
TeamPSI
10+ year member
Super Pimp VIP Member
**** all that
Platestacker45
10+ year member
941
I diden't know he was black! damnit... I don't like him anymore now...... J/P //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/biggrin.gif.d71a5d36fcbab170f2364c9f2e3946cb.gif
Tempe
10+ year member
FI Car Audio FTW!!!
grassroots
10+ year member
needs car audio rehab
^
i'm guessing having to sign up to view? i said **** all that when i clicked the link too....
i'm guessing having to sign up to view? i said **** all that when i clicked the link too....
Tempe
10+ year member
FI Car Audio FTW!!!
I didn't sign up for shyte. I just googled the following phrase and clicked on the first link: "extreme sports meets engineering"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technology
Royal Boom
Emily Lambert 05.21.07
pic
Tommy (The King) McKinnie is on his 35th windshield.
pic
What Would Meg Do?
Best Bosses for the Buck
Great While Nobody's Watching
Wall Street's Highest Earners
Complete Contents
Related Quotes
BBY 46.90 + 0.43
CC 16.01 - 0.01
Extreme sports meets engineering in a contest known as dB Drag. Bring earplugs.
It was 80 degrees with blue skies in Daytona Beach, Fla., on a beautiful March day. A crowd of young men from as far away as Arizona, Puerto Rico and Canada had chosen to gather in a municipal parking lot with their wives, girlfriends, coolers, deck chairs and car stereos--very big car stereos.
The group gathered to watch Steve Cook drive his Chevrolet Astro van up to a judging platform with colored lights and electronic reader boards. He stepped out and, when he was given the go signal, he turned on the stereo by remote. Brraaaap! went the van, which shook and rattled. Its windshield flexed. And then the reader board flashed 170.1, Cook's score in decibels. The 40 or so spectators whooped and took pictures. Cook beamed at his wife. He'd captured his fourteenth world record.
Cook is one of the best in the nation at dB Drag racing, as this pursuit is called. DB Dragsters try to build the world's loudest car stereos. Contestants tear apart and restuff their vehicles with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of amps, batteries and subwoofers that can produce a sound wave forceful enough to crumple your lungs. The noise is so loud that it can only be measured using instruments inside a sealed vehicle .
Last November Scott Owens of Gilbert, Ariz. set a world record (Extreme class) of 179.6 decibels inside his Ford F-250. A Saturn rocket's blastoff is roughly 180 decibels, if you stand 100 feet away (which is not a good idea).
Jared Crozier, 28, who didn't even bring his dB Drag car, drove 17 hours nonstop from Indiana to Daytona with his mother and younger brother to mingle with the sport's stars. "I started off just trying to be the cool guy in high school," Crozier explained. "Before you know it, you've got $30,000 worth of equipment tied up in a vehicle you're scared to take anywhere."
Thomas (The King) McKinnie, whose 1995 Isuzu pickup has 72 speakers and 16 amplifiers, was another champion holding court at Daytona. He tired of dB Drag and switched to a newer event called Bass Race, in which some competitors sit in their vehicles without earplugs and blast music at up to 160 decibels for 30 seconds. He's on his 35th windshield in three years.
The P.T. Barnum of dB Drag is Wayne Harris, an entrepreneur who also sells the decibel meters used in competitions. Since trademarking the sport's name in 1998, he has produced 7,500 shows in 40 countries, including Bosnia and Brazil. He and his wife run the company with ten promoters in the U.S. and 39 global franchises. He says his businesses gross $1 million a year.
Audio equipment firms such as Pioneer and JBL annually spend $5 million or so sponsoring competitors and events. XM Satellite Radio paid $250,000 two years ago to sponsor a tour. Best Buy (nyse: BBY - news - people ) and Circuit City (nyse: CC - news - people ) have signed up to host shows. Maxxsonics, a $40 million (sales) vendor of amplifiers and speakers, spends $250,000 a year on a dB Drag team. One teammate tattooed a Maxxsonics amp on his arm.
DB Drag would be more fun for the business folks if their business was the way it used to be. Annual wholesale revenue of aftermarket audio gear, the kind installed by the car buyer, has been stuck at $2 billion for two years and is off its 2004 peak of $2.3 billion. Sales have been crimped by Ebay sellers and carmakers themselves, which are putting in better stereos at the factory. (A few audio companies make money that way but at lower margins.) Audio equipment company Kicker this year reduced its budget for its dB Drag team. Rockford eliminated its team two years ago.
But industry engineers will continue to make the pilgrimage to dB Drag events because they are to car audio what Nascar is to Detroit: fertile ground for new product ideas developed by obsessive customers in pursuit of perfection.
Thanks in part to ideas born at dB Drag events, the acoustic power of car stereo speakers has increased tenfold in the last ten years, from a maximum of 500 watts per square meter to 5,000. (A loudspeaker at a rock concert puts out 2,500 to 3,000 watts.) Pioneer learned from dB Dragsters to cover speaker coils with ceramics to dissipate heat. Pioneer also uses material interlaced with carbon fibers to make speakers lighter and stronger.
Two years ago dragster Scottie R. Johnson cut open a 12-volt dry-cell battery and crammed in two more cells in an attempt to get another 4 volts. After word got around of Johnson's stunt he was hired by Powermaster, which put him in charge of its new battery line. In Daytona, when a contestant broke a windshield and melted a speaker coil in the lanes, his sponsor, T3 Audio founder Johnathan Demuth, wondered if next time around he should inject nitrous oxide to cool the speaker. Back to the lab they went.
A nice factory-installed car audio system can produce 115 decibels. Adding 50 or 60 decibels to that is an engineering challenge that grows exponentially harder as the decibels rise. Decibels come on a logarithmic scale; every ten-point increase in decibels equals a tenfold increase in power. Not only do dragsters puzzle over how to pack in more juice and speakers, they have to eliminate leaks and vibrations. Extreme dragsters fill door jambs with concrete, use bulletproof glass and bolt doors shut.
Steve Cook tackled the problem by stripping a 1990 Chevy Astro van and reinforcing it with more steel. He installed 60 16-volt batteries in their own steel cage. That voltage feeds 32 amps, each spitting out 4,000 watts of electricity. Those watts power eight subwoofers housed in a five-sided concrete box. The sound wave they create, at a low 79 hertz, travels around the concrete box and gets concentrated toward a sensor on the windshield.
If it all sounds too technical and a bit unfun, join the camp behind Paul Papadeas, who owns the rival International Auto Sound Challenge Association. "The science of sound is diminishing the effectiveness of our marketing," he says, as he cruises the Daytona event on a golf cart.
Papadeas is pushing new types of events to broaden the sport's appeal. In one, judges evaluate how close a stereo comes to sounding like a live performance. Another one, called Bass Boxing, has competitors play music, with cheering fans helping to decide whose car should win. DB Drag's Wayne Harris countered with Bass Race two years ago.
Washington University audiologist William W. Clark was horrified when he heard from a reporter how Bass Racers sit in their cars, ears unprotected. Sound more than 140 decibels, he warns, can permanently damage hearing after one exposure. Papadeas and Harris both suffer from a constant ringing in their ears. Harris blames shooting ranges, Papadeas blames being in a rock band.
Ear health means little to those chasing the magic number: 194 decibels, thought to be a threshold beyond which stereos might explode. "Fortunately they're not there yet!" e-mails a sarcastic Dr. Clark. "Only 15 more to go!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technology
Royal Boom
Emily Lambert 05.21.07
pic
Tommy (The King) McKinnie is on his 35th windshield.
pic
What Would Meg Do?
Best Bosses for the Buck
Great While Nobody's Watching
Wall Street's Highest Earners
Complete Contents
Related Quotes
BBY 46.90 + 0.43
CC 16.01 - 0.01
Extreme sports meets engineering in a contest known as dB Drag. Bring earplugs.
It was 80 degrees with blue skies in Daytona Beach, Fla., on a beautiful March day. A crowd of young men from as far away as Arizona, Puerto Rico and Canada had chosen to gather in a municipal parking lot with their wives, girlfriends, coolers, deck chairs and car stereos--very big car stereos.
The group gathered to watch Steve Cook drive his Chevrolet Astro van up to a judging platform with colored lights and electronic reader boards. He stepped out and, when he was given the go signal, he turned on the stereo by remote. Brraaaap! went the van, which shook and rattled. Its windshield flexed. And then the reader board flashed 170.1, Cook's score in decibels. The 40 or so spectators whooped and took pictures. Cook beamed at his wife. He'd captured his fourteenth world record.
Cook is one of the best in the nation at dB Drag racing, as this pursuit is called. DB Dragsters try to build the world's loudest car stereos. Contestants tear apart and restuff their vehicles with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of amps, batteries and subwoofers that can produce a sound wave forceful enough to crumple your lungs. The noise is so loud that it can only be measured using instruments inside a sealed vehicle .
Last November Scott Owens of Gilbert, Ariz. set a world record (Extreme class) of 179.6 decibels inside his Ford F-250. A Saturn rocket's blastoff is roughly 180 decibels, if you stand 100 feet away (which is not a good idea).
Jared Crozier, 28, who didn't even bring his dB Drag car, drove 17 hours nonstop from Indiana to Daytona with his mother and younger brother to mingle with the sport's stars. "I started off just trying to be the cool guy in high school," Crozier explained. "Before you know it, you've got $30,000 worth of equipment tied up in a vehicle you're scared to take anywhere."
Thomas (The King) McKinnie, whose 1995 Isuzu pickup has 72 speakers and 16 amplifiers, was another champion holding court at Daytona. He tired of dB Drag and switched to a newer event called Bass Race, in which some competitors sit in their vehicles without earplugs and blast music at up to 160 decibels for 30 seconds. He's on his 35th windshield in three years.
The P.T. Barnum of dB Drag is Wayne Harris, an entrepreneur who also sells the decibel meters used in competitions. Since trademarking the sport's name in 1998, he has produced 7,500 shows in 40 countries, including Bosnia and Brazil. He and his wife run the company with ten promoters in the U.S. and 39 global franchises. He says his businesses gross $1 million a year.
Audio equipment firms such as Pioneer and JBL annually spend $5 million or so sponsoring competitors and events. XM Satellite Radio paid $250,000 two years ago to sponsor a tour. Best Buy (nyse: BBY - news - people ) and Circuit City (nyse: CC - news - people ) have signed up to host shows. Maxxsonics, a $40 million (sales) vendor of amplifiers and speakers, spends $250,000 a year on a dB Drag team. One teammate tattooed a Maxxsonics amp on his arm.
DB Drag would be more fun for the business folks if their business was the way it used to be. Annual wholesale revenue of aftermarket audio gear, the kind installed by the car buyer, has been stuck at $2 billion for two years and is off its 2004 peak of $2.3 billion. Sales have been crimped by Ebay sellers and carmakers themselves, which are putting in better stereos at the factory. (A few audio companies make money that way but at lower margins.) Audio equipment company Kicker this year reduced its budget for its dB Drag team. Rockford eliminated its team two years ago.
But industry engineers will continue to make the pilgrimage to dB Drag events because they are to car audio what Nascar is to Detroit: fertile ground for new product ideas developed by obsessive customers in pursuit of perfection.
Thanks in part to ideas born at dB Drag events, the acoustic power of car stereo speakers has increased tenfold in the last ten years, from a maximum of 500 watts per square meter to 5,000. (A loudspeaker at a rock concert puts out 2,500 to 3,000 watts.) Pioneer learned from dB Dragsters to cover speaker coils with ceramics to dissipate heat. Pioneer also uses material interlaced with carbon fibers to make speakers lighter and stronger.
Two years ago dragster Scottie R. Johnson cut open a 12-volt dry-cell battery and crammed in two more cells in an attempt to get another 4 volts. After word got around of Johnson's stunt he was hired by Powermaster, which put him in charge of its new battery line. In Daytona, when a contestant broke a windshield and melted a speaker coil in the lanes, his sponsor, T3 Audio founder Johnathan Demuth, wondered if next time around he should inject nitrous oxide to cool the speaker. Back to the lab they went.
A nice factory-installed car audio system can produce 115 decibels. Adding 50 or 60 decibels to that is an engineering challenge that grows exponentially harder as the decibels rise. Decibels come on a logarithmic scale; every ten-point increase in decibels equals a tenfold increase in power. Not only do dragsters puzzle over how to pack in more juice and speakers, they have to eliminate leaks and vibrations. Extreme dragsters fill door jambs with concrete, use bulletproof glass and bolt doors shut.
Steve Cook tackled the problem by stripping a 1990 Chevy Astro van and reinforcing it with more steel. He installed 60 16-volt batteries in their own steel cage. That voltage feeds 32 amps, each spitting out 4,000 watts of electricity. Those watts power eight subwoofers housed in a five-sided concrete box. The sound wave they create, at a low 79 hertz, travels around the concrete box and gets concentrated toward a sensor on the windshield.
If it all sounds too technical and a bit unfun, join the camp behind Paul Papadeas, who owns the rival International Auto Sound Challenge Association. "The science of sound is diminishing the effectiveness of our marketing," he says, as he cruises the Daytona event on a golf cart.
Papadeas is pushing new types of events to broaden the sport's appeal. In one, judges evaluate how close a stereo comes to sounding like a live performance. Another one, called Bass Boxing, has competitors play music, with cheering fans helping to decide whose car should win. DB Drag's Wayne Harris countered with Bass Race two years ago.
Washington University audiologist William W. Clark was horrified when he heard from a reporter how Bass Racers sit in their cars, ears unprotected. Sound more than 140 decibels, he warns, can permanently damage hearing after one exposure. Papadeas and Harris both suffer from a constant ringing in their ears. Harris blames shooting ranges, Papadeas blames being in a rock band.
Ear health means little to those chasing the magic number: 194 decibels, thought to be a threshold beyond which stereos might explode. "Fortunately they're not there yet!" e-mails a sarcastic Dr. Clark. "Only 15 more to go!"
bassnatzii
10+ year member
Member
also so you understand the poster I think was Nick From IA, not king of bass, Tommy is a great guy, and it's viechles like this @ shows that will help get more ppl back into car audio again
he plays real old school stuff also nothing real rappy, or what not
his truck aka ho problems
you should try to find it @ a big show near you, it's one you have to see and experince at least once
Even Mad Mike from pimp my ride couldn't belive it, and could barley stand to sit in it LOLOL
he plays real old school stuff also nothing real rappy, or what not
his truck aka ho problems
you should try to find it @ a big show near you, it's one you have to see and experince at least once
Even Mad Mike from pimp my ride couldn't belive it, and could barley stand to sit in it LOLOL
audioholic
5,000+ posts
not a moderator
Oh well if Mad Mike from PMR approves, its gotta be great. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/wink.gif.608e3ea05f1a9f98611af0861652f8fb.gif
Grats to you.... uhm.... da king.
Grats to you.... uhm.... da king.
Intrepid Bass
10+ year member
Dade County
^ lol
'Grats to Tommy.
'Grats to Tommy.
Seems like something that would be printed in CA&E than Forbes. I guess Forbes is becoming more mainstream.
It did answer a key question for me. I was pretty curious about just how big an industry is car audio.
Considering sounstream does 40MM in sales, I'd say car audio @ best is a 2 billion dollar industry.
To give a reference, Lowe's sales are about 127MM per day. Our one store makes more money than sounstream. Not bragging, it is just when Nick (FI nick) said margins are thin, I didn't know they were that thin.
It did answer a key question for me. I was pretty curious about just how big an industry is car audio.
Considering sounstream does 40MM in sales, I'd say car audio @ best is a 2 billion dollar industry.
To give a reference, Lowe's sales are about 127MM per day. Our one store makes more money than sounstream. Not bragging, it is just when Nick (FI nick) said margins are thin, I didn't know they were that thin.
Activity
No one is currently typing a reply...
Similar threads
- Started by Nelly762
- Amplifiers
- Started by Tipsy
- General Car Audio
About this thread
