In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  Big Red was not the only enthusiast to remind me repeatedly that the extreme environment of car-audio competition has pushed the horizons of possibility for everyone. Car audio has driven the audio industry as a whole, and car audio geared for stereo competition drives the evolution of car audio.

  SOUND OFF!

  Explosive Sound and Video sits next to a hair salon, an ice-cream shop, and Tire Kingdom in a parking lot that was already grinding with heat by the time I arrived at ten thirty on Sunday morning. A pair of blue tents had been set up to shade an assortment of high-caliber sound-measuring equipment and laptops. Over the course of the next couple of hours, the participants’ vehicles rumbled into the lot along with spectators who clustered around the champion cars waiting for audio to be demoed and gazing hopefully at the dark-tinted windows to try and glimpse the special “something” each had hidden inside. The men, clutching giant plastic cups or dark bottles, seemed to fall generally into the category of short on neck and bald (save for a sneeze of facial hair) or stringy and towheaded. There were plenty of women as well, but with one or two exceptions, they were all girlfriends, wives, or the catchall “lady of.” Everywhere there were tattoos and T-shirts emblazoned with multiple skull or single crucifix motifs.

  By noon, a critical mass of competition vehicles had arrived in the plaza. I wandered around and found MP3 Pimp about to perform what is known as “hair trick.” Hair trick involves finding a long-haired woman who will lean her head into the window of a car demoing its audio. A young woman with very lengthy red hair was just bending over the passenger side of MP3 Pimp’s vehicle as I approached. He turned on the audio and her orange hair began flying up in the air, like a free-floating wildfire.

  “I love it,” she squealed when he turned the car off. “That’s the best feeling in the world!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “’Cause your whole head tingles and all your hair’s moving and you can see it all moving!”

  “And you can finally justify having so much hair,” a spectator observed.

  “I can finally justify having so much hair!” she concurred.

  The dB Drag Race qualifications were at last getting under way. For the onlookers, this process consisted primarily of watching a huge bald man with a shredded auburn goatee, in a tank top that read GORILLA HEAVYWEIGHT, lumber over to cars and stick a sound meter on a hose through the windows of dozens of them one by one, as if he were hooking them up to an IV in preparation for a transfusion. Once Gorilla Heavyweight had positioned the tube, the window rolled back up from the inside, and at the conclusion of a countdown from the judge, who held his fingers above the decibel-monitoring laptop, the audio behind the dark glass switched on to strike a tone barely audible from outside the car.

  After watching this for a time (qualifications were to continue for the next four and a half hours), I glimpsed the man I suddenly knew to be Tommy, the King of Bass, McKinnie. He had just emerged from the garage of Explosive Sound and Video and was walking to a low, gleaming black-and-silver truck sitting under its own special canopy, with the words HO PROBLEMS stamped across the front windshield and KING OF BASS on both sides.

  Even watching Tommy, the King of Bass, move from a distance, one knew oneself to be in the presence of a master of something. A handsome, mildly pumped-up man in his thirties, wearing a black Explosive Sound and Video T-shirt and a matching black baseball cap with the brim reversed, he had that hunter’s poise, that charged balance—of complete alertness and utter relaxation—the self-assured élan of a successful professional athlete who knows his body will perform exactly as it has to when it has to. Only in this case that body is prosthetic, the chassis of a low-slung 1995 Isuzu packed with enough audio equipment to kill by sound alone.

  McKinnie has been competing for ten years and purports to be undefeated in all car-audio competitions. He has taken his truck everywhere across the United States and prevailed at the world finals four years in a row, from 2005 to 2008. In 2007, for the first time, the finals were hosted over the Internet, with three locations in the United States (Florida, Indiana, and California) going “face-to-face” live online with France, Greece, and, perplexingly, Norway, to see who had the Earth’s loudest vehicle. Answer: Tommy, the King of Bass. A lot of times, McKinnie told me, “they call the King of Bass ‘the Case’ because I have twenty-four of everything. Twenty-four midis. Twenty-four tweeters. Twenty-four woofers, and twenty-four amplifiers.” His truck is known as the Loch Ness Monster, “because you always hear stories about it, but you never see it.” Nine-tenths of the year, the Loch Ness Monster remains deep within Tommy, the King of Bass’s, garage. He never drives it or brings it out, unless it’s going up on his trailer to a show. When I looked inside, it was like looking into Ali Baba’s cave—a black vortex gleaming with countless silver cones, odd lustrous disks, gorgon’s hair of wires, and plates of dark metal.

  The truck can hit in the 160s constantly for a minute straight. But there is no judging category that technically goes that high, so he runs in the 150 to 159 class, “What we call ‘Balls to the Wall,’” McKinnie said with a nod. “You know, ‘Run what you brung and I hope you brung enough.’” A pretty woman in a bright-white T-shirt and mirrored sunglasses who looked like a somewhat less pampered version of Scarlett Johansson, and who proved to be McKinnie’s girlfriend, appeared with a high black velvet crown studded with a rainbow of rhinestones. She handed it to McKinnie, who placed it casually on the hood of the truck.

  “I’d say my entry into the sport began when I was in junior high before I got my first car,” McKinnie remarked. “Guys that considered they were loud in the neighborhood—or considered they were loud in the streets—every time they would drive by, I would run to the door and my parents would think I was crazy. I said, ‘One day that’s going to be me, riding around shaking everybody’s houses and restaurants.’ I just always wanted a loud stereo.” He added that once he had his first car with his first audio system, he drove it loud enough that he was barred from every restaurant in town on account of shattering their glass—Burger King, McDonald’s, Taco Bell. Even the car wash (“which I’d never actually used, because my truck was always too low”) banned him because he drove by one time and broke its window with the power of his sound.

  McKinnie’s story reinforced what I’d heard from MP3 Pimp and Big Red the night before, and what I would hear from a dozen competitors—longtime and first-time alike—over the course of that afternoon. Everyone had craved a loud stereo more than anything in the world basically ever since they could remember wanting anything. Some of them had purchased their first car stereos before they could drive, let alone own a car. The crowd was not especially THUGish. It was, on many levels, diverse—amazingly so, racially—peppered with both more and less aggressive sorts, mostly in their twenties and thirties (with a handful of exceptions either side of the age divide) and making more or less money (though less was certainly the rule).

  As Tommy turned away to defend the Loch Ness Monster from a mob of admirers, Casey Sullivan, the administrator of FloridaSPL, a genial, gangly guy who looks all of sixteen, and his partner Buzz Thompson, who resembles a somewhat shorter, no less voluble, but considerably more coherent version of the Dennis Hopper photographer character in Apocalypse Now, introduced themselves, and told me their version of the history that Big Red and MP3 Pimp had begun feeding me the night before.

  They explained that car-audio competitions began in the early 1980s with extemporized “boom-offs,” along with more esoteric contests such as “car-alarm meets”—in which challengers matched up to determine who had the biggest, loudest alarm gadgetry in their vehicles.

  Over the next decade, two things happened. First, a new generation of speaker and amplifier technology powerful enough to survive multiple high-volume sessions—and loud enough to excite audiences in ways that sound quality alone never quite mustered—began to appear on the scene. Often the men behind the new subwoofers were home-garage tinkerers who never
wrote down their secrets and who made their mark by, as Thompson put it, “getting dirty, spending money, and taking time.” Eventually, if they were lucky, they got recruited by major manufacturers, who helped make a handful of American companies the elite standard of the car-audio scene. Second, sometime in the 1990s, a new strain of powerful subwoofers from China began thumping into the markets. Because they were so strong—and so cheap relative to high-quality equipment—competitions began to torque in the direction of loudness alone. Availability and affordability of extreme subwoofer technology set the stage for the arrival of dB Drag Races.

  One day in 1994, Tim Maynor, with Jonathan Demuth in tow, showed up at a bass competition. At that time sport participants were required to compete playing a song the match sponsors had chosen for them, which happened that afternoon to be the first song on the Flashdance soundtrack. Maynor and Demuth had analyzed the first track of Flashdance pulse by pulse to find the frequency at which it peaked and where the peak occurred. By abandoning all pretense of playing a recognizable snippet of the song, and instead hitting a button at the exact second when the music was loudest and playing only that one tone, they immediately gained three decibels of sound. The crowd, which Demuth told me numbered in the thousands, went wild.

  Their discovery opened the floodgates. Everyone started converting their cars into “one-note wonders,” or “burp vehicles.” Soon thereafter, McKinnie related, “dB Drag Racing got out of hand. Everyone lost the highs, lost the pretty stuff, the pretty-looking stuff, and it was all about how loud can you make your car be.”

  The dB Drag Race cars can’t even play music. If they do, they will break their speakers. (Sometimes destruction is the goal. The world finals occasionally include a Death Match class, in which competitors run head-to-head for five minutes. The last car standing wins, and both cars get buried in smoke from frying audio entrails.) Indeed, the vehicles themselves, let alone the audio systems, cannot withstand the pressure exerted by the burp button. It’s not coincidental that Maynor and Demuth were also the first team to replace their vehicle’s factory-installed windshield with a steel plate.

  And yet, Demuth told me, in putting too much “scientific-ness into it,” they took out the fun—and began losing sponsors as well. That’s when the organizations approached McKinnie and told him they’d come up with a new format—the Bass Race—and wanted him to compete. There was to be no more “burping.” Contestants had to play music for thirty seconds and remain within a certain decibel range the whole time.

  For all its musical appeal, the Bass Race is not appreciably quieter than SPL. Last year McKinnie broke thirty windshields. (He told me, regretfully, that in Florida insurance would only cover three a year.) In fact, while current peaks of the Bass Race may be closer to 161 than the 181-plus top scores of dB Drag, the bodily experience of Bass Racing for everyone involved may actually be louder. This is because, in the modified cars of the dB Drag Race, materials like three-to six-inch windshields and special reflection panels guide the energy wave to the exact spot on the dashboard where the judge’s microphone is grounded. Recent changes in regulations have begun to factor in the catastrophic consequences of car-audio showdowns for the hearing of participants. The dB Drag Race competitors in the classes of 140 decibels and above are required to operate their cars from outside, remotely. “Adequate hearing protection” is required if you remain inside at lower decibel levels. Similar rules have come into play for the Bass Races. But I didn’t see any Bass Racers standing outside their cars the day I was at Explosive Sound and Video—and they were hitting some seriously high numbers. The windows and doors were left open. The protection-free crowd got to “feel the vibe,” to merge with the full blast of music.

  A little while after we had spoken, Tommy, the King of Bass, at last demoed the Loch Ness Monster, playing his signature song, Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” I was standing about twenty-five feet away at the time. In the first few seconds, I had the uncanny experience of knowing that I was listening to music but being unable to hear the sound as music, to experience it as anything other than pure vibration. This is like hearing music if you’re deaf, I thought to myself. My pants legs and shirt suddenly felt loose and began fluttering wildly free of my body—somehow as though the agitation was coming from inside me. I had a cell phone in one front pocket of my jeans and my recorder in the other, and they both began massaging my thighs like mini-vibrators. It was extraordinary: not exactly exhilarating but electrifying. I saw the opaque panes of glass in the hair salon—covered with decals reading PERMS, TANNING, COLORING—begin flapping like black sheets. Someone pointed up at the floodlights on poles probably twenty feet overhead—the bulbs appeared to be unscrewing from their sockets. It was like standing on the lip of the apocalypse.

  After the demonstration, Buzz Thompson told me with a chuckle that employees from the drive-through McDonald’s more than fifty yards away were storming into the parking lot to complain that they couldn’t take any orders from customers because of the sound of Tommy’s truck. I asked him whether the natural development of the technology combined with the power of the Internet to accelerate that development meant that the decibel levels competitors hit would just keep getting higher.

  Thompson reminded me that there is a problem with the dream of perpetual progress in the sport, since it is approaching a realm where the physics of sound begins to create threshold limitations. Already, he said, when you’re in one of these cars and they’re doing 163 or above, there is so much pressure inside the cars that the air molecules cease to behave like air. The air becomes so thick that you feel as if you are moving underwater. Come to think of it, much of the music I’d heard sounded as though the speakers were submerged. Essentially, Thompson said, at 163 and higher the air has ceased to be air. Competitors today were already hitting in the low 180s. But once you hit around 194 decibels, sound ceases to be sound. Basically sound crunches the air and then releases it as it travels. At approximately 194 decibels, the pressure is twice the pressure of the atmosphere. That means there are no more air molecules to disperse. There is no more back-and-forth cycle. There is no more sound. There is only a forward-driving force of further compression. If SPL or Bass Race competitors one day hit 194 decibels, they will succeed in creating a shock wave. This is the realm of sonic booms and earthquakes.

  Even after all of the explanations I’d heard of why people were drawn to the sport of loudness for loudness’s sake, I was still missing something. I got that there were more rules and regulations to car-audio competition than I would ever have dreamed possible, and that competition—however arcane the terms—was driving the amplification. But I pressed Thompson to give me his take on what lay at the core of the obsession.

  “It’s just so sensual!” he moaned. “It’s sound! It’s feeling! It’s the attention you get! There’s so much to what you’re doing when you add a subwoofer to your car! And once you do it, you always have a taste for it. You find someone with louder, and you say, ‘Wow that louder is better than my louder.’ Every single guy out here wants to be louder. Nobody out here says, ‘Wow, that’s loud enough.’”

  That made sense. Yet of course this sensuality, the sensuality of “hair trick” or “balls to the wall,” was not, to put it mildly, everyone’s sensuality. And, to an extent, Thompson’s analysis amounted to saying, “These people are just born this way.” True enough, but I craved an answer with more reverb. I was standing next to Thompson sucking on the beer I’d been offered by Big Red’s Lady, pondering what, if anything, it would mean when scientists identified the genetic marker for “noise fetish,” when Thompson, who’d been waxing on about the feeling of 150 decibels inside an automobile, abruptly cried, “The entire state of Florida is designed to be driven around in! You can’t walk anywhere! You need a car to conduct your life down here. Every sixteen-year-old in Florida looks forward to getting a car! The car is your life.”

  And suddenly the click came. What was that sixteen-year-old
listening to before he got into his first boom car? When his headphones were off and his ears were naked to the stagnant air, I mean.

  Let’s leave the boom-car drivers demoing that special something in the egg-frying parking lot. We need to find somewhere quiet where we can think about this a little harder. Thompson’s last throwaway lines point deep into the sound of our age—all the way to the realm of acoustical weapons. And even to the blessed white inner sanctum of the iPod. Another way to think about the noise we make today is as an effort to immunize ourselves against the noise pain we’re all suffering from anyway. Another way to view our new noisiness is as a diverse global initiative in soundproofing.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Freeway to Noise

  A recent European Environment Agency report estimates that within the European Union alone, traffic noise regularly exposes upward of 67 million people to decibel levels exceeding safety recommendations in terms of both hearing and cardiovascular health. (The United States has been slower to track this problem.) Traffic is the most pervasive noise on the face of the planet. While we might have mentally habituated to its depredation, as we now know, we will never physiologically acclimate to it—and our behavior, unconsciously or no, reflects that bodily failure to adjust.

  When I thought about my time in Florida, I thought about traffic and noise. Whether in my hotel off the roaring ribbons of I-75, or on any one of my innumerable, interminable driving expeditions (since it was impossible to go anywhere without driving), what I heard was traffic. Oh, and any interior I entered was either playing loud music or blasting me with televised information. No wonder people who live in this kind of sonic environment want to boom through it! At least then the noise you’re subject to—that low-frequency, vertebrae-vibrating bass earthquake punched up on your special something—buries the sound of your surroundings.