| Wednesday, July 9, 2003 |
14:14 - Because We Can
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No, it's not a Mac post; nor is it a hot-off-the-presses article (I've been woefully lax in posting lately-- not having net access at home will to that to you; you try posting by screeching like the TX into the phone. The HTTPS handshake is a real bitch).
It's still cool, though:
dB (as in decibel) drag racing is an obscure but growing international "sport" in which competitors go head-to-head for two or three seconds at a time -- hence the name drag racing -- to establish whose sound system is loudest. The 2002 record, set by a German team of secretive audio engineers, was 177.6 dB.
The roar of a 747 on takeoff is usually quantified at about 140 decibels, although there's really no way to correlate the wide-spectrum noise of jet engines in open air with a low-frequency pure tone inside a highly reflective enclosure. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, with every 10 dB increase equivalent to a doubling of perceived sound (otherwise known as noise), dB drag racing enthusiasts create some seriously loud tones. (Another rule of thumb: All else being equal, every three dB of increased sound from a typical dB drag racing system requires a doubling of amplifier power.)
This is one of those "This is the kind of thing we do for fun, you other-people's-technology-hijacking throwbacks!" things, it seems to me.
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