Ground Pounding At The Pod

Did you know that maggots are used in Forensic Science to determine how long a body has been lying before it’s found? How vile is that? It’s about temperature and various details of the morphology of the larvae. You can tell how old a maggot is but only if you are an entomologist or insect scientist.
One day an insect scientist became a forensic scientist and asked if her colleagues knew that they could date a body by the look of the maggots’ guts? Grossed out, they admitted they didn’t but soon after that a whole putrid arm of forensics was opened up as science was applied and development against temperature tables were devised.
I personally may be as odd as that entomologist turned forensic scientist, for I am educated in Geology to degree level (that’s rocks and earthquakes and stuff) and as well as having found myself gripped by Seismology (which is just earthquakes) I have been in the lifetime grip of Bassology.
As well as this car stuff I live for, I review huge subwoofers for Home Cinema Choice magazine. The last ones I checked out were part of an £80,000 7.2ch set from KEF in Maidstone, where I went to review them. They had two 1,000 watt RMS 18 inch active subwoofers in the room. It was stupendous. The same magazine call me ‘The UK’s foremost expert in extreme audio’. And this event is probably why, as down the years I have occasionally let my guard down and admitted some of the more insanely bass-laden experiences that the world of car audio has brought me. Like the time Mmats barbecued me in their Room Of Doom at a CES one year and inspired me to write a cartoon series that was so much fun we are going to do it again.
Drawn by Julian Sewell it is of course, Son of BoomZilla and will be coming soon.
Meanwhile, I have been obsessed with bass my whole life. I was converted at my big posh public school. The head of music was running a lunchtime talk called ‘Noises Loud & Obscene’ I don’t recall the preamble. I vaguely recall the rugby songs he played on the weedy school speakers. I was moved to my very soul by what happened next.
He sat at the school organ and literally pulled out all the stops. He positioned his feet carefully as a lot of the notes were on the bass pedals and then he let rip with the most baroque performance of Toccata And Fugue in whatever key it is (D Minor) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The school hall rippled with bass down to 25Hz.
I was so affected that years later I persuaded the bloke in my year who played the organ, to play it while I was sneakily allowed into the area where the pipes are housed and climbed up into a gallery of tiny whistles of different types. It was so loud as the 36 foot long Big Pipe sounded from the floor below that I was falling out of the gallery and only was able to tell by sight as the granules in my Cochleae were being so heavily vibrated (remember this is a BIG ‘whistle’ with air going one way, not in and out like speakers) that my Organ of Corti was just useless. It was scary and I had to grab for my life. I suppose modern bass systems could do this but I was standing upright and you can’t do that in a car..

Go forward a few years to about a decade ago and there I am reading the USA press about American cars with their insane so-much-better-than-the-UK systems in hearses and taking up the whole beds of pickup trucks and longing to experience them so bad I could taste it. Then, as now the SPL or loudness readings that the Yankee competition cars could raise were some ten decibels louder than the best we could do. They had names like Terminator or Assassinator and they had a dozen or more woofers in them. I recall Kevin O’Byrne’s simple description of a queue shuffling tighter in an effort to get into a show in the 90’s in the USA as one of these Ground Pounders started up in the other side of the fence. He captured the spirit of the feeling of the moment and it was one of those things that just affirmed my status as a hopelessly obsessed nutter.
Pavement Shaker was another term they used and it got me to thinking. Not only was I by now employed in the mobile electronics trade but my boss was building an incredible 24x15incher demonstrator in an effort to be the first UK ever 150dB plus install.
The Brand was Earthquake of San Francisco.
It hit 153.3dB right out of the box but it was a day late to the show we had PR’d to the telly people and so denied me my chance to meet Clarkson, which I never, ever forgave. I figured the best name would have to be Seismic and let it carry the very name of the science of the Earth when it shakes. (The night I ironed my Earthquake transfer onto the back of my denim jacket, 20,000 people died in India and the Tsunami brand of car wiring still exhibited the January CES after the Boxing day Tsunami that killed so many. So having an elemental force as your brand can backfire as far as ‘cool’ is concerned. Our thoughts are with those affected by the recent 6.4 Richter magnitude event in Balochistan province in south-western Pakistan recently.)
Seismic the Dodge Ram day van died in a mysterious electrical fire, which made owner Mark Nathwani of InCars literally break down and weep like a baby on the phone to me, (which was a bit difficult as I was kinda emotionally involved too so it got bit weepy all round) and in the BoomZilla cartoon strip, there was an aside for a funeral. The Nathwani brothers had bunches of 1/0 gauge cable in two colours instead of a bouquet next to a huge grave where the burned Dodge Ram van was being lowered and the text read,
‘Voice coil to Ashes, Dust to Dust. If the Bass don’t get you, then the HF must’
The second install Nathwani had built for InCars holds the Fukuda-esque position of being the only one that ever won the top class in both SPL and SQ, with 157dB and an astonishingly high quality job by Paul Richardson and Alberto Lopez and Nathan Pearce. (A little known fact is that it managed 162dB during a mad never-repeated ‘what-happened-there-then?’ test run.)
It was called Son of Seismic.

Then my life changed and without doing the CV I found myself on Fast Car magazine and was thinking of a way to really make a splash with a cool feature. I had been wanting to do this idea for ages and got it green lit.
I would create an ‘Earthquake’ with car audio systems. Bass so loud it literally shook the ground beneath your feet. I put on my best public school accent and phoned the Edinburgh offices of the august British Geological Survey. I got on like a house on fire with the chap at the BGS and he was at first incredulous and then entertained. We could all go up to their seismometry station and give it a wobble and they would give us a Richter Magnitude reading. And then it dawned upon him that if we really, truly could shake the ground, then we would be at risk of occluding a genuine reading from a seismic event somewhere else in the world and their responsibility to the greater global seismic metering community was paramount.
So they gave me the number of a company called Vibrock limited. They make Seismographs and as well as being Civil Engineer types, they are members of all three Societies Of Professionally Blowing Things Up A Lot.
(That’d be the Institute of Quarrying, Institute of Explosives Engineers, Institute of Civil Engineers and the International Society of Explosives Engineers. Badass.)
So I called up all the bass heads and asked Fast Car to pay for the meter and asked the boss of Santa Pod if we could go and boom it up. To their credit they all said ‘Yes!’ The ‘Pod said as long as they get a credit. And to their undying credit they have let me do it again. And again. (You can see the original 10 year old article here)
Now in it’s third go and ten years on, we have refined the technique.
We have hardened the science.
The systems have gotten stupefyingly more powerful and logarithmically louder.
This time, again with Fast Car, who own the history of it, we did it with the scientists from Vibrock present, independent witnesses and a TV crew as well as the Fast Car stills snapper and our own Guru on the TA lens.
The Day the ‘Pod Went WOBBLE
I want to offer up a heart felt and major league thank you to all the folks who made this happen: The editor of Mad Mod Daddies’ mag Fast Car, Steve ‘Scary’ Chalmers; Santa Pod for letting us in; Dave Hogg and Tim Wilton of Vibrock; the Anglia TV folks and most of all the hardcore of UK bass heads, who get a roll call of honour at the end. An especial thanks to Geoff ‘Firestarter’ Kerss who used his fluid dynamics skills to park and point our fleet of bass wagons. He designs exhaust pipes for top marque car makers.
And a big slobby man-kiss for Midge and Glenda from Fast Car for coming to Witness it all. It was all they did, apart from eat the food and drink Red Bull.

I arrived at the front gate of Santa Pod and there were seven or eight cars and vans there already, a half hour before I’d said we would need them. I filled up with goose bumps. Bless them, they hadn’t even gone in the gate to park and wait but had hovered respectfully outside the gate. I waved and blew kisses like a big wet girly and then trundled into the Pod office to have a quick gush and thank them. They were polite but utterly and completely unimpressed by a few ice cars. This is the home of UK drag racing after all.
Quarter miles finishing in three hundred mph and jet cars. Huge events run by Hell’s Angels (proper righteous businessmen I gather) and even Formula One super-secret launch testing. We were not big potatoes. Drove back to the lads and waved at them and then I thought I’d pick where we would go.
I was quite wrong. For one, I missed USC this year and so hadn’t seen the great big area of new hard top exactly where I’d done this on grass in the past. (Proper money being spent by the Podsters on the infrastructure. I’ve watched it down the years as miles of barriers appeared and more tarmac gets laid. ) But while I manoeuvred about the site, the guys, quite oblivious to me, simply went and parked up in the single best place. I was quite superfluous.
As I’d driven up the lane earlier, I’d spotted this cameraman filming cutaways of fields and thought, ‘That’ll be my crew then, getting peaceful background to the World-Split-Asunder story.’ Turns out I was right and was introduced to the film crew a moment later.
After a brief conflab with them to make sure they got what they wanted, a smart pickup rolls up and the two bearded scientists climb out, Dave & Tim, who look all rugged and quarry-grade outdoorsy. Like blokes out of a Spielberg movie about blokes who blow up rocks a lot. They had come all the way from Derbyshire to look at the nutter who had hired this meter from them before. That’d be me.
They had disbelief issues and just wanted to see what on earth we were up to with their respected tool, the Vibrock V901 Seismograph.
The Vibrock explosives experts agreed to operate the ground-shake-o-meter and we picked a spot to embed the three-dimensions accelerometer in its billet-cut box into the hallowed turf of Santa Pod.
I asked our fluid dynamicist to park the cars. They were grouped together so snugly that  I could just get into the middle by one route only. I declared a brief meet and delivered the feels-a-bit-silly but crucially vital Risk Assessment. I explained how much effort and time had been expended in its production, I printed it out and gave a copy to the TV company who like that sort of thing and said.
‘The grass is slippery. It will be very loud. May contain nuts.’
Geoff ‘Firestarter’ Kerss doesn’t really look like a normal bloke. He looks like a mad scientist. Cutting a striking figure at a similar height to the Iceman, but thinner, I see him as what Beaker the Muppet grew up into after his apprenticeship as lab assistant for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. I suspect him of literally R.E.M. night-time dreaming about how to arrange these cars. He was really cool about the forum flurry beforehand only chipping in to let me know which days he could attend (or not) and offering, dead casual like, to array the bass. Having been on the scene he knows each install, even back as far as the amazingly old and amazingly yet potent Hifonics/Cerwin Vega install in the Transit van of K&M Acoustics. This meant he directed each one. Parked and pointed to the inch so that their bass could emanate out onto the turf where our about to be utterly astonished explosives engineers were crouched with bits of yellow squeezy-foam in their ears over the V901 Seismograph.
At first I made them all hop up and down on the turf around the meter looking a bit daft but thirty or so blokes and two girls hopping up and down made the V901 trigger and we registered a wobble.
Then, we went for it.
Everyone was asked to play a 40Hz tone and let it rip by way of a signalling system to a conductor where they could all see. The world went BURRRRRRR!! and the meter spat out some paper.
We got a maximum ground movement velocity of 4.5mm/s which equated to a detonation of 250 kilograms of explosives at a range of 500 metres and showed that the ground wobbled right on the 40Hz frequency!
It was working.
Ian Iceman Pinder asked plaintively, ‘When can we do 25Hz?’ as his bass eats elephants.

So we went lower, straight to the 33Hz CRF or what has now gone into the folklore as the Clitoral Resonance Frequency. As related to me by Todd Ramsey about his chum’s girlfriend. They had a big body shaking bass install and he had a test tone CD. They experimented and found 33Hz to be the one. (‘Ohhh YESS THAT’S the onnnne!’) I wrote about it in Max Power and it went deep into Ice culture in an instant. So deep, in fact that I reckon some reading will even think I’m claiming it as mine when it ain’t. Well it was Todd really but I did report it.
This time was less impressive as the deeper note was less resonant with Mother Earth. Her Dynamo Humm was going to be a bit tougher than that. We got a 3.5mm/s velocity and it was declared equivalent to 170kg of boom at 500 metres.
Then I simply asked for whatever made their world rock the deepest and hardest. Iceman gave in involuntary ****-eating grin and reached for the Slow Jams. Manjit the Geordie Boy and Mazdawg the Quietly Insane and all the good but absolutely and totally bonkers participants got ready to turn their cones inside out for posterity and fame.
Then they dropped it.
Never have I been so close to my limit for vibration comfort. My hearing was protected after all, this was bass, not just high frequencies, although some of the cars here are more than capable of hearing health harm in truth and depend on the users’ discretion. The air was grasped as though by Sauron’s Evil. The very breath was being gradually pulled from your chest, your intestines roiled like my delighted Id as, despite the absurdity, the sheer strangeness of what we were doing, for just that moment, I knew in an epiphanic instant that my career was experiencing a peak, right there with all these lovely people. And as the bass faded back and the Skylarks tumbled from the heavens above Santa Pod in acoustic shock, I felt a perfect love.
But it was just Manjit sneaking up behind me to give me a startling grope.
The cameras were running and we recorded the moment when our explosives scientists explained we had achieved a quite mad 6.325mm/s velocity in the Vertical axis (Longitudinal and Transverse being the L & T axes I guess) which meant we had shaken the ground as hard as fully three hundred kilograms of high explosives going off a mere 500 metres away would have done.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8706842981868661857&hl=undefined#
The first time we did it, we reckoned a 3.6 on the Richter Magnitude. The second time, 4.2 Richter, this time however, we calculated a value of 5.4 Richter Magnitude.
This is incredible and as I said to camera for the TV guys, had you been asleep in bed or rutting in full reproductive anger to actually make babies as against recreational sex, you would still have leaped out of your bed and run screaming into the street. Only I don’t think the words were quite as well chosen at the time. (You always think of something better after the chance, don’t’ you?)
Now for the hard science.
While Richter Magnitude is what made us go to Santa Pod and start this thing up all those years ago, which incidentally has never been done before or since, even by Americans, the assumptions you have to make about a 10km proximity of the epicentre and so forth, do really render the figure a soft-science item.
However, the V901 Seismograph is a precision instrument and there exists a tightly knit global community amongst companies like Vibrock. They know their USA counterparts. We know the USA bassheads or can get hold of them. The conversion directly to explosives mass-distance-equivalent is easily calculated with a straight line on a graph (although I confess I didn’t check to see if it was log-log graph paper) and so can, like all science be reproduced.
We will be applying, with due scientific rigour and witness statements and so forth, to the Guinness Organisation in an attempt to gain recognition for setting an inaugural and totally credible first ever Ground-Bass-Shake world record. 
Those present at this history making event were:
1. K & M Acoustics’ Mike Winstanley – 12x18in CV subs 6,600w RMS 156 dB; 6.5cubic sealed each, in a  Ford Transit. Accompanied by Richard Atkinson and Anthony Hart
2. Ian ‘ICEMAN’ Pinder – 6 X HCCA 15s 24,600w RMS 155.5@ 25Hz
3 Paul ‘Mazdawg’ Coughlan’s huge Rockford ‘Bass Burb 18,000w RMS
4. Gareth ‘Scruff’ Senior – 10x JBL GT5 12in 6,000w RMS. 152.2 dB drag 36Hz – 154.2dB @ 25Hz Propper Droppers with Mate Ashley Parfitt in tow.
5 Manjit Singh in the Rockford Bassmechanix van – 12×15; 8,000w RMS 156dB in EMMA with spar Andrew Ackerly
6 Geoff ‘Firestarter’ Kerss – Transit Connect 4 x RE MX 18s, 12,000w. 158+dB on a tone 154.5dB average on music.
7. Alex ‘Loudvanman’ Mitchell – VW T4 Transporter, 6 x DD 15’s walled at C Pillar, 18,000w RMS, dB unknown but savage
8. Big Boy Mark Smith – 4 x Orion HCCA 15s 10,000w RMS 154.4dB@ last drag
9. Matt ‘thejoose’ Sprigg – 6 x 12in SPL Dynamics SPL Subs and 9,000w RMS – 155.4dB @ 39Hz
10.Mark Keys – Charlie 10 Wideboy Megane 6x Kicker CompVX 15 sealed moulded wall, 6 Directed 2400d amps, 7,200w RMS.
11. Adrian ‘supraman’ Howitt, AKA Mr Beats – 9,000w RMS 6 x 15’s 31 cube box tuned 30Hz
12. Liam ‘liam_b’ Bradley – Citroen Saxo 6x JBL GT5s 12’s 3,300w RMS hitting high 140s dB
13. Joe ‘DA EARTHQUAKER!’ Ajji – 4x Earthquake Subzeros 15s 8,000w RMS 151dB
14. Ben ‘Ballisticcivic’ Fortescue -Ford Escort van,8 x 12in Ballistic BPM subs. 4,000w RMS. 152dB
15. Rich ‘Blade’ Bladon – 2 x DD9515’s – 6,000w RMS, 147.5dB Termlab (low tuning)
16. Jon ‘WonkyJon’ Clements –  9,400w RMS 1 DD9515 150dB+
17. Matty Jasper and Meg ‘Puddlez’ Parker – Vauxhall Corsa B, 2x RE Audio XXX v3 15in, 3,000w RMS, 149.7dB
18. Drew B(atchelor) – Smartcar, 1 HCCA 15. 2,500w RMS 149.6dB @ 33Hz
19. Jenny ‘bassbitch’ Monahan
20. Fusion Fiesta 2,500w RMS – Russell Shipton
21. Adam ‘DUB’ Day – 2 OZ Audio matrix 12’s with 1,500w RMS. 140dB+.
22. Chris ‘Chrig’ Barrow – MK1 Mondeo estate, 3,000w, RMS, 18in XXX 8cubic foot tuned to 35Hz.
23. Laurence ‘lozzy’ Corteil –  18in Atomic APX with 2,500w RMS 146dB
24. Ali ‘ali_88’ Shabbir – Groundzero GZPW15 SPL 3,000w RMS, tuned low 30’s
25. Jerry aka ‘BIG RED’  (Team Fusion ) VW T4 8 x 12s 150dB+  2,500w RMS 
TOTAL POWER ROOT MEAN SQUARE = 179,600WATTS
PEAK POWER = 360,000 WATTS 
After all the serious stuff, we got down to some heavy bass larks, running ‘hair tricks’ with Iceman’s insane air-blasting bass behemoth.
If you sit in the door way of his Astra, your hair flies out perpendicular to your head when the bass hits. To her credit, tough as nails and pretty with it, reporter Emma Baker from Anglia TV sat through repeated buffetings while both her cameraman and the Fast Car stills man Chris Wallbank got the flying tresses recorded. Sat alongside her, the lass Puddlez’ hair was far longer and went utterly berserk when the low jam flowed!
http://youtu.be/rEmnDvrf89k
You can see some more hair tricks at Modified Nationals 2008 and Streetlife 08 articles, which have videos embedded within them including one of Big Mick, Metallica’s sound engineer having his heavy metal mangled! 
THE CHALLENGE
We think you can reproduce this, USA, but we reckon you won’t shake the ground like we did! I know you can make meters move but we are talking Ground Pounder. Pavement Shaker and rrrreal loooows. So, like my mates at Audio Control like to
TAKE IT OUT AND MEASURE IT!
We can help hook you up with the USA Seismic monitoring and explosives consultancy folks through our chums with the beards and hard hats over here. You bring the bass and someone who can see the physics of sound in air like Keanu Reeves can see the Matrix to park the bass wagons best. Ours is called Kerss and it’s pronounced curse. You can’t whup us ‘cos we are decadent Brits and we know about excessive behaviour far past yours!
OK, that’s the Trash Talk as you fellows like to put it but in all honesty, give it a go, chaps, it’s jolly good fun!
We’re waiting to hear from you. 
Adam Rayner
online editor Talk Audio & ICE Contributor to Fast Car magazine
SPRING 09: Over on Steve Meade’s site a forum guy posted something we hadn’t worked out…
“That is absolutely insane. After some quick calculations based on only the setup info you gave, thats ~1,923,616.82 in^2 of cone area. Wow.”
And here’s where to click to see a funky cool slideshow in the newly imported gallery system. We LOVE this! If you go to the gallery itself from the menus above you can get at the fuller size versions of you want to nick any….
link