IT IS SCARY BASS TIME!
All Hallows Eve is upon us. Hobgoblins, sprites, will-o’-the-wisps and faeries will all be walking about in suburbia begging for sweeties with their parents in tow! We have already got a massive Swizzels Matlow bucket of sweeties from Costco ready for the zombie invasion at our house.
What is now seen as good fun, and the third biggest retail splurge after Christmas and Easter, used to have folks in the old days, hiding in their hovels, scared of the unknown and the undead. And now, the biggest audio in the world is touring with one particular product designed to do nothing but create fear, unease and disturbing wavefronts of pure infrasonic hell! The company is called Meyer Sound. They make the world’s most respected public address equipment. Used by ministers and metal mayhem maniacs alike. From stages to stadiums, they present their products as the ultimate ‘blank canvas’ for sound. How and what you paint upon it, is the art.
As a certified bass head, I have this in common with some lovely people. Crazed car owners, wearing dustbin lid sized woofers like headphones, with thousands of watts up them, and of course the extreme home theatre crew, who like scary bass. I have reviewed some astonishing low-frequency installations. I do love proper ‘Bass music’ recorded and produced especially for use by automotive bass heads but the soundtrack of blockbuster movies, is the real place to find the Fear Register. Meyer Sound are the first to truly apply science, to seek quantifiable proof of this effect. They found it was scientifically provable but describe the effect as a simple adrenal gland reaction. The very deepest bass vibrations, those that flow way below our threshold of hearing, are more sensate than audible. Yet we can tell and process all this infrasonic information. In the way that a mouse has way better hearing than us and how whales and elephants actually use sub sonic communication, we may be deaf as a post by comparison, yet we do still feel and process all of this stuff. It is shamelessly exploited in movie soundtracks. The single best reference to this effect and a movie moment of great fame will be, ‘Maybe it’s the power trying to come back on?’ and the image of a glass of water on the dashboard of the Ford Maverick SUV, wobbling. (Incidentally, that effect was done by twanging a piano string against the bottom of the dashboard, by a stagehand!) And I have always called it the Fear Register.
Here are some quotes. ‘The sub boxes can generate astonishing acoustic horsepower too and happily brag about their abilities to drop a note. How about 112dB at an almost infrasonic 15Hz? That’s ‘Fear Register’ lows (subsonics) with power’ (From my review of Klipsch THX speakers)
‘You have four twelves and nearly three quarters of a kilowatt at that point and the air shifting ease is fabulous. The result can de-bone you down to way lower than 20Hz and into what I call the Fear Register. Yum!’ from a review of an MK Sound THX Ultra 2 system.
‘The box is weighty and complex and allows an insane depth and range of low frequencies to be propagated. Melodic yet wobbly with superb control and tight accuracy. A fabulously high end output with both pressure and sustainable weight, for fear-register effects and room-bursting explosions.’ From a review of a REL B1 subwoofer.
Yes, the Meyer VLFC twin eighteen inch driver enclosure, whose rated passband is 10Hz to 36Hz, with 11Hz as the cited lower cut off. ‘Ours goes down to eleven’ is the slogan, a warping of an old joke from Spinal Tap, the classic rockumentary spoof movie. I went to the O2 and experienced the power and breadth of the system. Report is comingA bit epic, I am afraid as it has some history in it, but it’ll be divided into sections.
Meanwhile, a selection of Alpine kit is on the way in, for me to try out.. so the three pairs of JL Audio 6.75in car speakers, the last in the big old group test, need to get in the test rig in quick time. I did lose a few days to a painful trapped nerve recently, but it has receded, so normal service is resumed.
Do drive safely and avoid the old ‘˜Boomph-tinkle’
Adam Rayner OnLine Editor