Week Forty- Five Alternators & Community
Two thoughts today. There are two sides to the car audio thing. One is the individual adoration of music while you drive, in all its forms, for its own sake. Be it loud rock, searing smoky jazz divas or dance music played loud enough to FEEL. The other is the love of the equipment itself for what it can do. But also for the Joy Of Possession. Because it’s shiny or tough-looking.
And then there is ‘Ëcommunity’. Now, for the longest time, I didn’t even know there was such a thing. Back when I was thumping around London enough so that my sister got pulled over by the police in the family Pug 104 (yes, it was horrible and broke down when it had stood in the rain due to a design fault) and was asked if she had stolen it, since they knew the car for being loud and driven too fast by ME, well, the closest thing to community was Ian Pinder driving the Chelsea Cruise in his old-even-back-then Cortina and garnering his first fans.
Nowadays, I owe my very audience reading this, to a community, Talk Audio. And just today, I learned a bit more about our readership and visitors to the site and the magazine. And I also saw a heart-warming Facebook story about a group of blokes taking on an otherwise prohibitively expensive job of serious engineering. I am talking about Marcos Barnes. He of the invention of the awesome bass competition format Propper Droppers and the fitting of a massive unregulated alternator to his ride. Apparently, it can dial in all the way from 13.5 to 27 Volts DC! He has it tweaked to keep his power at 14.4V solid and reports firmer, meatier bass, even in traffic. It was fitted by Stuart Jevons of Team Hz Addiction (one of the loudest car audio teams out there, real 160dB psychos) and by Felix “I want to weld something” Doyley. Marcos Vectra Estate now rocks, as it has a monster alty in it.
Meanwhile, my publisher sent me this: (link bitly’d to fit the column format in sidebar)
Adam,
Someone asked me how many unique visitors a day TA gets, well I looked and it is between 3,000 to 5,000 depending on the time of year. However in looking, I noticed one huge spike on March 24th of 10k unique users hitting the site. Intrigued, I ran some stats and found that the majority of the traffic was hitting this page: link Sadly it looks like your Alex Butwell RIP message was shared around the web and viewed a plenty, not all traffic is good. đ
To which I replied, ‘Um, tragic but true, yet I disagree, as ‘good’ has more than one meaning. Yes, terribly sad…but a true goodness in that he was remembered and it resonated and he will not be forgotten. His loved ones might take comfort from how very many strangers cared about their Alex. Also, NO writer dislikes learning that they have had some REACH.’Â
Then, I added something about how I was going to use the bittersweet nature of the fact, to talk about community.
The only Old Guy thing I would add here, is that the Internet allows you to join the most specialised communities of all, like say Jaguar XJS rebuilder enthusiasts. But we aught not polarise too far. When it comes down to it, car audio is a small world and to see the petty jealousies and self importance and even the odd slice of entitlement going on upon Facebook and elsewhere and getting in between what we all love and sharing it together is a crying shame. It’s about that bass and the singer placed close enough to kiss. It’s about the open road and how acceleration matching crescendo, be it Prodigy or Yello or Lionel Ruddy Ritchie, can move your very soul.
Adam Rayner On Line Editor