What is the loudest noise you have ever been personally responsible for creating?
In my case, I once flew a jet trainer called a Fouga Magister, which is one of the loudest planes in existence. I didn’t realize how much noise I had made until later when I saw someone else fly it, and the racket was unbelievable. Never heard anything like it - waaaaaaay louder than a typical airliner or modern fighter (without afterburners).
So I wonder if anyone here has a job testing explosives or stadium public address systems…
It took me a while to think of it, but the loudest sound I’ve ever made is when firing blank bullets from a gun (who’s name I can’t remember. It’s non-deac verson is a .44 and has a triangular barrel on the outside) under a motorway bridge (which enhanced the echo)
Back in the day I used to cook at Pizza hut. The personal pan pizzas were made and cooked in these small 7" cast iron pizza pans. I was in the back of the resturant kitchen when I dropped a stack of about 30. It must have sounded like a train wreck. The whole resturant was shocked into silence.
My last auto accident. The sound of my front bumper snapping off could be heard in the back of my office building (the fender bender happened as I was leaving work).
Empty recording studio; Gibson Les Paul Custom; chain of six Marshall amplifier stacks, cranked up to 11.
You couldn’t be in the room with it, but boy did it ever sound great through the control room speakers! We just wanted to see what it sounded like. A power E chord rattled the whole freakin’ building. It was heard at the farm on the next property.
Firing off two Super Blackhawks at the same time. I was at the local firing range just outside of Fort Worth. Both pistols were on the table/rest thingy. Some big huge redneck comes over talking trash about how only a “real man” can handle 44s, and how you have to hang on real tight with both hands, etc. yada yada yada. I looked up at him (he was big), looked at my pistols. Then, I picked them both up, cocked them both on the upswing, and fired down range at the target. As luck would have it (pure dumb luck), both shots hit the paper. Then I set the pistols down and winked at the big guy. He wandered back to his buddies and was quiet the whole afternoon.
It was very loud, the recoil of both guns together was pretty ugly, and the muzle blast was impressive too. I never did that again
My band once opened up for a major act at a venue that held ~10,000 people. On stage I had 8 or 10 full Marshal stacks. Those were mic’ed and sent out through the PA. It was LOUD. When I hit the first chord during sound check I almost s*** myself.
On a side note: When I got my first Crate full stack I took it home and turned it up. I played for a while making tons of noise. When I was done I went into the kitchen and opened a cabinet to get a glass. About 4 glasses fell out. The amp was so loud it shook all the dishes to the front of the cabinets. I had to go around, open the cabinets and catch whatever fell out. Man, i was fun.
When we were irresponsible teenagers, me and my brother hooked our guitars and microphones up to a large amplifier in our back yard one Saturday afternoon, and started playing the blues. After about twenty minutes a red-faced man ran into the yard and screamed at us “you’ve got five minutes to stop, or I’m calling the fucking police!” (To which I responded with an improvised song called The Five Minute Blues, that went “I’ve got five minutes to play/Before they come and take me away”.) :wally
A friend dropped by later to say that she had been walking in the hills past the next village to ours, about three miles away, and could hear every word we were singing. :o
In my reckless early-teen years, A friend and I used to make explosive devices; I won’t share the recipe here (and please don’t enquire/suggest), but it’s one that terrorists have been known to use.
We thought it would be cool to make a cannon, so my friend took a section of stout steel tubing from an old office chair, welded a steel plug in one end and drilled a fuse hole. We packed it with a little of our explosive mix, rammed down some cotton wool and dropped in a suitable-sized ball bearing. We positioned the thing on an old tree stump, lit the fuse and retired (to what turned out to be a completely unsafe distance). There was a sort of high-pitched whistle, then the most enormous BOOM! I have ever heard - the shockwave was like a punch in the stomach - we were both stunned and deafened. When we found what was left of our cannon, it was a flattish, twisted plate of metal - the tube had split right open flat (I think it tore open starting at the fuse hole).
Testing the thing on a tree stump was my idea; my friend had wanted to mount it on a homemade rifle stock and fire it handheld.
You can’t compete with jet engines and guns with mere loudspeakers but anyhoo:
Not quite a stadium public address system. A friend and I ran a PA business for a few years and we had a regular club gig, bands during the week raves Friday/Saturday. Normally for raves we would beef up the 3 Kilowatt***** band rig with another 2-3K of Turbosound boxes. This brought the SPL up to acceptable****** hard-core rave levels (this was not a big club). One week we were lent (for a demo) another 5K rig and a 2 by 21" sub-bass unit ~600W. So we put all that in too. 8 foot high PA stacks on three sides of the room. With this all this fired up you could feel the sound vibrating your internal organs, the floor shook, the CD wouldn’t track. With the room empty it was indescribably loud. Imagine standing right next to a Marshall stack at full blast but you’re in the middle of the room and the nearest speaker is 20 feet away. I wonder how many punters we deafened? I swear it was loud enough to blind people.
*****Horn-loaded PA system Watts, not home stereo “Watts”.
******ie, unbearably loud.
Dad once showed me how to make an ANFO bomb. We set it off in a marsh and it was really load. Someone actually called the police and said that they thought a jet must have crashed nearby.
Also, we used to fill balloons with acetylene and oxygen and set the off with a cigarette. That made a satisfying BOOM. I quit when I discovered that acetylene would self-ignite sometimes. I was pleased when my eyebrows grew back. I eventually learned that drinking can impair your judgement badly.
