quote:
How in the world do they get these absurd numbers?
Just up my alley. I used to be heavily involved in the Sound Quality (SQ) side of car stereo.
I still have a lot of friends in the sport/hobby. There is a lot of work that goes into a DB Dragster. Think of them as the top fuel of car stereo.
Have you ever actually needed to travel a quarter mile in under 4 seconds?
The top DB Dragsters usually push in excess of 50,000 Watts. They use arrays of phase aligned 10" to 18" woofers. The vehicles are not very driveable, they go from the trailer to the "lane" to the trailer.
Most of the vehicles have been seriously sound deadened, and any opening that is not necessary has been welded shut. The windows and windshileds replaced with thick plexiglas and reinforced with steel.
The walls the the woofers are monted on are often made of metal. The power supplies are massive, dozens of batteries, capacitors, multiple alternators.
These are speciality machiens.
Check out:
http://www.kicker.com/kcsc/mainx.show_page?p_filename=GatesdBDrag1.htm
The real trick is that you can get a fairly exact volume measurement for the inside of the vehicle. You can easily calculate the resonant frequency for this volume. Then you can find a driver that resonantes near this point. Next, you find the point in the recording that you want to use that has the most energy at this frequency. Now you put that on an A/B auto repeat loop. Voila, a big burst of sound.
Most of these vehicles play for two seconds or less in competition.
So what't it all for? Reaserach and development. Just like real time drag racing provides information on auto parts in high stress conditions, DB Drag provides information back to the manufacturers about how their components work at the highest levels of stress.
The guys at Kicker RMA can disect a woofer or Amplifer that is returned and tell you what caused it to blow up. Then work on improving constants in the next generation of the product.
And it is a lot of fun to watch these cars go at each other, stuff is always smoking or melting or blowing up.
Everybody has to have a hobby. And this one beats drugs.
-Fat Bob