Factory car alarm problem?

adrienne224

Registered User
Noisy parkers
Some car stereos are so loud you can't actually sit in the car while they're on. Jonathan Hawley asks why. The list of injuries that can result from car accidents is long and terrible, yet there's a new automotive health hazard that has nothing to do with an actual crash. How, for instance, would you feel about a car that has been designed to send you totally and permanently deaf? It exists. In fact, hundreds of them are scattered about the country's capitals, and many thousands more in America. They are owned by people who, for want of a better phrase, we'll call car-stereo enthusiasts.
Their vehicles, crammed with What speakers (what are the best car speakers Carspeakerland.com), amplifiers, graphic equalisers and more electronic hardware than a Dick Smith store, have become life-support systems for an aural fix. And in terms of the amount of noise they produce, bigger is definitely better. It's the sort of car you'll hear on any busy night, on any shopping strip in any big city in Australia. You can hear it coming from a block away. Not its engine, exhaust or squealing tyres, but the stereo, booming away to a techno beat cranked up to impossibly high volumes. Most of us might enjoy a little quiet music on the tape deck, Vivaldi perhaps, a bit of Bryan Adams for the younger folk or Lubricated Goat for the alternative types.
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You might even like to turn the volume up a tad and sing along. Most people's idea of entertainment stops short, however, of perforated eardrums. According to the experts, it is not unusual for an enthusiast to spend $15,000 on a full system, and the occasional job might cost up to $40,000. For that, the car owner will get almost every internal panel of the vehicle covered in speakers, ultra bass-responsive sub-woofers will be hidden under the seats and the boot will be crammed with amplifiers, graphic equalisers and cross-over units that channel the right frequencies to the right speakers.
The car's electrical system usually needs to be upgraded to handle the extra power load, and at least one more battery is usually needed to keep everything running. Bruno Bercari, whose business Hypersound specialises in custom-built sound systems, says that there's a real art to getting the best sound out of a car. Speaker placement (what size speakers are in my car) is a paramount consideration, not just to ensure the best sound quality, but because it is becoming increasingly difficult to find spaces to fit the number of speakers needed to complete the job. "It's not just a matter of cutting a hole and screwing a speaker in," he says. "With ADR (Australian design rules) regulations, you're not allowed to physically cut metal away from a vehicle's body.
So what you do is you've got to make custom panels up, brace weld pieces of metal in if you've removed anything. It's carpentry, woodworking, motor trimming, you're half panel beating as well, you're using fibreglass, so you're basically a jack of all trades." There's also plenty of stories going around about back-yard operators willing to carve up a car with little regard of the consequences. Such as the BMW 3-series owner who had the car's parcel shelf turned into Swiss cheese so that a row of sub-woofers could be installed. When the back window fell out, he boasted it was because of the stereo's power.
What he didn't realise was that a parcel shelf is not for carrying parcels: the metal structure is there to hold both sides of the car together, and the amount of flex generated by removing it was basically turning his BMW into junk. "It's a professional game, it's not for someone to set up in their back yard and start cutting big holes in cars," says Bercari. "Especially now with the advent of airbags, if you stick the wrong wire in, then boom, you've got airbags going off." There's a whole different group of people for whom car stereos mean far more than just listening to music.
Competitions in which car owners pit their machines against each other are divided into two basic categories: the sound-off, in which the quality of the stereo installation and the purity of the sound is judged; and something called dB drag racing, which is interested in only one thing - pure volume. The dB drag racing scene, which started in America, involves two cars fitted with microphones parked next to a row of lights. Competitors have 30 seconds to produce the most noise, and whoever lights up the most bulbs wins. The stereos are operated by remote control, and everybody stands well back to avoid permanent ear damage. The Australian record for sound pressure level in such an event is 161.8 decibels. If you could be strapped to the outside of a Boeing 747 when it takes off, you would experience about 160 dB, and a very nasty headache.
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The American record in is a whopping 169.4 decibels, which is far louder because every gain of three decibels is an actual doubling of sound pressure level. The only worse place to be, apparently, is on the launch pad of a space shuttle when it is blasting off. The vehicle that recorded the American level was not your average car. The stereo system alone cost $250,000 to install, but it doesn't end there. The true heroes of the genre will actually fill every available cavity in the vehicle's body with cement. The doors, pillars and roof cavity are made rock hard so that no sound energy is lost through flexing panels. Such full-on attempts are rare at street level, but it is not unusual for a car's stereo to be worth more than the car itself.
Which, according to Bercari, is usually an innocuous-looking Honda or Suzuki. For instance, he recently installed a $20,000 system into a Honda Integra for a 20-year old P-plater. So why do they do it? Bercari reckons it's because there are few opportunities left for young people, particularly males, to modify their cars without attracting the attention of the police. Fully worked V8 Monaros, lowered to within centimetres of the ground and belching flames, are being made redundant by stricter emissions and roadworthy laws, so a properly installed mega-system is one way to personalise a car. Of course, if such a stereo is keeping the neighbours awake, then police do have the discretion to tell the owner to shut it down. Read more: Car Speakers Reviews How to choose the Best Car Speakers
In New South Wales they can impound the vehicle if it is too noisy. Think about that next time someone catches you humming away to your favourite Carpenters tune in a traffic jam. Don't worry, in the grand scheme of things you're actually fairly normal. WHAT ON EARTH IS ... OVERSTEER? Most cars these days are front-wheel-drive and generally understeer slightly as they corner, that is, they tend to straighten out and require a bit more turn of the wheel to get around the bend. With rear-drive cars, if you put enough power into the back wheels, the car will skid slightly into the corner and eventually spin out. Expert drivers can manipulate this oversteer to go around corners faster. Hoon drivers use it to do burnouts. Drunken idiots use it to crash into trees.
 
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