Other dudes seem to enjoy throwing gasoline on already raging campfires. I am assuming that these guys are already in possession of a neck that is quite red, and judging by the intensity of the resulting fireball, the rest of their bodies will be red as well. At least until they recover in the burn ward.
I am not sure which part of the male DNA sequence compels men to mess around with fire, combustible materials and stuff that produces smoke, but it must be an atavistic reaction which dates back to prehistoric times. Why else would someone destroy a perfectly good pair of high performance tires while doing burnouts to impress his buddies ? Or other inexplicable endeavors such as blowing up perfectly good birthday cakes, setting their own pants on fire while igniting beer-fueled methane emissions and revving motorcycle engines to RPM's approaching infinity itself. It's a dude thing.
What you don't see, is rednecks messing around with electronics. Electronic devices have the potential for entertaining, albeit , small fireworks displays. I guess it just isn't destructive enough for the average beer-swillin' on a Sunday pick up drivin' dude. They don't know what they are missing. I haven't destroyed any audio equipment in a long time, intentionally or otherwise, but I have had some fun over the years.
1. Resistors are futile.
One of my jobs in audio as a youth was in an electronics shop. There was nothing being sold in that store that held my interest. It was in a mall however, and my coworkers and I would enjoy eating lots of junk food, drink prodigious amounts of coffee ( as audio salesman are wont to do ) and blare music directly into the mall just for the hell of it. It wasn't all bad, and at the risk of dating myself, we sold CB radios and accessories, of all things.
If anyone reading this has ever worked in audio or retail in general you might relate. You might think that you have the "retail customer from hell" tale to top all tales, but that's because you have never had to deal with the average CB radio customer. We also had a CB radio base, which was eventually put out of commission. Something to do with the CRTC sending us warning letters about "excessive cursing" on the air.
The worst part of this job was doing inventory. We had thousands of resistors and capacitors stored away in little drawers.They had to be counted one by one every few months. If any of you know about resistors you are aware that each little stripe denotes a value. This was pre -internet and we had to use one these primitive gizmos to determine the value of those very small components.
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| Gigs hadn't been invented yet |
During my time there, my older, and more experienced in the ways of mischief co-workers, showed me a few things that we could do to alleviate the boredom and pass the time. We had a very large variable power supply in the store. One could take a resistor and hook it up to the positive and negative leads. Simply crank up the voltage until the thing would get red hot and eventually explode with a satisfying pop. Resistors are also rated in Watts, so we also had some humungous 100 W resistors the size of sausages. It took a lot of juice, but those suckers would fry.
Come inventory time there were far fewer resistors to count and the mall manager never did figure out what the funny smell that always seemed to linger in front of the store was.
2. Quad que c'est ca ?
While I didn't destroy anything myself in this particular situation, I find it entertaining nonetheless. I had somehow gotten roped into going to some suburban backyard barbecue. Then, as now, I rarely ventured out into the suburbs. There was plenty of food to go around, but I was still bored to the point where I could kick a dog ( relax, it's just a figure of speech). As booze started to lubricate the squares attending this function, it was decided that there should be music. The host hauled his speakers outdoors and that was a sign that the " fun" was about to start.
They were expensive speakers, but I can't recall the brand. Acoustics 101: don't put your speakers outside. The lack of room boundaries is sure to wreak havoc, and you will likely end up with a pair of blown speakers. As the, ahem, music commenced, my annoyance factor soon increased. The bad sound of an amplifier being clipped combined with the same lame music heard at weddings and barbecues around the world soon outweighed the amount of booze available to drown out this cacophony.
As the party-goers contorted and flailed about to the music ( like looking at a car crash, I swear !) the amplifier kept cutting out. The constant breaks in music elicited cries of disappointment from the more than slightly inebriated guests. Not unlike the drunken aunties who would pinch your cheek hard enough to draw blood when you were a kid, all the drunken aunties that were present zeroed in on me. " Get Serge to fix it, he's the stereo guy". There was nothing to fix; the dude was over-driving his QUAD 405 amplifier. He was cranking the boogers out of that poor low powered amp and the thing was overheating. Unlike the guests who were getting louder ( and more obnoxious) which each passing drink, this amp had the good sense to shut itself down.
I reluctantly went indoors to assess the situation. This dude was starting to annoy me with all of his technical theories and would not listen to reason. He then proceeded to argue the fact that QUAD meant that it was quadrophonic while deftly ignoring the fact that there was two sets of terminal designed to drive one pair of speakers. I tried to explain, but it fell on deaf ears. I pulled out the geek card and told him that QUAD is an acronym for Quality Unit Amplifier Domestic. Nothin'. I concluded with " Just put big bag of ice on top of the amp then, that should fix it". He proceeded to do just that. Yeah, it turns out that melting ice and 'lectricity don't mix.
I still hear about this bullshit at family dinners.
3. How Bose Can you Go?
Back in the day, as now, regardless of how knowledgeable you may be, in the audio business, you are only as good as your last sale. I don't know a lot of used Toyota salesman that can re-build a transmission, but sales is sales and the bottom line rules. I found that out soon enough when I was starting out in audio business when I did not hit my quotas and found myself on my ass.
I needed a new job and reluctantly accepted a position at some chain stereo store that could be best be described as a predecessor to today's big box stores. They sold brands that I had absolutely no interest in. It wasn't youthful arrogance, all that stuff was junk. When I think back, my opinion hasn't changed. I might have been inexperienced, but I had good ears and I knew crap when I saw ( and heard it). I must reluctantly admit that a few of those pieces are now collector's item and maybe I should have purchased a couple of those Marantz tuners with a built-in oscilloscope. Like baseball cards, who knew back then?
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| Can also detect cockroaches |
Of all the brands that have come and gone , this one remains at the top of the list of stuff that makes angry. It wasn't the fact they sounded horrible ( screeching midrange and tubby bass), or that they tried to rope people in with that direct/reflecting nonsense or the fact that they required a ridiculous equalizer box to barely even function ( to be hooked up in a tape monitor loop no less). It was all the marketing hype that went along with it. The hype was successful because, sadly, a lot of people bought into it. Never mind that Bose refused to divulge what was inside that black box and that the grilles were glued on with adhesives no doubt developed for holding buildings together. ( it's amusing to note that today, most of those black boxes have been lost, so people who buy used 901's are using them straight up, no box. Even dogs run away in fear).
It became my mission to take these down. It had always been a mystery and the cause of much speculation as to what was under those grilles. One of the main marketing ploys that Bose employed was their claim that you could absolutely not blow these speakers. Sounds like mighty big fightin' words to me. I set out to somehow get those grilles off and blow these speakers right to hell.
The manager was often absent, so I was pretty much left to my own devices. One day I brought a whole bunch of tools from home. After opening the shop, I made a beeline for the Bose. It literally took me a couple of hours to get those grilles off. It would have been easier to take an engine apart with my hare hands. It paid off, because my suspicions were confirmed. The speakers were made up of 9 extremely cheap paper drivers. That would certainly explain the shitty sound ( and weird impedance curve, I suspect). Now on to the next order of business. It was time to blow these suckers up.
I spent the rest of the day hooking up various large receivers and cranking The Ramones. Other than annoying the guys at the Radio Shack across the way ( this was also in a mall) I didn't succeed in accomplishing much. Those misshapen boxes must have had a 5 pound resistor inside or something, because try as I might, I couldn't fry them. At the end of the day, I more or less gave up and tried to get the grilles back on without anyone being the wiser.
I think that one of the 9 drivers might have been crackling, but the speakers were so shitty to begin with that I couldn't be sure. The grilles had wooden frames, and with out the 5 gallons of glue required to keep them on there, they also rattled. Made the speakers sound better in mind. I tried my best to steer customers away from these abominations, but people bought them anyway. I bought a Formula 4 Mayware Tonearm with my commission check and found another job. Somewhere out there, there might still be a pair of Bose 901's with rattling grilles.
4. I Didn't See Nuthin'.
Several years after that I somehow found myself employed at a job that had nothing to do with audio.
Circumstance led me there and but I found myself on the road to Shitsville soon enough. The 30 mile commute was bad enough, but I was soon relegated to the graveyard shift. Not sure how that happened, but it was fast enough to make my head spin. The graveyard shift presents its own insidious effects. Circadian rhythms cannot adapt to this unnatural way of living and one starts to slowly go loco. It was a large trucking terminal and there wasn't much going on at night, so boredom became an inevitable facet of this ridiculous job. This was also pre-internet, so entertainment was out of the question. All the work operations were done in cursive writing ( ask your grandpa). These were primitive, trying times.
I drank a lot shitty coffee and would sometimes wander around the vast, almost deserted terminal. Other than the time a big rig literally squashed the security shack on the way into the yard, there wasn't much excitement.
One night, I found a much larger photocopier than the one I had been using. As I indulged in a few hours of photocopying my face with various goofy expressions, I noticed some electronics high up on a shelf.
It was a PA system that I assumed was used to make announcements throughout the terminal and offices. It was a primitive gizmo and it was mono only. It was made by the Muzak Corporation. Yes, that Muzak. On a side note, I recently took an elevator in a downtown tower and they actually had elevator music playing. I didn't know that strange art form still existed, but it remains as creepy as it always was, with overtones of a lunatic asylum.
I did a walk-about and soon realized that the entire building was wired with dozens of speakers, many of them enclosed in the office ceilings.
There was no tuner hooked up to this system, but rather music was piped in ( via phone lines I assume) from Muzak's dedicated " music stations". Elevator music, all day, all night all the time. All that would succeed in accomplishing is making my already painfully dull job even more frightening. A lunatic asylum with a lot trucks and thousands of crates of Gillette razors. That is a slasher movie in the making right there.
Having a sound system on hand with nothing but seizure-inducing elevator music was like starving and having nothing but a case of Alpo dog food on hand ( and no can opener).
I had a lot of time on my hands to hatch plots, so I soon thought of something. The following night I brought a large cassette deck with me to work. Like I said, it was a long time ago, so everybody had a cassette deck. whether they liked it or not. I had planned this properly, so I had also brought an RCA y-adaptor and some long interconnects. I went to the basement and hooked up the cassette deck to the weird PA amp. Lucky for me it had an auxiliary input. I popped in a cassette and the entire terminal was filled with music. It was fairly bad sound and in mono to boot, but, hey it was something (and it was freakin' loud ).
I fiddled around with it for a few hours, having to go into the basement and walk about a thousand feet every time I had to change cassettes or adjust the volume. I soon grew tired of the shitty sound as well as running a marathon to mess with the controls. It was OK while it lasted but the novelty soon wore off. I unplugged the cassette deck and put into the trunk of my car before the boss arrived for the day shift.
Several days later I was called into the office. Something was "wrong" with the PA system and the boss had some questions. He didn't know about any of my interests in audio, it just seemed coincidental. I of course pleaded ignorance. Turns out that not only had I fried the amplifier, I had also managed to take out 12 speakers along with it.
5. The Good Ol' Days
Since I am indulging in nostalgia, I may as well include the story of the first thing I blew up. As mentioned in an earlier post, I started in the audio business at a fairly young age. It was a real blast being surrounded by expensive equipment and cranking music all day.
Expensive doesn't always mean good. This was the paleolithic era of high end audio and there was a lot bad stuff out there. Like I had mentioned, the transition from tubes to transistors was still a relatively new science, so there was a lot of harsh, bad-sounding gear of questionable reliability.
We had the misfortune of being an authorized Cerwin-Vega dealer. I hated those things as soon as I laid eyes on them. The speakers were covered in ugly grey carpet, which to me was a dead giveaway that these speakers were shitty. I didn't have a lot experience, but I had good ears. Also I was young, so I could probably still hear dog whistles. My suspicions were confirmed when I heard these monstrosities for the first time.
Strangely enough, Cerwin Vega also made amplifiers and they were just as ugly as their speakers. Audio stores used to crank more music back in the day it seems, and louder as well. One day, as I was firing up the vacuum cleaner, the music was already rockin' along at full blast. The Cerwin Vega amp was driving a pair of corner-mounted enormous Klipschorns. Sure it was loud, but it sounded horrible.
I stared at the amplifier for a while and pondered the fact that it looked stupid and amateurishly made.
It had brightly colored plastic switches on the face plate, and for some reason, the fuses were also mounted on the faceplate with the same brightly colored plastic.
Inexplicably, I felt the uncontrollable urge to hit the fuse button. They were spring-loaded like a power switch. Maybe it was an OCD kid moment. Like when you were a child and your dad told to you in no uncertain terms to not touch something: you just had to touch it. Maybe it's the same logic that causes kids to stick their tongues on frozen metal poles. I don't know, all I know is that I had to touch that switch. So I did.
The fuse popped out of it's holder and, almost simultaneously, a horrific sound emanated from the speakers. An incredibly loud howl was produced that sounded like a thousand giddy Justin Bieber fans. I think that I must have dropped pigeons for a 3 block radius and maybe fireman were on their way. As I scrambled to figure out which preamp this piece of shit, and seemingly possessed amplifier was hooked up to to lower the volume, I could also hear my boss shouting something about me being a " f***ing retard !" and smothering about being a " Yoisher" ( which I surmised to mean " f***ing retard in Yiddish).
I finally found the volume control and got that noise under control, but the damage was done. It turns out that I had been one of the few people in history who had actually managed to blow a Klipschorn. A few weeks later I learned how to replace one the 15 inch Electro Voice drivers in the labyrinthine entrails of a transmission line speaker while simultaneously being called a Yoisher.
I haven't blown up or fried audio equipment for many decades since those early experiences. I once smacked into the heat sinks of a Threshold amp while walking barefoot. I still have the scars, and no longer place very large amplifiers on the floor. Other than that, these days I am happy with popping bubbles on those jumbo bubble wrap sheets.
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