Did you know that maggots are used in Forensic Science to determine how long a body has been lying before it’s found? How vile is that? It’s about temperature and various details of the morphology of the larvae. You can tell how old a maggot is but only if you are an entomologist or insect scientist.

One day an insect scientist became a forensic scientist and asked if her colleagues knew that they could date a body by the look of the maggots’ guts? Grossed out, they admitted they didn’t but soon after that a whole putrid arm of forensics was opened up as science was applied and development against temperature tables were devised.

I personally may be as odd as that entomologist turned forensic scientist, for I am educated in Geology to degree level (that’s rocks and earthquakes and stuff) and as well as having found myself gripped by Seismology (which is just earthquakes) I have been in the lifetime grip of Bassology.

As well as this car stuff I live for, I review huge subwoofers for Home Cinema Choice magazine. The last ones I checked out were part of an £80,000 7.2ch set from KEF in Maidstone, where I went to review them. They had two 1,000 watt RMS 18 inch active subwoofers in the room. It was stupendous. The same magazine call me “The UK’s foremost expert in extreme audio”. And this event is probably why, as down the years I have occasionally let my guard down and admitted some of the more insanely bass-laden experiences that the world of car audio has brought me. Like the time Mmats barbecued me in their Room Of Doom at a CES one year and inspired me to write a cartoon series that was so much fun we are going to do it again.

Drawn by Julian Sewell it is of course, Son of BoomZilla and will be coming soon.

Meanwhile, I have been obsessed with bass my whole life. I was converted at my big posh public school. The head of music was running a lunchtime talk called “Noises Loud & Obscene” I don’t recall the preamble. I vaguely recall the rugby songs he played on the weedy school speakers. I was moved to my very soul by what happened next.

He sat at the school organ and literally pulled out all the stops. He positioned his feet carefully as a lot of the notes were on the bass pedals and then he let rip with the most baroque performance of Toccata And Fugue in whatever key it is (D Minor) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The school hall rippled with bass down to 25Hz.

I was so affected that years later I persuaded the bloke in my year who played the organ, to play it while I was sneakily allowed into the area where the pipes are housed and climbed up into a gallery of tiny whistles of different types. It was so loud as the 36 foot long Big Pipe sounded from the floor below that I was falling out of the gallery and only was able to tell by sight as the granules in my Cochleae were being so heavily vibrated (remember this is a BIG ‘whistle’ with air going one way, not in and out like speakers) that my Organ of Corti was just useless. It was scary and I had to grab for my life. I suppose modern bass systems could do this but I was standing upright and you can’t do that in a car…..

Go forward a few years to about a decade ago and there I am reading the USA press about American cars with their insane so-much-better-than-the-UK systems in hearses and taking up the whole beds of pickup trucks and longing to experience them so bad I could taste it. Then, as now the SPL or loudness readings that the Yankee competition cars could raise were some ten decibels louder than the best we could do. They had names like Terminator or Assassinator and they had a dozen or more woofers in them. I recall Kevin O’Byrne’s simple description of a queue shuffling tighter in an effort to get into a show in the 90’s in the USA as one of these Ground Pounders started up in the other side of the fence. He captured the spirit of the feeling of the moment and it was one of those things that just affirmed my status as a hopelessly obsessed nutter.

Pavement Shaker was another term they used and it got me to thinking. Not only was I by now employed in the mobile electronics trade but my boss was building an incredible 24x15incher demonstrator in an effort to be the first UK ever 150dB plus install.

The Brand was Earthquake of San Francisco.

Seismic the Dodge Ram day van died in a mysterious electrical fire, which made owner Mark Nathwani of InCars literally break down and weep like a baby on the phone to me, (which was a bit difficult as I was kinda emotionally involved too so it got bit weepy all round) and in the BoomZilla cartoon strip, there was an aside for a funeral. The Nathwani brothers had bunches of 1/0 gauge cable in two colours instead of a bouquet next to a huge grave where the burned Dodge Ram van was being lowered and the text read,

The second install Nathwani had built for InCars holds the Fukuda-esque position of being the only one that ever won the top class in both SPL and SQ, with 157dB and an astonishingly high quality job by Paul Richardson and Alberto Lopez and Nathan Pearce. (A little known fact is that it managed 162dB during a mad never-repeated “what-happened-there-then?” test run.)

It was called Son of Seismic.

Then my life changed and without doing the CV I found myself on Fast Car magazine and was thinking of a way to really make a splash with a cool feature. I had been wanting to do this idea for ages and got it green lit.

I would create an “Earthquake” with car audio systems. Bass so loud it literally shook the ground beneath your feet. I put on my best public school accent and phoned the Edinburgh offices of the august British Geological Survey. I got on like a house on fire with the chap at the BGS and he was at first incredulous and then entertained. We could all go up to their seismometry station and give it a wobble and they would give us a Richter Magnitude reading. And then it dawned upon him that if we really, truly could shake the ground, then we would be at risk of occluding a genuine reading from a seismic event somewhere else in the world and their responsibility to the greater global seismic metering community was paramount.

So they gave me the number of a company called Vibrock limited. They make Seismographs and as well as being Civil Engineer types, they are members of all three Societies Of Professionally Blowing Things Up A Lot.

(That’d be the Institute of Quarrying, Institute of Explosives Engineers, Institute of Civil Engineers and the International Society of Explosives Engineers. Badass.)

So I called up all the bass heads and asked Fast Car to pay for the meter and asked the boss of Santa Pod if we could go and boom it up. To their credit they all said “Yes!” The ‘Pod said as long as they get a credit. And to their undying credit they have let me do it again. And again. (You can see the original 10 year old article here)

Now in it’s third go and ten years on, we have refined the technique.

We have hardened the science.

The systems have gotten stupefyingly more powerful and logarithmically louder.

This time, again with Fast Car, who own the history of it, we did it with the scientists from Vibrock present, independent witnesses and a TV crew as well as the Fast Car stills snapper and our own Guru on the TA lens.