Please 'Boom' Responsibly As most of you have noticed, the noise ordinances have become much tougher lately. Most of this is due to idiots, yes IDIOTS, who drive through residential areas with their windows down while their system is playing at full power. To make things worse, the music they listen to has all sorts of foul language that's not suitable for small children, (who may be playing outside). There are even a few people, who are even beyond idiot status, that play their systems at full power through residential areas after 10:00 PM (when many people go to bed). I don't believe that this type of behavior is good for the industry. If the fines get too stiff, people will stop buying large systems. If this happens, more people will get out of car audio (who wants a mediocre system). People get interested in things because they're exciting. A deck and four 6.5" speakers are not going to interest many of the younger car audio enthusiasts. If car audio enthusiasts keep annoying more and more people, the fines will keep getting tougher. All of this will only reduce interest in the equipment that fuels the industry. If you want to listen to your system at full volume, get out on the highway where there's little chance of bothering anyone. When you get to a red light, turn it down. If the only thing attractive about you is your 'system', you have some work to do. Bottom line... Think about what you're doing. Think about other people. It's not the end of the world if you have to turn the volume down for a little while.

Power:
Power is a measure of the amount of work that is being done at a given point in time. If there were a tractor pulling a plow (or any other device doing work) at a given rate of speed, it is doing a certain amount of work. The actual amount of work being done is determined by the load presented by the plow (the amount of soil being turned) and the rate that the tractor is pulling it. To pull the plow faster, the tractor's engine has to produce more power.

The power that an amplifier can produce is determined by the load presented by the speaker's voice coil and the amount of electrical force that the amp can apply to the woofer's voice coil. I'll go into more detail on these topics (amplifiers, electrical power, speakers, speaker loads... NOT tractors :-) later in this tutorial. In the following demo, you can see that the cone only moves a little at low power but more at high power. Click on the blue buttons to go from high power to low power.

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