GRAMOPHONE DREAMS

Jamming with cans

- BY HERB REICHERT

Most of what I know about audio I learned from drag racing. That's where I first recognized the relationship between force, geometry, and sound.

When I was barely out of high school, I began consciously picturing sounds as a symphony of forces operating in a Cartesian space. In retrospect, this “Cartesian picturing” was probably inspired by the descriptive geometry class I was taking at Wright junior college in Chicago, but I didn't think of that at the time.

In my partner's tiny wood-framed garage, revving an engine with racing headers and no mufflers was a Level-6 noise event that made hot, pressurized air crackle in my ears like machine-gun fire.

The exhaust was loud, but I was standing close enough to the engine that I could distinctly hear cooler air and fuel hissing as it rushed into the carburetor at extremely high velocities. Meanwhile, the exhaust was heating and pressurizing the entire plywood room, shaking its flimsy walls. Kids on bikes standing just outside the open garage door told me they felt the hot wind.

This high-drama sound was easy to picture as a vectored three-dimensional force, with temperature coefficients.

I remember how the next day, while towing our car to Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisconsin, I once again pictured the sounds around me on a three-axis graph.

Racing Sundays started early and quietly, not talking to my partner Bill sitting next to me, driving hungover with my ears tuned to the myriad vibrations transmitted through the trailer hitch on the back of a blue '49 Plymouth. Picture a homemade car trailer fashioned with diamond plate and square steel tubing painted machine green carrying a gutted, hoodless, windscreen-less, chalk-white '58 MG bolted to a home-made chromoly frame, powered by a Chevy small block. Total investment: $750.00, including the home-brew deep-sump oil pan.