Billion Watts in the Speaker [video] | Hacker News Reader

Billion Watts in the Speaker [video]

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Good to see him doing well. I think he single-handedly keeps the national grid on their toes.

The most powerful circuit I ever made dealt with 100A continuous and 200A peak at 24V, this guy is is simply on another level I can't even begin to wrap my head around.

He is the OG madlad. Been following his channel since the beginning!

Wow, that whole video gave me the willies! I almost killed myself once with a mere 400V across a flashgun capacitor. He had 20kV across many orders of magnitude more capacitance. I'm definitely not going anywhere near that contraption ;-)

He feels like an old friend. One of the first real "youtubers" even before that was a thing. Been watching him since the beginning I think.

At some point he mentions the "missus", and I remember him going through a divorce/breakup at some point (maybe because he kept on blowing things up in his attic...). Glad to see he's got someone in his life again, it looks like he's doing well!

Anybody who likes this will absolutely love Styropyro channel

https://m.youtube.com/@styropyro?ra=m

The mapping between audio gear and the power grid is pretty close. AC power and audio waveforms are basically the same thing. If you connect a speaker directly to normal mains power, it will operate briefly before burning out. You'll get a very loud 60 or 50 hz test signal depending on where you plug it in. There are some drivers large enough that they can withstand this power level indefinitely. The car audio market has some pretty crazy designs.

There are pro audio amplifiers that are capable of producing >120v RMS at their output terminals. I would be much more interested in seeing a youtuber purchase one of these and attempt to run a bunch of household appliances using it. Blowing up random shit with ridiculous amounts of power got pretty old for me as a form of entertainment.

true, I was speccing a bom for a huge output SET amp, slowly buying bits and pieces during lockdown, then I did a bit of wiring on my house and got a minor shock from the mains, threw out everything realising that such a mistake during the amp build would result in a major headache and lifelong trauma for my wife.

That is an absurd amount of power. Even this guy thinks it's crazy and dangerous:

https://sound-au.com/project117.htm "One flash and you're ash !" 260 VOLT DC POWER RAILS!

All you really need is 100 W for a good home HiFi. I have a set of the shorter Magnepan (forget the model) with a decent 100W Sony amp and at mid volume is too loud to comfortably listen to yet sounds very crisp and clear with a sealed 12 inch sub driven by a 150 W amp.

I was looking at 100wpc (single ended), not much output but the plate is around 1000v iirc, hundreds of mA, continuous draw from the power supply could run into hundreds of watts.

Easily enough to switch me off permanently if the screwdriver slips.

I totally forgot about that website. I built this amplifier many years ago:

https://sound-au.com/project3a.htm

It had so much capacitance on the DC bus that you could run it unpowered for a solid minute with actual program material.

> can withstand this power level indefinitely

What power level? 120V on a 15A breaker?

I = V/R and a typical speaker is 8 ohms which does happen to result in 15A at 120V. Interesting.

> There are some drivers large enough that they can withstand this power level indefinitely. The car audio market has some pretty crazy designs.

I wonder how true the claims really are. Rod E. of sound-au.com even questions the claims. I see some cheap "1500" watt RMS 8 ohm speakers for like 150 bucks, might be a good test, plug it into the wall through a variac and turn up the power to the full 1500W and see how long it lasts. I am too lazy to look right now but I am sure someone has tried this and put up a video.

Here is an example of what I am referring to:

https://emaudio.com/product/12-custom-hand-built-subwoofer-8...

These competition grade units would probably trip your breaker before they burn up.

Indeed. Those dual 1 or 2 ohm coils, even in series, would pull 30 and 60 amps respectively at 120 VAC. You could feed it from a two pole 60 or 125 amp breaker though at 1 ohm it would pull 14400 W and likely not last very long.

I still would still like to see how long a so called 8 ohm 1500W speaker will survive on 100-120 VAC mains.

I worked for a manufacturer/importer of audio gear in Australia and if you have the gut instinct to question the rated watts then those are generally the peak watts in the nanosecond before the thing catches fire and gives up the ghost.

> There are some drivers large enough that they can withstand this power level indefinitely.

I'm pretty sure the 34" speakers he shows off at around 12:45 could do that. Some napkin maths says he could plug these directly into a electric dryer circuit and emit about 135db(!) at 50hz.

I hope he does some of that kind of shenanigans before launching the voice coil through the wall.

> electric dryer circuit

I have to take umbrage with this. Metal band Manowar clearly specified blowing one's speakers with rock and roll, not a electric dryer circuit.

Just by reading the title I've thought - it must be Photonicinduction! Glad to see that I was correct. True madlad!

With any of the "high power experiment" folks on YouTube, I'm always glad when they upload again... you start to worry after a few years!

I love how this video has a modern "podcast" setup, yet the lighting and camera quality are still consistent with a decade ago when I started watching the zany experiments.

Insane power. Also… kinda predictable ‘experiment’ if you have that kind of equipment? A railgun would have been more interesting, but I’m sure there are way more interesting applications than violence. Altho… what on earth could handle that amount of power?

He’s alive!!!

Mmmmm, popped it.

This is not really a HN subject, I think - that said, I really love this dude.

Popping up in my subscription-feed after 5 years was a highlight <3

And it def. IS nerdy :D

There was an almost NASA mission control-esque moment in a lot of my hacker-adjacent circles and chats when this video popped up.

If anything, we're all celebrating he's still alive!

Despite his best efforts, still alive.

He epitomises exactly who I'm hoping to bump into on the odd occasion I'd walk into a pub alone out of boredom. 50% everyday gentlemen 50% off the wall mentalist. Love his humour and mad schemes

> This is not really a HN subject

you're right, it isn't about AI/Jev/etc

I was thinking about him about a month ago. I was looking at some large transformer and thinking "Hmm I bet photoninduction would like this"

whats remarkable is he looks _younger_ now than five years ago. perhaps I should playing around with megajoules of power.

Perhaps it's the company he keeps? Jensen Wang would know a thing or two about that.

It was glad to see him again, but I think styroPyro is his spiritual successor. I would love to see them work together on something.

Spoiler: it becomes a compact one-time use railgun.

Actually only 7MW assuming a 4ohm speaker coil. Impressive but I've seen bigger bangs on youtube with even more energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC7sNfNuTNU

"Only" 7MW XD. The coil doesn't remain a coil for long, though, and it's hard to predict the behavior of the rapidly expanding ball of plasma.

styro was inspired by photonicinduction, by his own admission

I seem to remember a few years back this guy made a lot of noise about a "free energy" (ahem) device he'd invented and claimed he was giving the plans to China and Russia as a way of getting back at the UK government for some slight or other, then promptly dropped off the face of the internet in protest(?) I guess he's back.

IIRC it worked by using a big gyroscope to stay stationary while the earth rotated, causing 1 rotation every 24 hours. So not technically free energy, just taking it from the earth

I was quite worried that he'd gone off the deep end when he published that video

The way I understood his "free energy"-device back in the day, was supposedly trying to induce a current into a set of coils from the very tiny discrepancies between the earth's rotation and that of its magnetic field. How the gyroscope would play into it, is anybody's guess (alignment, I suppose?). Obviously, none of this would work, and I don't think he was in a particularly good place back then.

I saw an artwork like this before, maybe by Anish Kapur?

That’s not a very charitable interpretation. He was distraught about not being able to get his wife into the UK and was lashing out. He removed the video, he knows it was silly. Hopefully the situation was sorted.

It's just what I remembered, clearly I had no recollection of that part. My sympathies with him if he was in some kind of strife.

His wife is mentioned as being behind the camera in the latest video, so it sounds like it was sorted.

Yeah UK marriage visas are fucking expensive, long and humiliating.

Its one of those things that was borne out of tabloid panic (IMPORTING WIVES AND FAMILIES!!) which means that now everyone has to go through pain until a scandal or another panic causes a change.

It's exactly the same as the green card problem in the US. The UK is not exclusively bad here.

I don't know the specifics of the UK marriage visa process but as someone who went through the American one, I feel like it's not that bad in terms of visas. There's the usual bureaucracy but nothing terrible. Obviously my experience is Trump 1 through Biden administrations, Trump 2 has made it worse.

I remember him showing a cube with an outlet and a switch that could power a lightbulb. He eventually revealed that inside were just a bunch of lithium ion cells taken out of disposable vapes

Whatever came of his hydrogen/electrolysis project? He has talked before about how those big control panel boxes he made and the high voltage transformers were to contol some kind of high power electrolysis rig that would make a huge hot-air-balloon-like flame. Not sure if that was some kind of free energy effort or if he just wanted to make fire with electricity.

A stoichiometric mix of hydrogen and oxygen, which is what you get when you electrolyse water, will straight up detonate when ignited. A normal party balloon of the gas is like a gunshot when it pops. A 1meter diameter balloon will probably wake up a whole city.

He probably did it at a small scale, and realized how phenomenally stupid it is and declined to pursue the idea further.

Further reading: https://youtu.be/l9CI6KSV560?is=R8LTPX9esprEqmCp

5 years since his last vid, to make you feel old.

he kinda turned that speaker into a highly inaccurate railgun

How many HDDs will this crash

1.21 GW? Needs a flux capacitor.

Popped it

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