A combination of "enjoying loud music and building things" has resulted in the 18-month-long creation of an enormous DIY sound system.
Say hello to Pad Thai Hifi -- the brainchild of CAD worker Joss Redfern.
The Hifi comprises two Matrix XP5000 powered amps for the lower end and two Behringer EP2500 amps for the top end, with digital speaker management from a Behringer Ultradrive. Three amp channels work the sub-bass alone, which kicks out around 8,000W and powers the 18-inch V18-1000 speaker in the six specially-built "Hog" bass-bins. Most DIY soundsystems use a maximum of four bass bins.
Why Pad Thai? "It just sounds pretty awesome and rhymes a little," Redfern told Wired.co.uk. "I might of been taking the piss out of a friend saying a dubstep phrase, peng and said it sounded like a Thai food."
According to Redfern, putting the soundsystem together was a gradual process, the beginnings of which were as a distraction aid from final year degree work. He told Wired.co.uk, "I went on a few forums like Speakerplans.com when I was bored. There's this really good, active community of people making their own designs and posting plans. It's phenomenal how much there is to read about it all."
It wasn't long until Redfern started buying equipment, which had a steep learning curve. "Biting the bullet and buying my first two amps and suddenly needing to learn how to use all of this new power was amazingly exciting." As was having to work out how to use his first ever crossover, which came with no instructions but plenty of wires, dials, buttons and a fairly large chance of blowing a few speakers.
Those first two bedroom amps are now used as the monitors on the soundsystem.
The quest to go bigger and bigger has remained a continual aim in Pad Thai Hifi's creation. Redfern said: "At the time of building the first section it felt absolutely massive, then we moved onto building something with four 12-inch bass bins and it felt huge. I remember standing on top of it and just getting silly excited and realising that if I was going to do it, I may as well do it properly and go really big."
So he did. The current behemoth, referred to by Redfern as "stage two", came into being in October 2010. It was only when the team heard it shortly before its launch party that they truly learned what they created. "It was unbelievable; so over the top. You could kind of feel it in your body." Not bad for something that started out as a "heap of wood".
At that launch party in a warehouse in Newcastle, Pad Thai Hifi was used in its entirety. After nearly five hours of performance, the police turned up to stop the fun -- announcing that windows across the city were being gently shaken.
Redfern is currently hacking apart a van into a campervan designed to house the system, with the measurements of the vehicle corresponding to speaker parts, for easy Transformer-style conversion. Once it's on the move, you too may be able to hear Pad Thai Hifi shaking the windows of a town near you.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
