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“And don’t forget to breathe.”
These are the last words I hear before the doors shut, and I forget to breathe. I’m choking on air pressure, disoriented by displacement, and all I do remember is that someone said there’s a panic button a few inches to my right—a big red button I desperately want to punch through the wall.
But I force myself to inhale, will myself to exhale, keep my clenched fist tight to my chest, and 45 seconds of suffocating cycles later, the doors reopen. Shaking my head, my thoughts begin to settle, and I start to remember where I am, why I’m here, what I’m hearing.
I’m in Tempe, Arizona, in the garage at the headquarters of audio solutions designer and distributor Rockford Fosgate. I’ve just staggered out of the mobile SoundLab “Pressure Chamber”—a purpose-built enclosure in the back of a van that produces a low-end onslaught to demonstrate the brute force of four 19-inch T3 super-woofers, eight 6.5-inch Punch Pro midrange woofers, four Punch Pro bullet tweeters, and 11,000 watts of power. This exercise in excursion punctuates a day where I’ve toured every decade and company department to see how speakers and amplifiers are engineered for elevated performance and adrenaline spikes.
A lot goes into output
If you’ve been into car audio, you’ve probably been in a car with some Rockford audio. The company was launched in 1980 by Jim Fosgate, who invented the Punch EQ in 1973 to make music more impactful before introducing the first car amplifiers to form the brand’s foundation. In the mid-1980s came Punch woofers, followed by computers, decoders, source units, signal processors. From four amps to over 40 years goes the story—hundreds and hundreds of components for mobile, marine, and motorsports. All recognizing that you can’t just take a car…
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