Sonic Boomers : Gut-Jarring Thumping Is Music to the Ears of ‘Bass Heads’--and Car Stereo Sellers

The woofer-induced concussion of bass explodes with the flick of a remote, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s thumping thunder sending the car shimmying down the Ventura Freeway.

Vision blurs, corneas swim in a turbulent sea of sonic waves. Temples sweat, teeth rattle, vertebrae sway.

A fire engine whips by, nearly unnoticed by a middle ear already in shock.

Thump, thump, thump. The mighty, mighty bass is working its pneumatic magic, billowing enough sound waves to blow-dry a wet head.

Todd Brown, 19, zaps the remote, tames the beast. He leans over from his extremely reclined driver’s seat.

“Moves a lot of air, don’t it?” brags the bass head stereo installer from Oak View. “Once I launched the windshield 20 feet.”

It’s almost a religious experience for thousands of teenage boys and other slowly maturing males across Southern California and beyond. Their cars are temples of sound where they spend hours paying gut-throbbing tribute to the goddess of thump.

But to the more treble-inclined, it’s all nonsense. Even worse, it’s annoying. The boom bears down on the innocents at stoplights, on quiet residential streets and in once-tranquil parks. Across the state, public outcry has led to laws and laws have led to tickets for car stereos making noise more than 50 feet away.

“It’s a $107 citation,” said Oxnard Police Officer Randy Cole, who estimates that his department writes about 25 loud-music tickets a month. “My policy is to enforce it to the letter of the law.”

But like many of his noisy compatriots, Junie Vicente could not care less.

“I got three tickets for noise pollution, but that’s not going to stop me from bumping. I gotta have bass,” the 25-year-old Oxnard resident says. “I just gotta. I trip on it.”

The backseat of his candy-apple red Camaro--with remote-controlled hydraulics--no longer exists. In its place stands a wall of woofers: six 12-inch bass-pounding speakers arranged in two solid rows of sound.

“I like the way it feels, the way it tears up the air. It’s like a giant walking down the road. Boom, boom, boom.”

One of Vicente’s favorite pastimes is pounding his bass until the sound waves begin to interfere with his neighbors’ television reception.

“I love watching the TV screens shake. That’s the ultimate. Oxnard knows who I am, baby!”

Car stereos are big business--about $2 billion a year nationwide--and few understand bass heads better than stereo manufacturers and installers.

“Instead of a muscle-car engine under the hood, these kids put a pair of 18-inch woofers and a 1,000-watt amplifier in the trunk,” said Keith Lehmann, a spokesman for the Torrance-based car stereo manufacturer Alpine Electronics of America Inc.

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A basic factory-installed stereo uses about 25 watts of power.

“They’ve basically transferred the power from the hood to the trunk,” Lehmann said.

It all started with the bass-driven rap of the late 1980s and the corresponding technology that enabled it to be heard in cars, said Isaac Goren, a stereo installer in Woodland Hills.

“The demand was already there, just waiting for the supply to happen,” Goren said.

Big bass has become a rite of passage and a status symbol of the 1990s, said Lehmann, a confessed bass head.

“Bass gives them power and influence. It lets them disrupt air for blocks and blocks.”

The average bass head is male, age 16 to 24, blue-collar, and is always looking for a bigger bass fix, according to statistics collected by Alpine, whose core customer is the bass head.

“They’re always looking to upgrade,” Lehmann said. “They’re never satisfied. Bass heads are compulsive and impulsive . . . and they’re driving the industry,” he said.

Vicente slides right into the demographic portrait. He earns about $20,000 a year working as a food purchaser at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, he says, but has pumped about $5,000 a year into his sound system.

He has 20 speakers and 1,400 watts of power. He wants more.

David Pichon’s making a pretty penny on bass from customers such as Vicente. He owns Custom Car Sounds in Ventura, a regular hangout for bass heads, also called boomers.

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“I got kids coming in here and spending what they’ll never have on stereos,” Pichon said. “I have one kid here who has spent $6,000 on a wall of woofers, 2,800 watts of power and a whole bunch else for his little Ford Escort.”

Pichon likes bass too--always has. At 31, he is the oldest bass head in his workshop.

Actually, it’s more of a studio, where half a dozen fellow boomers design and create their works of art. It takes a lot of talent, they say, to build a system that churns out as much noise as a giant power saw and still make it sound just right.

It’s a noisy place.

“We’re carpenters, engineers, designers, electricians and auto-body specialists,” says Merwyn “Bingo” Pamarang, 23.

Like many in the shop, Bingo has flirted with advanced degrees in several technical fields, but has found that, like a medieval apprentice, he learns from working for master stereo craftsmen.

“These cars are my resume,” Bingo says.

Junie Vicente and his Camaro are back again. He’s already spent $11,000 on his stereo, but now Vicente wants even more bass.

“There’s always room for improvement,” he says. “I never run out of ways to improve it. I don’t even think about the cost.

“It’s my wife, my baby, my Mona Lisa. It’s me. It’s who I am.”

Gene Hester, 23, is another favorite customer with sonic spending priorities.

He’s got a wall--eight 12-inch woofers--in the back of his Chevy Suburban. The wall renders the rear window useless, which is OK, because the backdoors are opened only to display Hester’s Plexiglas-covered piece de resistance: three amplifiers totaling 2,400 watts of power, a giant equalizer and a row of industrial-size fuses.

All told, Hester’s car has 24 speakers.

“I started out with six 12-inchers and they were facing up instead of forward,” Hester says. “But there were other systems out there that were better.” He starts to laugh. “Were better.”

Constructing a wall that faces the windshield has its benefits.

“You can’t get any closer to the bass than this,” Hester says. “You can’t hide from it. The wall throws it at the back of your head.”

Like Vicente, Hester has invested a good portion of his ego in his stereo.

When the portly Hester enters his car and grasps the joystick of power, he’s no longer the 300-pound kid from Oxnard who helps his parents sell household appliances. He becomes the Bigfoot of Bass, rattling foundations and prowling parking garages to set off car alarms.

“Chicks dig it,” Hester says with a beefy grin. “I get a lot of phone numbers on account of my system.”

But not all girls yield to the lure of bass bravado. Aspen Ahmad, 18, of Napa isn’t particularly impressed by her Ventura boyfriend’s booming bass stereo. Her love for 18-year-old Robert Smith is deeper than the low notes, she says.

“It’s really not something that’s ever impressed me about a guy,” Ahmad says.

Sitting in his white Chevy Suburban with his friend Brown one recent night, Smith waves off Ahmad’s criticisms of his stereo: 900 watts of power fueling nearly a dozen speakers.

“She says it gives her a headache, but you should see how she turns it up when she drives around with her girlfriends,” Smith says.

The guys are out for a drive in Smith’s Suburban.

Brown revels in bathing himself and everyone else around him in sound waves. Being heard from blocks away is handy, he says.

“I don’t ring doorbells anymore. I don’t even walk up to the front door. There’s no need.”

Smith is considering adding several more 12-inch woofers.

“My stereo is only so loud,” he concedes. “After a while you get used to it. I don’t feel it enough.”

Smith and Brown may not feel the music enough, but the Suburban does. Several nuts and bolts affixing the backseats to the chassis have already come loose. But it’s a big car and can handle more thump than Brown’s little Geo Prizm.

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“I’ve cracked the gas tank a couple of times and I can’t drive in the rain because the stereo makes the wipers jump across the windshield,” Brown says. “My stereo takes up so much energy it dims the headlights.”

His mother, Betty Brown, says she’s proud of her son’s engineering talents.

“I always wanted him to go to NASA, but he went into audio instead,” says Brown, who knows her son is home when the walls begin to vibrate.

But she’s concerned about his hearing.

“It’s a creative outlet and it keeps him out of trouble, but I worry about the damage to his ears.”

Her concerns are more than a mother’s irrational fears, according to Jane Snyder, an audiologist at UCLA’s medical center.

“Bass is a problem,” Snyder said. “It’s a whole-body experience and these kids get addicted to it. But they’re risking serious hearing damage when they expose themselves to it at high volume for a sustained period of time . . . especially in a car where there is no exit for the sound waves.”

Snyder said she’s tempted to hand out her business card to kids cranking their stereos on the streets of Los Angeles.

“I’ll be seeing them in five years anyway,” she said.