Loudest speaker on earth can melt your face off

I know some of you out there—the ones who drive by my house at 2 a.m. with your thump thump thump bass cranked up—who think you have a loud speaker system. Yeah, you're pretty proud of it, but you have no idea what a total rube you are when it comes to serious loudness: Wyle Laboratories is the proud owner of the loudest speaker on earth, the WAS-3000, and it puts garden-variety speakers to shame. (It's the smallish silver unit next to the technician in the picture above.)

The WAS-3000 is no spring chicken. It was built back in 1967 and remains, as far as anyone knows, the most powerful loudspeaker ever built, able to generate sound pressure levels up to 165 dB with just a single modulator. No, it wasn't designed to blast Buffalo Springfield or Procol Harum (which would not sound like music at all at that level), but rather to do acoustic wave testing on equipment via a "linearly controllable electro-pneumatic noise source." (What would you test with such a speaker? In part, it's been used to test whether jet engines and space shuttle components will fall apart when exposed to extreme noise and the vibrations that go along with them. It was built originally to simulate noise from the Saturn V launch.)

Putting 165 dB in perspective, that's louder than anything you'll likely experience in the natural world. Ear pain begins at 125 dB. Jets and gunshots can hit 140 dB. The space shuttle taking off is 150 dB, at which point it is said you will begin to feel like you're suffocating due to the sound pressure. 165 dB has been said to be loud enough to melt your earwax, though your eardrums probably won't rupture until you hit 180 dB. The loudest sound that is possible (due to the constraints of physics) is 194 dB.

Lord knows I never want to be in a situation where I'm counting decibels at such strasospheric levels, but I am happy at least to live in a world where an audio monster like the WAS-3000 exists. Remember: It's here to protect us.