SEVEN 21-inch subs? OK, here’s my tenuously related old-audiophile anecdote.
When I was a kid in the early 70s, some friends dragged me to an attic bedroom in an old hippie house to smoke weed with two older Haitian guys that I didn’t know. The room was something like 25x6 feet, long & narrow.
At either end they had one of those giant metal horn speakers you see mounted on towers at rock festivals. Almost as tall as me. I should have run as soon as I saw them.
These guys were really proud of their system, but were also very scary. Without saying a word, one of them cued up Mountain’s first album. Mountain. Of course.
The lead-in groove surface noise was deafening, but when the music started, I couldn’t hear anything at all. The only thing I remember is an intense sheet of pain bisecting my head. No sensation of hearing sound.
And to complete the mind-f**, the second guy put on a strange display while the music was playing, furiously dancing around the room waving a big-a** knife under our noses & grasping a humanoid cloth doll, as if to psych us out with some sort of drugged-up faux voodoo ritual. I’m sure they thought it was funny.
We left as soon as we recovered enough to rub two thoughts together. Even today, decades later, I still can’t hear "Mississippi Queen" without flashbacks to that terrifying experience. The wages of sin.
And that’s why I became an audiophile!