The most powerful circuit I ever made dealt with 100A continuous and 200A peak at 24V, this guy is is simply on another level I can't even begin to wrap my head around.
Billion Watts in the Speaker [video] (youtube.com)
75 pointsby Element_3 days ago39 comments
bArray 5 hours ago
Good to see him doing well. I think he single-handedly keeps the national grid on their toes.
datas 3 hours ago
He is the OG madlad. Been following his channel since the beginning!
nickcw 8 minutes ago
Wow, that whole video gave me the willies! I almost killed myself once with a mere 400V across a flashgun capacitor. He had 20kV across many orders of magnitude more capacitance. I'm definitely not going anywhere near that contraption ;-)
bob1029 3 hours ago
The mapping between audio gear and the power grid is pretty close. AC power and audio waveforms are basically the same thing. If you connect a speaker directly to normal mains power, it will operate briefly before burning out. You'll get a very loud 60 or 50 hz test signal depending on where you plug it in. There are some drivers large enough that they can withstand this power level indefinitely. The car audio market has some pretty crazy designs.
There are pro audio amplifiers that are capable of producing >120v RMS at their output terminals. I would be much more interested in seeing a youtuber purchase one of these and attempt to run a bunch of household appliances using it. Blowing up random shit with ridiculous amounts of power got pretty old for me as a form of entertainment.
etcetcetcetceta 2 hours ago
true, I was speccing a bom for a huge output SET amp, slowly buying bits and pieces during lockdown, then I did a bit of wiring on my house and got a minor shock from the mains, threw out everything realising that such a mistake during the amp build would result in a major headache and lifelong trauma for my wife.
MisterTea 13 minutes ago
That is an absurd amount of power. Even this guy thinks it's crazy and dangerous:
https://sound-au.com/project117.htm "One flash and you're ash !" 260 VOLT DC POWER RAILS!
All you really need is 100 W for a good home HiFi. I have a set of the shorter Magnepan (forget the model) with a decent 100W Sony amp and at mid volume is too loud to comfortably listen to yet sounds very crisp and clear with a sealed 12 inch sub driven by a 150 W amp.
aaronax an hour ago
> can withstand this power level indefinitely
What power level? 120V on a 15A breaker?
I = V/R and a typical speaker is 8 ohms which does happen to result in 15A at 120V. Interesting.
MisterTea 38 minutes ago
> There are some drivers large enough that they can withstand this power level indefinitely. The car audio market has some pretty crazy designs.
I wonder how true the claims really are. Rod E. of sound-au.com even questions the claims. I see some cheap "1500" watt RMS 8 ohm speakers for like 150 bucks, might be a good test, plug it into the wall through a variac and turn up the power to the full 1500W and see how long it lasts. I am too lazy to look right now but I am sure someone has tried this and put up a video.
bob1029 33 minutes ago
Here is an example of what I am referring to:
https://emaudio.com/product/12-custom-hand-built-subwoofer-8...
These competition grade units would probably trip your breaker before they burn up.
MisterTea 19 minutes ago
Indeed, those dual 1 or 2 ohm coils. Even in series they would pull 30 and 60 amps respectively at 120 VAC. You could feed it from a two pole 60 or 125 amp breaker though at 1 ohm it would pull 14400 W and likely not last very long.
I still would still like to see how long a so called 8 ohm 1500W speaker will survive on 100-120 VAC mains.
trymas 2 hours ago
Just by reading the title I've thought - it must be Photonicinduction! Glad to see that I was correct. True madlad!
geerlingguy 2 hours ago
With any of the "high power experiment" folks on YouTube, I'm always glad when they upload again... you start to worry after a few years!
I love how this video has a modern "podcast" setup, yet the lighting and camera quality are still consistent with a decade ago when I started watching the zany experiments.
jcims 4 hours ago
He’s alive!!!
Eupolemos 6 hours ago
This is not really a HN subject, I think - that said, I really love this dude.
Popping up in my subscription-feed after 5 years was a highlight <3
And it def. IS nerdy :D
kotaKat 5 hours ago
There was an almost NASA mission control-esque moment in a lot of my hacker-adjacent circles and chats when this video popped up.
If anything, we're all celebrating he's still alive!
beloch 5 hours ago
Despite his best efforts, still alive.
ytxm 4 hours ago
He epitomises exactly who I'm hoping to bump into on the odd occasion I'd walk into a pub alone out of boredom. 50% everyday gentlemen 50% off the wall mentalist. Love his humour and mad schemes
gosub100 3 hours ago
> This is not really a HN subject
you're right, it isn't about AI/Jev/etc
KaiserPro 3 hours ago
I was thinking about him about a month ago. I was looking at some large transformer and thinking "Hmm I bet photoninduction would like this"
whats remarkable is he looks _younger_ now than five years ago. perhaps I should playing around with megajoules of power.
Ylpertnodi 3 hours ago
Perhaps it's the company he keeps? Jensen Wang would know a thing or two about that.
squidmaster 5 hours ago
Mmmmm, popped it.
barbegal 3 hours ago
Actually only 7MW assuming a 4ohm speaker coil. Impressive but I've seen bigger bangs on youtube with even more energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC7sNfNuTNU
bittercynic 2 hours ago
"Only" 7MW XD. The coil doesn't remain a coil for long, though, and it's hard to predict the behavior of the rapidly expanding ball of plasma.
etcetcetcetceta 2 hours ago
styro was inspired by photonicinduction, by his own admission
red_admiral 38 minutes ago
1.21 GW? Needs a flux capacitor.
xattt 5 hours ago
Spoiler: it becomes a compact one-time use railgun.
ablation 5 hours ago
I seem to remember a few years back this guy made a lot of noise about a "free energy" (ahem) device he'd invented and claimed he was giving the plans to China and Russia as a way of getting back at the UK government for some slight or other, then promptly dropped off the face of the internet in protest(?) I guess he's back.
voidUpdate 5 hours ago
IIRC it worked by using a big gyroscope to stay stationary while the earth rotated, causing 1 rotation every 24 hours. So not technically free energy, just taking it from the earth
I was quite worried that he'd gone off the deep end when he published that video
shaaaade 4 hours ago
The way I understood his "free energy"-device back in the day, was supposedly trying to induce a current into a set of coils from the very tiny discrepancies between the earth's rotation and that of its magnetic field. How the gyroscope would play into it, is anybody's guess (alignment, I suppose?). Obviously, none of this would work, and I don't think he was in a particularly good place back then.
thenthenthen 4 hours ago
I saw an artwork like this before, maybe by Anish Kapur?
cedws 5 hours ago
That’s not a very charitable interpretation. He was distraught about not being able to get his wife into the UK and was lashing out. He removed the video, he knows it was silly. Hopefully the situation was sorted.
ablation 5 hours ago
It's just what I remembered, clearly I had no recollection of that part. My sympathies with him if he was in some kind of strife.
freshollie 3 hours ago
His wife is mentioned as being behind the camera in the latest video, so it sounds like it was sorted.
KaiserPro 3 hours ago
Yeah UK marriage visas are fucking expensive, long and humiliating.
Its one of those things that was borne out of tabloid panic (IMPORTING WIVES AND FAMILIES!!) which means that now everyone has to go through pain until a scandal or another panic causes a change.
philipwhiuk 34 minutes ago
It's exactly the same as the green card problem in the US. The UK is not exclusively bad here.
grishka 3 hours ago
I remember him showing a cube with an outlet and a switch that could power a lightbulb. He eventually revealed that inside were just a bunch of lithium ion cells taken out of disposable vapes
nancyminusone an hour ago
Whatever came of his hydrogen/electrolysis project? He has talked before about how those big control panel boxes he made and the high voltage transformers were to contol some kind of high power electrolysis rig that would make a huge hot-air-balloon-like flame. Not sure if that was some kind of free energy effort or if he just wanted to make fire with electricity.
_joel 2 hours ago
5 years since his last vid, to make you feel old.
emsign 3 hours ago
Popped it