$20,000 General Lee

[ws23rt]

Your Junior Detective Kit is in need of an upgrade.

Monkey See, Monkey Do III

You can go ahead and assume the same response from me for each future sequel you add to your Monkey See, Monkey Do series. Don't forget to change the number at the end, i.e., IV, V, VI, VII, and so on.

I just copy and paste you replies from previous threads and you respond, its like you are debating with yourself.
Oh,
Monkey See, Monkey Do IV. (Already refuted, thus dismissed).

It's best to use care here---If he were to debate him self for too long it might cause a big splat on the screen

[GordonGriggs]

I don't see any problem doing a General Lee for 20k. I did a "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" for about 19k. If I had not put 5k in the 440 it would have been a lot less.

[kikgas01]

Thanks for that link Maxim, never seen that.

[UH60L]

Funny thing about the horn.  When I got my charger running, I ordered the correct (12 note I believe) horn from JC Whitney.

Installed it and it sounded pretty good.....with the engine running and at a high idle/slash engine revving, hehe.

My electrical system was so shoddy, that if the car was at idle or turned off, it played really sloooooow.

Also, I hooked mine to the actual horn button and you had to hold it down for the duration and let up before it started going again, hehe.   

The reactions to it while driving were quite hilarious though considering my car was painted appliance white.   

[MaximRecoil]

Installed it and it sounded pretty good.....with the engine running and at a high idle/slash engine revving, hehe.

My electrical system was so shoddy, that if the car was at idle or turned off, it played really sloooooow.

One of the advantages of having a good recording of the horn and playing it through a PA speaker is that it would always sound perfect instead of varying in speed depending on how much juice is available. Another advantage of a PA speaker setup is that you could play any tune/sound you wanted.

[Mike DC]

                                   
The complaint has always been that the electronic PA type Dixie horns don't sound nearly as good. 

I don't know what would be feasible if you custom built one rather than off-the-shelf'd it.   

But AFAIK trains & semis still use actual compressed air pushing through plastic/metal horns.  Might be a lesson there. 

[MaximRecoil]

                                   
The complaint has always been that the electronic PA type Dixie horns don't sound nearly as good.  

I don't know what would be feasible if you custom built one rather than off-the-shelf'd it.

One done on the cheap may not sound very good, but there is the issue of the recording itself too. Off-the-shelf setups like the COGApa not only use a cheap speaker and amplifier, but they also never have the right recording. Most traditional air horn based Dixie setups sound bad too though; a few minutes spent on YouTube searching for "Dixie horn" can confirm that.    

But AFAIK trains & semis still use actual compressed air pushing through plastic/metal horns.  Might be a lesson there.  

Police, fire, ambulance, and air-raid sirens these days are all done through an audio amplifier and a horn-loaded compression driver (AKA: "PA speaker"). The most typical police siren setup uses a control head unit which generates the electrical signals for the various tones (e.g., "wail", "yelp") in real time (i.e., not a recording, though a high quality recording of those electrical signals would give the same results), a 200 watt amplifier, and a pair of 100 watt horn loaded compression drivers.

The principle is the same either way, i.e., moving air combined with the acoustic loading effect of a horn. Your basic car horn like the pair of horns that came stock on Dodge Chargers are also speakers, albeit rudimentary ones.

I've been looking around for used police siren speakers. They are just horn loaded compression drivers, like you'll find being used in all sorts of PA or home/car audio applications (i.e., they can do far more than just play basic tones; they could do a fine job of playing anything from 12-note Dixie to Beethoven to AC/DC if you wanted them to), but the advantage of them is that they are designed for a car environment / exposure to the elements, like mounting behind a car grille. They are also designed to meet sound output standards required for warning sirens (such as SAE J1849).

When I was younger I was heavily into car audio, and I still have a couple of big Rockford Fosgate amplifiers from the 1990s (which was before Rockford Fosgate "sold out" in the early 2000s, and started showing up at Best Buy and such with inflated "max wattage" power ratings). One of them is a Power 1000a2 (250 watts x 2 @ 4 ohms; 500 watts x 2 @ 2 ohms; 1000 watts x 1 @ 4 ohms). Note that this is a class A/B amplifier and retailed for over $1,000 new. 1,000 watt amplifiers are a dime a dozen these days, but they are class D amplifiers. Class D amplifiers are very efficient, but they have poor sound quality, so they are primarily used for powering subwoofers: a specialized application in which their deficiencies aren't generally considered perceptible. They are also used for powering police siren speakers because rudimentary "wail" and "welp" tones don't require much precision from the amplifier, so it makes sense to go with the cheaper, smaller, and more efficient class D amplifier if a siren type sound is all you are using it for. Class A/B amplifiers on the other hand are useful for everything; it is what you'll find in e.g. a home stereo receiver, or in car audio powering the mids and highs (and the lows, if someone is especially concerned about sound quality of their bass).

So my plan is to find 4 of these 100 watt police siren speakers. The most common ones have a nominal impedance of 11 ohms (which is odd, 4 ohms and 8 ohms are the standards for car audio and home audio speakers respectively). I'll wire them into two parallel pairs, so I'll effectively have two 5.5 ohm speakers. Since my amplifier puts out 250 watts x 2 @ 4 ohms, it will put out about 203 watts x 2 @ 5.5 ohms (406 total watts), which is great for powering four 100 watt speakers, and since the impedance is over twice as high as the amplifier is stable at, it will run cool / have an easy life.

This setup will have twice the power and twice the number of speakers as a typical police siren, which theoretically will make it 6 dB louder than a typical police siren. Some police sirens only use one 100 watt speaker, so 4 times the power and number of speakers in that case. It will be way louder than any normal Dixie horn.

I also found a better copy of the TV sound clip, and it isn't missing a split second of the last note like the one I posted earlier, so that part is taken care of.

Edit: I just won an auction for four 100 watt police siren speakers, 3 of them are Federal Signal Dynamax ES100 (1 of them is new, 2 of them are used), and the 4th one is a Federal Signal Dynamax MS100 (which was the older version of the ES100; looks the same), also used. Since I already have an ideal amplifier in storage, a head unit with pre-outs installed in my car, and a good copy of the TV sound clip on my PC, all I need to do is wait for the speakers to get here and install/wire everything up.  

[Mike DC]

   
That's way over my head in terms of audio tech.  Sounds like you know what you're doing. 



Where/how did you get a cleaner audio clip of the TV show's horn byte, anyway?

[MaximRecoil]

Where/how did you get a cleaner audio clip of the TV show's horn byte, anyway?

On a cell phone ringtone site (link). There were 49 results for "Dixie horn", so I started clicking on each one. Most of them were the same thing, uploaded by different people, and wrong, probably recorded from a Wolo. Then there were some other wrong ones uploaded by other people, and a few that were downright horrible. Then I clicked on one that was obviously ripped from the TV show, and it was pretty good as-is. They had obviously done some background noise removal from it, but a little bit of it remained. There were a couple more on there uploaded by different people that were from the same audio source, but had different processing applied to them. I took the one of those three that I liked the sound of the best and did a little extra background noise removal on it and cropping of dead air and I'm satisfied with it for now. I don't expect I'll find any better unless Warner Bros. officially releases it in some sort of TV sound effects compilation or something.

Here are the three from that site that were obviously sourced from the TV show:

1. http://www.zedge.net/ringtone/1631984/dixie-general-lee/ (this is the one I used for additional processing)

2. http://www.zedge.net/ringtone/520144/dixie-horn/ (this is the same as above, but someone got a little overzealous with cropping, so part of the first note is missing)

3. http://www.zedge.net/ringtone/159038/dixie-air-horn/ (still the same source; processing has changed its timbre slightly, and not for the better in my opinion)

And here's the version I'm planning to use with my speaker setup (removed additional noise from and cropped the file in link #1) - https://app.box.com/s/f3w1l523507mt4cjx7uk

[sanders7981]

As much as I love the debate about a "correct" sounding horn, I will steer back to the OPs thread topic.  Sure, you can absolutely make a GL for less then 20k!  I have/am doing all the work on mine, which has saved a ton of money, and will have it all together for around 17k, including purchase price.