Had a dream last night of a van pulling a huge pile of amps, tied together with rope.
Atomic amps
For a long while I’ve been wanting to figure out how many guitar amps it would take to equal the volume of an atomic bomb. After finally finding the right formulas (number of sources = 10 x (increase of level in dB/10)) given the volume of a standard Marshall full stack (122.3dB) and the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (248dB), I found it would take 3,715,352,290,971 amps.
If a regular Marshall speaker cabinet has a footprint of 14.5 x 30″, that many amps side-by-side would span a 441.1 x 912.6-mile grid, or a swath of land from New York City to Niagra Falls and south nearly to Atlanta.
As a side note, if this was to be a ring instead of a grid, it’s diameter would be 2,006 times larger than that of Jupiter.
Also, as Angeles notes, this could be powered by Niagra Falls.