Comment by WalterBright
6 hours ago
Perhaps you haven't heard the sound of the right engine.
A 4 cylinder is very annoying.
A Detroit V8 sounds very good loud, with the large displacement and the right cam.
The most heavenly sound in the world is a Merlin V12 aircraft engine. (The yootoob videos with engine starts just cannot capture it.) There's even a book about it - "Sigh of a Merlin".
My dad was an Air Force P-51 pilot (with Merlin engine). When he passed, the local aviation museum said they'd do a memorial P-51 flight at the funeral for free, as long as I paid for the gas. Best money I ever spent.
Sometimes I'll hear the distinctive sound of the 4 engine B-17, and they'll be flying low and slow over Lake Washington. A marvelous sight and sound.
I really miss the sound and smell and feedback you get from ICE. Here almost every vehicle is electric and it’s, weird. I dont have a car but a electric moped, they seriously suck compared to the ICE ones (charge every day instead of gas once a month, no control/shitty firmware: delays between breaking and gas, 1/0 power, no real granularity), oh yeah no clutch also… arghhh
I've often had the dubious pleasure of standing behind an idling CNG-powered city bus. And breathing in the exhaust tastes like... "oxygen" was my first reaction, but perhaps more like "a firehose of normal air". It's probably not recommended to breathe it for long periods, but it doesn't have that natural discouragement built-in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_natural_gas
I can accept that other people enjoy the sound of loud cars, if you can accept that other people find them almost universally annoying, and would rather be listening to the far quieter sounds of birds, or the breeze in trees, or the conversation they were having.
Hmm, maybe a metaphor would help. Imagine if there was a pretty substantial subculture of people who loved wearing colorful, flashing, unbelievably bright lights on their clothes at all hours of day and night. When you're at an art museum, people will walk between you and the paintings, blinding you for several minutes as even having them in your peripheral vision made it impossible to see much of anything else. When you're walking down the street, you often need to pause what you're doing as they walk past. At home, in bed, trying to sleep? Despite your best efforts with blackout curtains, almost every night in a city, someone manages to light up your room to daylight levels for a few minutes just walking past.
Most of them, you assume, mean no harm and are just having fun and expressing themselves. But having them near you is always disruptive, and you're disinterested in discussions of how what you actually mind is the strobing from low frequencies and the lack of art in poor arrangements and not how FUCKING BRIGHT THEY ARE, TURN THAT SHIT DOWN, WE'RE TRYING TO LIVE IN A SOCIETY WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH YOU?
And maybe you feel bad for freaking out afterward, but it just feels constant, and you understand that living in high-population places involves a certain level of tolerance of people's idiosyncracies, but at a point, it's hard not to feel like the sheer level of disruption and disregard demonstrated by a fairly small level of the population is actually deliberate and malicious.
And also they reek.
> if you can accept that other people find them almost universally annoying
I am well aware of that. I don't drive my loud car after dark so I don't annoy the neighbors. The ones that complain I offer a ride in, they have fun, and we're both happy.
There's also a limit to enjoying the sound, and I wouldn't want to take more than a brief jaunt with it. I only drive it once a week or so.
I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone had a small lawn. When the weather warmed up, and it was the weekend, I'd open the windows. Inevitably, one of my neighbors started their lawnmower, rrrrrrr, and it would take them some ungodly amount of time to mow their lawn. They'd finish, and I'd sigh with relief. A couple minutes later, another neighbor would start up their lawn mower. Etc. Etc. From 8-8, Sat-Sun, you could not open the windows. It was intensely irritating. I was glad to leave that neighborhood.
In another neighborhood where I lived for a time, I shared a fence with my neighbor separating our backyards. He had a little yappy dog that yapped all day. All day. No respite.