Is there a way to electronically interfere with my neighbor's car stereo/bass speakers?

I don’t have the technical knowledge to help you, but I sure am interested in whatever other replies you receive.

I’m sitting here thinking about smacking your neighbor, and I don’t even know where you are….

Not legally I doubt.

Can you break into his car and turn on his headlights all night? Dead battery = no stereo

Is he listening to broadcast or satellite radio or his own stereo?

[Edit. Not a viable option.]

If you have access to high explosives you could build an explosive flux compressor to produce a directed EMP and toast all the electronics in the car. Of course if you have access to high explosives and are willing to detonate them in a built up urban area then its probably easier just to blow up the car.

It’s not feasible to do with any electronic device that you can legally use. Either you can respond by being the most obnoxious, loud neighbor and wait for his response or go for an EMP generator.

Keep a look out on eBay for a “Death Ray, portable unit”.
Buy it.
Set it for “stun” ! ! ~ ~JK

I would just fire up the printer and print “I am going to break your fucking windows unless you can respect your neighbors and keep the radio down at reasonable levels.”

Then leave it on the windshield.

How about a police radar speed gun or LiDAR gun? Whenever they buzz me my radio starts fuzzing and beeping.

Oh hell, I could’ve just recommended common methods of destruction.

Save money and just buy some kerosene and a book of matches.

You’re welcome.
No charge.

Baseball bat, use it to electronically interfere with the singnals produced by his brain.

….....even better.

@Lightlyseared Is a flux compressor any relation to a flux capacitor? :)

I don’t know if noise-cancelling headphones would work for you in this application or not. (They’d be uncomfortable to wear for hours at a time anyway, I think, so I don’t strongly recommend them, anyway.)

Perhaps you could just start up a leaf blower or lawnmower engine when he starts his stereo. You wouldn’t even have to do any work with them; just start ‘em up. (Be sure to turn it off when he turns down the volume, turns off the sound entirely, or simply drives away.) It might take a while with someone this clueless, but he might eventually learn that the two noises are related, and modify his behavior.

I know you didn’t want to hear about calling the cops. But still, any port in a storm, you know?

Does your neighborhood have a noise ordinance? Any chance you could find a phone app that would give you an idea of the decibels he’s producing on his stereo? If so, you might be able to get some help from the police. Maybe.

Detonate a nuclear device in the atmosphere above the target. The resulting EMP is sure to fry his radio.

Not legally, and not without massive collateral damage, like killing anybody with a pacemaker or insulin pump.

@Adagio Yes. The original name for a flux compressor was a flux capacitor but the name seems to have changed for some reason ;). Its a tube with high explosive in it with wire wrapped round the tube with an aerial at one end. You pass a current through the wire and detonate the explosive at the end opposite of tube to the aerial.

@Lightlyseared Catch is, how precisely can it be targeted? If you blow the ECU in their car, that’s a costly repair; enough for criminal charges. Especially if you also blow the ECUs in other cars in the area, brick a few smartphones, etcetera. I agree that you may be better off just skipping the EMP and just using the explosives.

@wildpotato That’s different as it’s interfering with the signal coming through your antenna. For something hardwired like a CD/MP3 player, those often use shielded cables, so any RFI strong enough to jam that will cause other problems. Look up the origins of the microwave oven ;)

If he is listening to the radio it is trivial to block a station for a few hundred feet. That is not legal but it can be done without sophisticated equipment. A 100 mW signal at the right frequency would broadcast sweet silence. He might then move to another station so make sure you have a sweep capability.

Another trick might be to just interfere with his listening pleasure. For $50 you can get an electric fence controller that will make a high voltage pulse every second or so. Run a length of wire parallel to his car for a about 10meters. The wire can be 10–15 ft away and still work. Unless he has an extremely professional installation the pulse will induce a shot of static onto his speakers every second. That repeated, loud, static burst is very annoying to a “music purist”.
These acts will also prevent you from listening to that station but that is a small price to pay.

Awesome idea @LuckyGuy I wish I knew what you just said, but it looks like it would work. Hope the OP can follow through. LOL

Please keep us updated.

Did I say anything? That type of interference with communication device would violate FCC rules and I would never suggest such a thing. Nor would I suggest the placement of a battery operated gas grill ignition system, with the gap bent wide and a piece of electric fence wire stretched out about 10 ft. That would make spread radio frequency interference all over the radio spectrum and might even be picked up by the awesome Monster cable speaker wires no doubt installed with pride in said vehicle.

I’ve been told the ignitors sold at Lowe’s fire off at 4 Hz. Replace the AA battery with a 12V Gel cell so it can put out more juice and run for a long time.
A purist might add a VOX circuit that turns it on automatically when it hears a low freq bass riff.

Well I for one am grateful that @LuckyGuy understands the importance of self-restraint….

@jerv sadly you’d probably take out a large portion of the city as well as the car. It’d probably be classed as a terror attack.

But it’d stop the music is the thing….

I would expect that simply taking a pair of diagonal cutters and cutting the valve stems off his tires would send an easy-to-understand message. The obvious downside would be that, with the car not going anywhere for awhile, he may decide to kick back and 1listen to more tunes.

@Lightlyseared As would practically anything involving EMP. Indiscriminate area-effect attacks of any nature (explosive, biological, RF/EM…) may be considered terrorism.

@Lightlyseared flux capacitor = Back to the Future

This question intrigued me, but I don’t know much about electronics. So I asked… somewhere else, and found this, which seemed interesting.

“gearslutz.com”......Who knew ??

Thanks, @CWOTUS I’m going to look around on there to see if they have anything that will shut Sarah Palin up….

Don’t think that I’m not following at least one of the ideas here. Thanks everyone.

Now… I’ve learned that subwoofers have magnets in them. Could I possible ruin a subwoofer sticking a high powered magnet to the trunk of the appurtenant car?

To demagnetize those would take gear that you wouldn’t be able to lift; at least the size/weight of a V8 engine. Also, you’d be open to prosecution for the damage done; probably at least a couple grand in restitution. And you’ve left enough of a trail that it wouldn’t be terribly hard to trace it back to you. You’d be better off renting a truck and totaling his car in a collision. At least that might look like an accident, and would definitely be simpler. Of course, that has it’s own issues, like the potential for Vehicular Manslaughter charges…)

A “high powered” magnet would have no effect. There is reason these devices are called “permanent magnets”. You would need to do something.that would affect the crystalline structure of his magnet. There are a couple of ways to do it.
1) Raise the magnet above the its Curie point, typically 400 – 500 C. You can do that by setting the car on fire.
2) A mechanical shock can shatter the magnet and cause depoling. You can do that by following the excellent advice above.

I would go with the electrical relay circuit or ignitor. Don’t leave them on long.

@LuckyGuy Just double-checking; am I correct about the scale of the gear it’d take to degauss a subwoofer’s magnet?

@jerv You are correct. If anything, you have underestimated. The power to do that at a distance is tremendous.

If you spray it with microwave absorbing material and send a focused beam of a few hundred kW, that would destroy it at a distance. It would take equipment similar to this:V-MADS

@LuckyGuy I was assuming a distance of “right over the trunklid”. The Inverse Square Law dictates that it’d get absurd if you wanted a range of much more than that.

To anyone reading this post. This is only a theoretical physics discussion. Nobody is going to actually destroy any speakers or the car or its owner – the latter obviously being the best and only reasonable solution

@jerv Right. Inverse square is the limiting factor – if you want to kill it magnetically. Magnet thickness features prominently in the force equation and is the same order as distance. As a first order approximation figure the thickness of the speaker’s cylindrical magnet as 1 unit. Let’s call it 1 inch for easy math. If the speaker is located 2 feet from the trunk, 24 inches, we need to slam it with a field much greater than 576 times its normal.
My idea is to take a different tack. I want to kill it by using heat and getting it above the Curie point so it is no longer a magnet. Of course this might set the car on fire but so be it.
Hmmm… a handful of iron filings or rust would do a number on the system, too

I’m still liking electrical interference. A simple relay wired such that it closed when there is no power and opens when there is power, which will then close so there is power,.... will oscillate and emit a noisy electrical field as the relay’s internal coil field collapses. I believe Marconi transmitted radio signals across the Atlantic using a similar method.

@LuckyGuy Fire is the solution to many problems :)

At work we have squirrels that like to chew on battery cables. Several people could not start their cars at the end of the day. I wonder if you can put peanut butter on his battery cables to attract some hungry pests?

Put a common pin across the speaker wires, direct short will “FRY” the transistors in the amplifier.

@RocketGuy Tossing some sunflower seeds under the car every day might just do it!

Too late! I already called the cops.

Did it stop?

A timely article in the news today:
Shooting over loud music in Florida

‘murrika

Florida… of course!

It seems that that’s where all the weird shit goes down….

@ragingloli ‘Round these parts we’d jes’ take out the ole 870 pump an’ shoot out his car winders’.

@jerv Of course.

I notice we haven’t heard from @Dutchess_III since the date of that article…

Sry. Been in jail. I’m back now!

@Dutchess_III Welcome back! How was the coffee?

3 hots and a cot. And no early morning music!

But you do have free health care so it can’t be all bad.