Back in the mid- to late-90's, when the corporate superstores began setting up shop in our backyards, independent mobile electronics retailers were left scrambling for a piece of the pie. They sought answers and ideas to help them survive in a new world of giants. They would do whatever it took to remain in business. Some gave installations away for free. Others reduced inventory and service. At least one retailer held an event in which he threw barbecue chicken and pork off his roof to a crowd of hungry mobile electronics enthusiasts. And, sadly, many were forced to pack it in.
      It's now almost 2002, and most of the smoke has cleared from the wave of superstore invasions. And many independent retailers are still standing- and doing just fine. Derran Dugger  is one such case. When the going got tough in Mankato, MN. Dugger masterminded a strategy to keep his store, Rockin' Ronny's afloat. The strategy: Rockin' Ronny's Room of Doom! This frighteningly intense bass experience constructed of metal , neon, exhaust tubing, fiberglass, wood, and various industrial byproducts has continuously attracted a steady flow of curious onlookers to his store-enthusiasts and civilians alike.
     Opened in 1993, Rockin' Ronny's has catered to both the audio enthusiast and performance markets for nearly a decade. Located roughly 80 miles south of Minneapolis, MN. Dugger's store has been consistently rated among the best mobile electronics and performance retailers in the five-state area. He owes much of his success to his willingness to stay current with the times.
     "What I find is that you've got to be willing to change," he explains. "Whether it' the products you sell or the appearance of your store, you've got to keep an eye out for the trends and go with them. If the kids keep coming in and seeing the same stuff over and over, they're not going to keep coming in. We normally give the store a facelift about every nine months."
     When the Circuit City's and the Best Buy's landed in Mankato, Dugger felt his sales decrease significantly. He knew he had to do something to compete with these big boys. Around that same time, Dugger noticed that SPL competition was becoming increasingly popular. He saw a lot of retailers building SPL vehicles and hauling them oft to competitions in hopes of getting their names out there. Dugger decided that this would not work for Rockin' Ronny's. He figured, "Why build an SPL vehicle that only a certain group of people would see maybe six weekends out of a year? Nine times out of ten, these shows are out-of-state or out of your area." 
     Dugger thought about his situation and remembered an empty room in his store about the size of a large walk-in closet. The room had been used as a high-end sound room, a place Dugger could bring customers and really talk to them about what he could do to their vehicles. But as Rockin' Ronny's began to pick up more brands, Dugger constructed a large wall in his main show floor to accommodate the increased inventory. The room had remained unused for over a year. That's when it occurred to Dugger that he could create an extreme SPL experience right there in the store. 
     "We knew we had to do something big, something like nobody's ever seen, "remembers Dugger, "so we decided to build an SPL vehicle in the store. It would be nasty, industrial, and loud. We got a hold of a couple of good buddies at Orion and we were off to the races. We looked closely at the size of the room, in terms of volume for the subs. We wanted to figure out just how many subs we could put in there. We we're gonna' put them on the ceiling if we had to. The techs over at Orion figured out, with whatever magic computer they have, that 24 12- inch subwoofers (Orion XTR's) would be just right." 
     "Then, we wanted the sub enclosures and everything else to be constructed in sort of a rounded design. We hand-made the enclosures out of wood, MDF, Fiber glass, Plexiglas, and aluminum. The whole room is totally industrial - lot's of red neon, metal, and mesh. We have a false floor in the room that's made of all metal grid work. Underneath it, there's metal shavings everywhere piled up. There's conduit running throughout the room [ribbed metal tubing that electrical wire runs through]. The conduit is what shields and hides all the room's wiring." 
     Providing power for the Room of Doom, Dugger chose six Orion HCCA275G4 amplifiers - that works out to roughly 5000 watts. The amplifier rack completely surrounds the one seat in the room. Each amplifier is running a stack of four subwoofers. There are six stacks of four woofers each sharing an enclosure with a huge port. Each port is large enough to stick your head in. In fact, the system displaces so much air that the room's walls and windows move about a 1/4 of an inch. "Screws are starting to fall out of sheet rock," Dugger says. "We need to do some maintenance." 
     Directly in front of the listener's seat, Dugger installed two pairs of high-end Orion HCCA 6 1/2-inch components. The components basically float on their own pods made from exhaust tubing. There's also a 6-inch Rosen monitor in front of the seat, so if somebody doesn't want to listen to a bass CD (like Bass Mekanik), Rockin' Ronny's can play them a DVD. "Something like 'Terminator 2' gets pretty intense with all those subwoofers," says Dugger. "The only non-SPL aspect of the Room of Doom is that we've got it tuned to where you can also hear some nice highs." 
     Six Lightning Strike gel-cell batteries and two Cascade 90-amp power sup- plies completely run the show. Dugger chose all lightning audio wiring for the project - over 500 feet of speaker, power, and signal cable. 
It's Go Time 
In late May 2000, after several months of construction, the Room of Doom was nearly complete. To create a buzz in the community, Dugger ran "teaser" ads on the local radio stations. The 60-second spots would describe this "crazy thing" people would soon be experiencing; at the end of the add, Dugger revealed to listeners just what this "crazy thing" was. The spots went something like: "Are you ready to get your ass blown off? Are you ready to experience over 5000 watts of power in your face? Do you have the balls to take this punishment?" And they'd conclude by saying, "Room of Doom, coming soon. Rockin' Ronny's." That got people talking about it. In fact, people started coming to the store to see what Dugger and company were working on. It got to the point where they had to work on the project only at night. Finally, once the room was done, Dugger changed the radio ads to say, "the Room of Doom is now open at Rockin' Ronny's." 
     "When we got it all done, we started to worry whether it would be safe for people to even sit in it," remembers Dugger. "So we got some lawyers involved to protect ourselves. We decided to make people buy a $1 ticket to go into the Room of Doom. On the back of the ticket, there's a waiver that tells them they're entering the room at their own risk. And the ticket is actually a coupon. They get their $1 back if they buy something. 
     "All these people started coming in. The Room of Doom is basically our calling card to get new traffic into the store. We've seen a large increase in traffic. We turn the room on for people about ten times a day. When the super-stores came around, our sales went down a little bit. But since we opened up the Room of Doom, it pushed our sales back up that little bit. It's like a hangout for some of the kids. Some people are scared to go in it. Others are like 'that ain't shit.' But when they come out of the room, they're usually a little frazzled, all smiles. We run the room for a full minute. We once measured it at about 158.8 dB, so it shakes you pretty hard." 
     Rockin' Ronny's is yet another success story in the saga of the independent retailer. By taking an empty room and filling it with magic, Dugger essentially assured his own survival. For more information, visit Rockin' Ronny's on the Web at www.rockinronnys.com.

DUGGER THANKS LUIS DEL CASTILLO,
MICHAEL ECCLES, BEN GRUBER, ORION'S
BILL TURNER, AND PAUL AT LIGHTNING AUDIO.