AudioSports USA

I've been messing around with car stereos since before I could drive. My dad and I installed many radios, speakers and CB radios in vehicles my family owned.

I was in high school in the mid 1980's when the whole car audio industry took off. Cars were begining to get more complicated to 'soup up' so most young guys began tinkering with their car stereo instead of their engines.

A nice car stereo system back then was Pioneer AM/FM cassette deck and couple of 3-way 6x9s in the rear deck. A REALLY nice system had a Clarion or Realistic 40-watt EQ/booster. And yes, we played them LOUD as they'd go.

In '83 or '84, I recall someone at school drove up with 10" clear-cone Becker woofer mounted in the center of the rear deck in a Camaro. It was powered by Sanyo 100-watt amplifier the size of washing machine. That setup was the Holy Grail of car audio for a couple years in our town.

I remember another guy raised the bar by installing six 10" Beckers and three Sanyo amps. We gave him pass on the fact he drove a Toyota station wagon.

By the time I graduated, Sony had introduced some good amplifiers, woofers and of course, compact disc players. Early CD players cost over a grand, didn't have radios and skipped like crazy. But the difference in sound quality was amazing.

We used to look for the few CDs marked DDD (all digitally mastered) because those sounded awesome. Most stuff was marked AAD or ADD since the original masters were analog. Though subtle, there was noticable difference in sound.

We cruised alot, cranking it up against one another at red lights and in shopping center parking lots. In '84 or '85, I remember a local car stereo store (actually an auto accessory shop turned car stereo store) hosting the first 'crank it up' contest. I don't remember anything specific about it other than they had prizes for first, second and third. The guy with the Toyota wagon only got third which we all thought was crazy.

I attended a couple more sound-offs after that and in 1989 entered my first NACA event. I had no clue about what the contest involved, the classes or the rules. I just remembered being pissed that installers from shops in other towns were enter in consumer divisions instead of pro. Seems liars have been competing in sound-offs since day one.

Why did I mention all these memories here? Because lately I've noticed a few people claiming to be experts of all things car audio and sound-off related. Only problem is, there weren't even born when 12volt industry really got 'cranking'. They have no knowledge of CAN, NACA, WAC, CMAA, TOW, or when the top competitors were guys like Wayne Harris, Jimmy Hamm, Mark Fukuda, Eric Holdaway, Manville Smith and Lucio Proni.

Those guys (and many more) built the 12volt industry and used the sound-off hobby to further those goals. Just as auto racing pushes advances in auto part designs, the technical and installation advances directly attributable to the sound-off lanes is incredible. If some of the younger car stereo enthusiast had a little more respect for the history and pioneers of the hobby, maybe some of us old-timers could teach them a thing or two. - TAM