Decibel Don Drowns Out the Competition

By STEVE CHAWKINS

March 31, 1999 12 AM PT

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer

He graduated from Westlake High School last year but only last weekend did he get his summa cum loud.

For now, Aaron Boerger of Thousand Oaks holds one of Ventura County’s most deafening distinctions: His fire-engine red ’97 VW Jetta boomed out a bass note louder than any other car in a competition known as dB drag racing.

The dB is for decibel. Boerger cranked 138.2 of them with his windows shut. By comparison, a thunderclap is 90 decibels. A jet plane taking off is 100 decibels. Every additional 10 decibels represents a 10-fold increase in volume, and is best measured in outraged subdivisions, angry letters to the editor, laws hastily passed, houses hastily listed, kidney stones miraculously shattered.

By day, Boerger takes customer service calls for a company that makes laser-whitening instruments for dentists.

By night, he does decibels.

Doesn’t it hurt your ears, I asked him.

“My ears?” he said.

Wearing a T-shirt that said “Got bass?” Boerger acknowledged that the house-rattling, plaster-crumbling, heart-pounding boom of a passing audio enthusiast is not everyone’s cup of tea. “Sometimes people flip me off,” he said. “They say, ‘Turn it down, people are trying to sleep!’ ”

Boerger took his first-place Saturday in the parking lot outside Audio Experts Car Stereos & Alarms in Ventura. The store’s owner, Barry Ross, used to compete on the professional audio circuit. Years ago, he outfitted his Chevy truck with 36 speakers and enough wattage to run microwaves, washing machines, hair dryers and big-screen TVs in two households simultaneously. He took home all kinds of trophies, but those were in old-fashioned events that gauged sound quality, not just volume.

“Some of these kids now can get pretty out of control,” he said, with a hint of sadness.

I didn’t see out-of-control at Saturday’s sound-off. dB drag racing is highly regulated--the dB Drag Racing Assn. sets the rules--and disappointingly scientific.

In dB drag racing, loud is not the ability to fell small mammals or cause the roses to wither. Loud--the engineers would scoff at such a primitive term, if engineers scoffed--is gauged by highly sophisticated equipment in vans that could double as FBI listening posts. Kenwood, the audio manufacturer, dispatches such vans to contests it holds throughout the country.

On Saturday, cars competed two at a time before 15-foot-tall light towers. A Kenwood marketing man named Wayne Krauss joked as he introduced the players: “It’s Jim’s first time here. He’ll be playing Dr. Laura . . . Meet Ray. Looks like he borrowed his mom’s car for this . . . .”

Most had spent thousands on their systems. Boerger hauled around equipment he valued at $6,000--a 200-amp alternator, a digital signal processor, a deep-cycle battery and an amplifier powering three 12-inch subwoofers.

And Boerger--like the others on Saturday--is just a novice. More experienced players are legendary for sparing no expense in the search for loud; to eliminate decibel-wasting vibrations, one veteran poured 900 pounds of cement onto his van’s floor and 90 on the dash. Others have riveted shut all doors but the driver’s.

Krauss gingerly set microphones over each dashboard, each exactly 1 1/2 inches from the window. He gave each driver earphones and had them roll their windows up. Before the green light flashed, he wished them luck.

“OK now,” he said. “The whole idea is to get it as loud as you can, blow something up, and go into the store to buy something else. Got it?”

They got it.

For 30 seconds at a time, they cranked their hearts out. They plugged in CDs like “Bass-gasm,” with roving bass signals instead of music. From the outside, it sounded like nothing more dangerous than the hum of killer bees. On the inside, the earphones muted the sound, but not the feeling.

“It feels like someone reaching into your insides and twisting,” said Daniel Rosales, whose Chevy pickup was equipped not only with a killer sound system but a TV as well.

So why do they spend all this time and money to achieve a volume that can wring their intestines, bust their eardrums, and drive goodwill from the neighborhood like St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland?

At 41, Rosales, the granddaddy of the bunch, had his own theory.

“You reach a certain age, you can’t spend all your money on Viagra,” he joked.

But I think Krauss, the Kenwood man who has held these contests throughout California, was more on target.

“Why do they do it?” he asked. “Because they can.”

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is [email protected].