| No doubt you’ve experienced the reverberating thunder at a red light, a pounding sound with the ability to rattle nerves and compound the problems of the day. Or, maybe you awoke last night to the throbbing, droning bass coming from your apartment complex parking lot. What began as a fad has now become ingrained in our culture, with debatable societal impacts, depending on whom you ask. They’re commonly referred to as “boom cars,” automobiles stuffed with enough speakers and amplifiers as to be too much sound system for even a large home. And the trend has left the confines of the teenage set, expanding to include people in their 30s, and possibly older. People across the country engage in competitions to see whose vehicle sound system is the loudest and most clear. Some competitors have spent thousands of dollars on their car stereos just to be the loudest on the block. In our own neck of the woods, drive down Washington Road on any given Friday or Saturday night and you’ll find carloads of teens and twenty-somethings engaged in mock, decibel, warfare. Mike Wheelis, owner of Innovative Audio, 3103 Washington Road, makes his living installing the huge “woofer” bass speakers and amplifiers in people’s cars. He thinks the trend is about innocent fun and the enjoyment of music, even though he’s been cited for noise violations in his own car — once, right across the street from his store, to the tune of a $125 fine. “As far as the bass, I hope kids keep on liking it,” Wheelis, 24, said. “It keeps me in business.” Others, however, think sellers and manufacturers of the loud, booming stereos should be run out of business. One of them is Mark Huber, spokesman for Noise Free America, a Virginia-based, grassroots organization whose goal is to quell boom cars and other forms of noisome annoyance. “To me, it’s just a violation of personal sanctity,” Huber said by phone. “It’s trespassing onto my personal property and robbing quiet out of my home. There’s neighborhoods where children can find no quiet time to read, to study, to learn, to explore their young imaginations and develop an independent personality.” Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a special report dealing with the matter of loud car stereos and ways to address the problem. “Noise from a variety of sources, including loud car stereos, can cause hearing loss, disturb sleep, increase stress, make people irritable, and make naturally aggressive people even more aggressive,” the report stated. It seems that Richmond County residents also have had their fill of the loud car stereos. Major Larry Vinson of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department says that loud car stereos comprise one of the highest complaint categories in Augusta. However, after attempting to acquire the figures himself, Vinson said the department’s records division could not provide the data to accurately support that claim. “I can tell you that it’s one of the biggest complaints we get in the county of Richmond,” Vinson said. “Every neighborhood watch meeting that I go to, and I attend quite a few, one of the most often-said complaints is loud music.” Vinson said most of that loud music is coming from cars. Richmond County deputies don’t give breaks to offending vehicles, either. While complaints about loud music coming from a home or apartment are first dealt with by giving the offender a warning, drivers of boom cars are cited without being given a second chance, Vinson said. That, in part, is because in the past, vehicular offenders — given their mobile nature — typically were receiving several warnings in the same day from different patrol areas, Vinson said. Georgia state statutes allow for the driver of a vehicle to be cited for a noise violation if the stereo can be heard from 100 feet away. A Richmond County ordinance cuts that distance to 50 feet, but Vinson said he encourages his deputies to go by the distance set by the state to make a stronger case in the event it comes to court. Wheelis and John Arrasmith, manager of Innovative Audio, both think law enforcement is too harsh on boom cars. Arrasmith, a 28-year-old who first began installing loud stereos in his vehicles more than a decade ago while living out West, said it’s all about moderation. “I’ve been doing this for 10 or 11 years and I’ve got a stereo in my car that’s loud compared to what a lot of people have got,” Arrasmith said. “You know, I ride around in the daytime, going down the road, I’ll turn it up, but I don’t go down neighborhoods and out till 2 or 3 in the morning with it blaring. Everything’s got a place and a time.” Wheelis points out that even a factory-installed stereo, without the amplifier and large speakers, could still be heard 100 feet away if the owner turned up the volume enough. “It’s got its place. I don’t think they need to be messing with the kids as much as they do, especially on the weekends, like on Washington Road and things like that,” Arrasmith added. “But when they go off on the side roads and into neighborhoods, yeah, I see absolutely nothing wrong with pulling them over and giving them a ticket then.” While groups like Noise Free America have proposed legislation to curb loud stereos, Wheelis said that would be a mistake. “If they (those opposing boom cars) knew how many stereo shops are in America … They employ a lot of people,” Wheelis said. “Most of them have four or five employees, at least. Here in Augusta, there’s 10 shops and at least 100 people employed by stereo equipment. You know, they crack down on it, five of them shops close down, that’s 50 people unemployed.” But Huber says that problem lays squarely on the industry’s shoulders. “Actually, it’s a very, very foolish business plan to develop and promote a product that is designed to disturb the peace, to market that product to the lowest common denominator of human behavior, which is aggressive,” Huber said. Huber, a phone company technician in Richmond, Va., pointed to the tendency of many car stereo manufacturers to market their products as loud and offensive in a way that makes those characteristics cool or hip. For instance, the ad slogan for Sony’s “Xplod” car stereo system was, “Disturb the Peace.” “What they’re (car stereo companies) doing is just ... making it louder, selling more amps and more speakers, when these engineers that they hire from MIT, they should be developing technology that would produce a quality sound within the driver’s compartment at safe levels and as little as possible outside,” Huber said. “But they are developing and promoting a product that, when used, is loud enough to cover up the sound of emergency vehicles in the driver’s compartment and rattle china in someone’s house 100 yards away.” Even Wheelis and Arrasmith acknowledge that the stereos can be annoying. “Even in my house at night, around the neighborhood, you’ll hear them riding down the street,” Arrasmith said. “At 11 o’clock at night, I don’t like it. In the middle of the daytime, you know, you don’t always want to hear it, but it’s a little different in the daytime.” “I can’t stand sometimes when people (in boom cars) pull up beside me,” Wheelis said. “But I mean, I don’t say nothing to them. That’s what makes my money. And if they were to do something to outlaw it or make it illegal and crack down on people, and people quit spending their money, there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to be hurting.” Even so, Vinson said his department will continue to enforce noise ordinances on boom cars with vigilance. “A lot of people in Richmond County are upset,” Vinson said. “They feel like no cases are being made or not enough. And I agree. There’s probably not enough. It needs to be dealt with every time we hear it.” Vinson said he has yet to understand why people don’t simply turn it down. “I wish I knew the answer. I think it’s a status symbol. It’s the ‘in’ thing to do that,” Vinson said. “There are just people who think there is just absolutely nothing wrong with it. They say, ‘I bought it; it’s mine.’ And they don’t understand that I wouldn’t want to force my music on anybody and I don’t want theirs forced on me. “I mean I hate it. I really do.” |
