Wayne Harris, President and Founder of the db Drag Racing Association. Ohio's Team Baldman Creations maxed out with an SPL of 175.2 dB at last year's World Finals. Glass windshields can break under pressure, so most are replaced with reinforced plexiglass.

Wayne Harris is a man you can't help but listen to. As president of the dB Drag Racing Association, he heads up one of the largest organizations in the noisy world of stereo sound-off competitions, traveling the globe promoting his sport to thousands of car audio enthusiasts. What is dB Drag Racing? Imagine the loudest sound you've ever heard, like a 747 at take-off, and then think about bottling that sound inside a car and cranking it up. The idea is to generate the highest Sound Pressure Level (SPL) you can and measure it on a drag racing-style meter in real time. Competitions are head-to-head with the loudest system coming out on top.

His passion for the loud dates back almost 20 years, when the then-23-year-old Harris took the fledgling car audio world by storm, building two award winning systems and dominating the competition circuit for nearly five years. His thundering accomplishments are still legendary in sound-off circuits, and his "Terminator" car remains a top show draw, even though he's been out of competition for more than a decade. His success paved the way for a long career in the car audio industry, working as a design engineer for both Orion Audio and Rockford Fosgate before leaving in 2000 to head up dB Drag Racing full time.

Crutchfield Advisor caught up with Harris last month as he was preparing for the 2003 dB Drag Racing World Finals.

Q: What's your title with the dB Drag Racing Association and what does the organization do?

A: I'm the president and founder, and our job is to sanction car stereo competitions. The dB Drag Racing format is simply head-to-head competition to see who has the loudest stereo. We started in 1996 with one competition and have grown to over 1,000 events a year in 54 countries.

Q: What makes a dB Drag Race different from the other kinds of car stereo competitions?

A: There are all different types of competitions out there — some for sound quality, some for appearance, some incorporate elements of installation quality, and then there are the SPL contests that just measure how loud you can get. The problem we found with the other formats is that there's a level of the judging that's subjective, whether it's how good your system looks or how it sounds. So our goal with dB Drag Racing was to have really high energy, in-your-face competitions that are very objective and fair for all the competitors. Your score is whatever the meter says it is, whatever your SPL is, so you can't get more objective than that.

Q: Where did dB Drag Racing come from?

A: My experience goes back to 1984 when I started building a system in my car to go cruising. One of my friends told me about a contest where you could compete with your car stereo, so I went to Dallas to check it out. They were called "Rolling Thunder" contests and they were being put together by a local sales rep named George Reed to get people interested in car stereo and build up his business. It was super grass roots, something that had never been done before, and people really got into it. He held the first national championship, which I won, and helped get me noticed by the industry. Those contests were really the basis of modern car stereo competitions.

But by the mid to late 90s I had decided that the format being used for SPL competitions wasn't going to be successful since it just wasn't exciting to watch. The cars were each being judged individually so the only thing for the crowd to watch was the standings board after each contestant was done. It was boring. So I got together with some friends and we came up with the idea for dB Drag Racing — head-to-head competition with an SPL meter that would get the crowd into it and really be exciting.