I've thought about this again for a little bit and it seems to me that iasca officials are touting a level playing field for what reason? Come on, admit it, iasca exists to create a pissing contest for 1) who has the most money, 2) who can create the most violent shaking. As a foot note there are those who roll in with a car audio system to die for in terms of reproduction. So are the judges really afraid your copy of the music is somehow remastered to compensate for sound staging or whatever? Sure it's possible, but really what they're thinking of is whether for the SPL contest you didn't remaster it register more SPL. hhmmm??

It seems to me that the SPL competitors are at liberty to construct things that can endanger the lives of people, going beyond sanity in cases to construct car audio that does not sound like car audio, and reduce a car into something that can not be used as a car even, in order to win. Surely, if the goals of IASCA had quality of sound as a priority, then they should open up the playing field to allow *anything* to be done, including remastering, post-processing of any kind. The point here is if the SPL people are allowed to play a track and it is not even recognizably so... then why not allow source music that sounds exactly like it should be?

In simplified terms: The SPL contest is about who can get the biggest amplitude on a sine wave. The quality contest is about who can get the most perfect sine wave. Now consider, if you are forced to use a CD containing a sine wave that is mastered in a way that it plays with distortion or loss of quality on YOUR system..... why NOT allow the owner to use a slightly different waveform that sounds like a perfect sine wave, perhaps even better than the original?

So replace sine wave with cd track, and it's the same concept. So maybe it would unlevel the playing field, but it would encourage people to go to "any length" to win and create systems that you would literally lose yourself because you completely believe you ARE There. It seems to me requiring a known source cripples the quality contest quite a bit.

Calvin "late night iasca musings"