What’s all the debate about? There are two schools of thought: One camp thinks RTAs should be eliminated from competition judging criteria while the other side feels it should stay as is. And there are about a million variations that fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Feel left out? Don’t feel too alone. Many folks outside the competition circle don’t even know there is such a controversy.

Just what is all the fuss about and how did it get started? To understand things better, we need to go back nearly 20 years. In the early 80s, one of our magazine editors (Dave Navone) was asked to be the head judge of the first World Finals of Autosound. This was a huge event held in the Houston Astrodome. Everything about this event was huge except for the judging preparation. Since Dave was asked to participate at the last minute, he actually wrote the rules on the plane while flying from Sacramento to Houston. A lot was crammed into this couple of hours. One such rule is the now famous “18 inch rule.” I’m referring to the almost universal thinking that the power fuse for a system should be no more than 18 inches from the battery. I’ve talked to many installers that actually think that there’s a technical reason for this “magical distance” of 18 inches. While this distance is not really a bad idea, it has no foundation in engineering except that Dave felt the fuse should be near the battery and he happened to choose 1.5 feet as a limit so there would be a clearly-defined rule.

At about this same time, RTAs had started to find their way into the car audio shop. Dave felt that an RTA measurement would round out the judging and make things even more interesting. So he proposed that the goal was the so-called “smooth curve” with no major deviations. Like the 18-inch fuse rule, the idea seemed to catch on. In the late 80s when Alpine sponsored the Car Audio Nationals (C.A.N.), the RTA rule was revised a little, but continued as a big part of the score. Soon after the NACA organization, which later became IASCA, began using an RTA score of 40 points of the sound quality score.

In the early years, there were rules that prohibited any adjustments to the system once the judging had started. Under these conditions, it was really hard to achieve a good compromise between good sound and a good RTA score. Many competitors complained and, eventually, the point value for RTA score was reduced and finally competitors were allowed the luxury of multiple equalizers to optimize for sound quality, RTA, and SPL.

Today, many competitors see the use of multiple equalizers with different settings for RTA and SQ by nearly all top competitors as proof enough that the RTA should be eliminated as a judging criteria. They feel it’s a little like putting racecars on a dyno just before a race and giving them a score for highest horsepower and flattest torque curve. Certainly we all agree that horsepower is important for winning races and the flatter the torque curve the better, but it takes more than good dyno results to go fast. A dyno cannot tell about the way a car handles, its wind drag coefficient, or its overall weight. Winning races requires even more than going fast, just like winning contests requires more than sounding good. Winning races requires good driving and a fast pit crew, and winning contests requires a good install and good presentation.

What’s my take on the RTA issue? First, I think if it is retained, it should be emphasized that it has nothing to do with sound quality. RTAs measure spectral response, not sound quality. Spectral balance is but one small part of what makes a system sound good or bad. An RTA cannot separate direct sound from reflected sound. It cannot tell the direction of a sound. It cannot separate unwanted noise from test signals or desired sounds. An RTA lumps everything together and displays one curve. The mic element that an RTA uses for “an ear” is a single element and cannot even come close to hearing like a human ear.

Anyone that has ever spent any time with an RTA measuring cars learns fast that even small mic movements will cause variations in measurement. Trying to tune a car to a certain curve and repeating that measurement literally becomes an exercise in mic placement. If the mic placement cannot be repeated within a small part of an inch, it’s almost impossible to obtain any sort of consistency. The RTA portion of a contest is primarily an exercise in mic placement, and, secondarily, an exercise in measuring system response. Since very small mic movements give such varying readings, it stands to reason that the only useful measurement for sound quality purposes would have to be the average of many different places in the listening area.

And since this is difficult to quantify and repeat exactly, it certainly downgrades the single-point RTA measurement to a technical exercise that can separate the detail-oriented men from the careless boys. As such, I see no problem with the RTA continuing, especially in the expert classes. It forces a discipline on the competitor that cannot be ignored if he/she is to win. While an RTA has nothing to do with sound quality, neither does a pit stop have anything to do with going fast. But remember, the fastest car on the track can still lose a race in the pits because of lack of details and planning.