I may be missing the point here, but surely the aim is to have the best sounding equipment. How is it possible to cheat?

The best sounding equipment compared to the other cars in the competition.

Doug can probably give more detail here, but here's how I understand it.

Since the judges want to compare apples to apples, they need a baseline reference- a known set of audio tracks- on which to judge. The competitions don't just use any old CD, they use a specific judging CD. Until Doug told us otherwise, I thought that competitors were allowed to use their own copy of that CD if they wanted. They're not.

Being able to use your own copy of the CD would allow you to (in advance) copy the tracks and alter the wave data so that it did better in certain parts of the competition. You would know what characteristics the judges were looking for on each track, so you could theoretically alter the tracks themselves to enhance those characteristics. Then you could burn a new copy with the altered tracks on it and use that in the competition.


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Tony Fabris