Las Vegas cabaret look-alike in Kuching Boulevard Shopping Centre

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CONGRATULATIONS: The winners of the various categories of the EMMA competition posing for a group photo.

SIBU: The first EMMA (European Mobile Media Association) competition at Boulevard Shopping Centre in Kuching recently resembled a Las Vegas Cabaret.

With the bright neon lights, blasting music and professional dancers around, one would be forgiven should he thought it to be a Las Vegas event.

The crowd that turned up that day were actually being blown away by some of the best in-car entertainment systems in East Malaysia.

For 12 hours, a panel of highly experienced judges listened to the audio systems of more than 40 cars to pick the best audio system in eight categories of the competition.

EMMA is the de facto standard for car audio competition worldwide.

EMMA was founded in 2000 with the objective of creating a level playing field for sound quality competitions in Europe and to unify the different rulebooks that were being used all over the continent.

Over the years, EMMA has successfully emerged into a huge community of mobile media enthusiasts, top-class mobile media specialists as well as committed entrepreneurs.

Since inception, EMMA has expanded to more than 40 countries, and in 2011, EMMA held more than 300 events

with more than 20,000 cars competing.

EMMA International is the leading organization for the EMMA national car audio associations all over the world and is responsible for the yearly organized international head judge training, the standardised rule books and competition CDs.

EMMA uses the competitions as a platform to encourage and grow the mobile media industry by encouraging both installers and competitors to extend their knowledge of the equipment they are using.

EMMA was brought into Malaysia by the Auto Audio, Accessories and Air-Condition Traders Association of Malaysia (AAA) in 2010. Initially, the competitions were only held in West Malaysia.

Over the years, EMMA competitions have brought together many audio enthusiasts from all over Malaysia

and are widely regarded as the premier car audio competitions due to the high standards practised by the organizers and competitors.

Due to overwhelming enquiries from East Malaysia, AAA decided to organize the event in Kuching this year.

According to AAA president Cherrie Lim said: “We’re extremely grateful and overwhelmed with the support we received from the people in Kuching to this event – the first in Sarawak.”

“Due to the success of this event, we are looking to organize this event yearly in various other towns in East Malaysia,” he added.

There were a total of 40 participants competing in eight different categories which were further divided into classes, depending on the number of amplifier channels used to power the speakers or speaker-system installed.

If two amplifier-channels were bridged to create one bridged channel or two mono-amplifiers were linked together, this would be counted as ‘one amplifier-channel’.

If a competitor is competing in two categories, it is possible that a different number of amplifier channels is used (for example, eight channels in Multimedia and 5 channels in SQ). In this case, only the numbers of channels used for SQ are counted to determine the correct class.

This may be checked by the judges, for example, by disconnecting speaker cables at the amplifier-connections.

Participants are not only judged on the sound quality but also installation quality, workmanship and aesthetics.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge will be to build an audio or multimedia system that will overcome the problems of vehicle acoustics, reproducing music without noise or distortion and to make the music sound like the ‘original’.

To know more about EMMA, log on to http://www.emma.my or https://www.facebook.com/EmmaMalaysia.