All very interesting stuff and it sounds (no pun intended) that the USA is more strangled in its noise regulations than the UK. However, for my part I like motorcycle exhaust noise because I like classic bikes and classic racing bikes most of all. I guess that puts me in a minority here, maybe as someone earlier said, people think I'm "a dick" but that's what I like, it's my choice to like it, no-one elses.
Sure you can claim that bikes are noisy and disruptive, just like much of our mechanised world has become noisy and disruptive compared to the cool green hills and the peace and quiet of 200 years ago, it's called progress, whether you subscribe to it actually being progress or not. Noise is just one factor in our polluted world that invades the privacy of others. I hate the loud stereos of the teenagers in their little deathtrap cars but I hate light pollution more. Security lights street lights, houses wrapped in christmas lights - so bad that most countries have to move their space telescopes to the outside of nowhere to escape the light pollution becasue it's no so bad they can't see through the sodium glare to pick up the dots of light from space. On sunny days, I can't escape the appalling song choices of my neighbours, blasting out their favourite bands in the back garden, most of which I hate, but have to accept because there's nothing I can do about it. We're all surrounded by intrusions of some kind.
Face it, we are all of us having our privacy invaded by someone, somewhere, sometime and noise, motorcycle exhaust noise to be specific is a tiny tiny factor in the big picture.
Personally, I will not stop loving the sound of a special motorcycle on cam, with race pipes, being ridden hard. I am eternally grateful that I have experienced several years of the Britten V1000 racing in the isle of man, a twin boom so deep you could hear it several miles and minutes away before it shot past with the doppeler effect changing its characteristics in a flash. I've heard the hailwood honda six in the island too on full pipe and it was haunting and unique. Now I'm looking forward to going to the MGP this year to see the Paton 500s howling off the mountain, a sound so industrial it almost hurts but it is beautiful too. I am thankful for the old school sound of my own CR750, 4 into 4 open megas makes beautiful music to me; the waspish crackle of the van veen kreidler I once owned, shrill, sharp and insectlike; the deep boom of my homologated road legal Ducati 888 SP5 with it's 105dB corse cans and recently, the sheer unadulterated cacophony of the Ducati D16RR desmosedici I briefly owned, an unholy sound like nothing you ever heard from a bike close up and well over 110dB.
All of those pale into insignificance though compared to the prelude of a Supermarine Spitfire flying low overhead and out to sea as an entree to the best sound I ever did hear, an Avro Lancaster Bomber, banking hard at the top of the Derwent Valley to begin a low level simulated bomb run on the derwent reservoir in the Peak District in England. On a hot summers day, in the peace of a beautiful National Park. The Lancaster made everyone stop, watch, listen, every man woman and child within the miles of earshot stood to attention and bathed in the glorious sight and sound of that machine, every hair on your neck stood proud too and I thank God that I have been able to experience these wonderful, terrible, awesome sounds in my lifetime.
I like loud bikes, I like the multitude of different sounds they make, they are a pleasure in my life that I don't want to give up, ever. If you think that makes me antisocial, a "dick", un-neighbourly then that's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but your opinion is yours, it isn't mine, it means nothing to the multi-coloured aural tapestry of my world and it never will.
