FWIW, I'm with Robie; neither his Suzuki or my BMW bike reach 70 db (the EPA limit) or are nearly as noisy as a diesel PU. Listen to those Honda Gold Wings with their massive 6 cylinder engines--what, you can't hear them at all? That's right.
The loud pipes, as pointed out in the NPR piece, are results of after-market modifications, many, if not most, of which are illegal under EPA regs. And as Robie pointed out are being outlawed by lots of biking clubs.
The biggest offenders of course are Hardly David's son and other cruiser riders who refit their bikes with loud pipes because "loud pipes save lives" and "they make me giggle when I leave for work early and wake up everyone in the neighborhood" (and as a VP of HD said "we build motorcycles for middle-age accountants who want to dress up like outlaws and drive big loud bikes into small towns to scare the locals", who of course either laugh or curse). I recall one BMW rider being ridiculed on a forum because he said all his HD friends "dress up like pirates to drive to the tavern" and "could he do it too" LOL. Some sport-bikers are also buying some extra loud tuned exhausts (but for a different, but still loud, sound). The kids in my neighborhood simply poke nail holes in their dirt-bike mufflers and/or take the sound insulation out of the muffler. This is "all good" because America is home of the free and the land of the immature. Naturally the snowmobilers racing in the ditches on Skate Creek Road deign nice quiet 4 strokes for screaming 2 strokes that can be heard literally 4 miles away "look at me! look at me! look mommy, no hands!".
As far as the sound of freedom goes (unrestrained high-power pistol and rifle reports), Sen. Udall just introduced a bill to transfer Pittman-Robertson revenues from wildlife conservation to building rifle ranges on public lands.
