Pursuing the ultimate sound for a single song…

… or band… or genre.

Or, for many people, a set of test tracks that they use over and over.

Whenever I get to catch the Grateful Dead Hour on the car radio, I think we should just make sure our system does great Grateful Dead. There are 1000s of live shows and a steadily growing catalog of official releases, so quite a body of work. The Dead, 24x7x365.25.

Neli actually did this in an earlier life and on a budget. Klipsh speakers and Adcom electronics. You can imagine how it does kind of approach concert like dynamics and volume. And when you are young [excepting this latest generation], the idea of playing a stereo at below concert-level volumes just seems… well, wrong.

I’ve often thought that our previous system, especially with the EMMLabs digital front end, was optimized for Dark Side of the Moon. It just presented that song in such a magical manner that worked on so many different levels: intellectual, emotional, hormonal, and practical audiophile levels. Yummy.

And many audiophiles try and optimize for Classical Music.

Before the Acapella Atlas speakers got here I was fixated on making Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive song sound as good as I could get it: My Imagine Dragons ‘Radioactive’ playlist.

I know this is wrong, intellectually, from a system designer / optimizer’s perspective. But there is still this really strong emotional need to make the system sound really good for My Music.

Which, you know, changes. But that is all to the good.

What this is not is having to ‘change what you like’ because nothing else sounds good on your system. So many audiophiles just play 4 piece jazz, or 3-piece Jazz plus female vocal. They act like this is their favorite music. Great music, sure. Enjoy it myself.

But seriously? I am sure there are closet Death Metal enthusiasts, for example, who are audiophiles, but they have been told to not optimize for Their Music so they go along with the small jazz program.

So, as we optimize the Atlas speakers, we try to just make them sound their best, of course.

But darned if I don’t stick in my favorite music a lot to see how IT sounds. 🙂