MAX live event #2

The second Musical Accuracy eXperience, or Musical Accuracy eXcellence (we’re not sure which one works best yet but both end up as MAX) was held 19 October 2025 at Auto24 in Roodepoort. A fantastic venue for Sound Quality (SQ) evaluations for car audio.

Joel and I had our work cut out across 8 entries that spanned from ultra high end through to systems that deliver real bang for the buck.

The ethos behind MAX is simple. We establish a reference for music and see how close systems get to that reference. In our case the reference is live music and we focus on technical accuracy. We listen for specific characteristics and then score against those. It is of course subjective but we have spent years trying to figure out how to make listening objective to remove as much cognitive bias as possible.

The philosophy behind MAX is that if you manage the technical aspects to your music you then ought to be able to master and MAXimise the inherent musicality of your system and hopefully the subjective enjoyment of it by you.

We don’t care if you listen to studio generated artificiality, or concert recordings bordering on the anally retentive perfectionist. What you enjoy is up to you – we aim to try and give you as much insight into where we think your technical areas may require a bit of tweaking.

Bear in mind that we reference live music against our hi-fi reference kit – and so bringing car audio into this arena is already a massive step up for car systems. Whilst you cannot equate the two given the very different environments it is amazing how excellent car sound can be!

Yesterday Joel was Mr Nasty in his track selection. We use Tidal for our source and Stravinsky was the opener (https://tidal.com/track/77607310/u). In this track we’re looking for stage width, depth and definition. We want to hear the stage in front of us, wider than the car and deeper than the car. You know. Nothing difficult!

We followed that up with a live recording of Orpheus from Sara Bareilles (https://tidal.com/track/184427809/u) in which we want to hear ourselves in the crowd, up close and personal. We then want to hear Sara nice and high, centred. Again, trivially easy stuff!

Then we got tough. Genesis Drum Duet live (https://tidal.com/track/113326064/u) was our next choice and it’s an absolute pig of a track. A real stinker. It’s two drum sets with the bias to the left set which makes channel separation the king of the heap here. Worse the kick drums are not miked equally and we wanted to a) hear them and b) position them. Try this track on your hi-fi sometime to see what we mean. And then try to see what a car with DSP has to do to get it right. Easy peasy? Not so much.

Bass and ambience and a sense of space are tested throughout but we used Chinese drums because, well, why wouldn’t you? (https://tidal.com/track/12014143/u). Here we’re listening for space creation vs reverb and it’s a great test of sub bass control and execution. We want to hear the vellum pinging as it gets smashed with a bloody great big stick and we want that impact and subsequent bass to really kick and resonate naturally. We want to get the sense of the size of the arena in which the drums are being played and not feel as if we’re actually in the drum itself.

Tonality was tested with two vocal tracks with Fall On Me (https://tidal.com/track/123011426/u). It opens with a male voice that not having heard until a week before in preparation I placed as female and follows up with Christina Aguilera and it’s a stunning vocal reference track. The human voice can be hard and we were looking for granite, meat and body and fluidity all at once. The next one up was Gaga with Is That All Right (https://tidal.com/track/96098358/u) and this is fast becoming a favourite of mine. There is reverb in this track that either translates into space or into annoying artificiality.

The standard of the cars was excellent. As always we don’t care what’s in the car and we listen as the car is presented with the only adjustments being made are to volume. We don’t move the seat and we both listen and chat and swap seats in the evaluation. My observations are that connectivity to the car system matters – the sound on offer is so good that when you use BlueTooth it exposes the limitations of the tech in ways we can’t quite fully appreciate until you’ve heard it.

It is also amazing to hear how good some of the cars are. The personal variation across them is also always super interesting and there are always surprises on the day. We never thought we’d suggest MORE bass to any car audio enthusiast but it happened. And whilst there are cars that are technically superb, it was gratifying to hear that they were also musical. One forgets that sometimes overly clinical can result in a dry and detached audio experience that whilst technically correct loses out on the emotional engagement with one’s music. Listening to the system only will always lead to a path of disappointment, and enjoying your music for you yourself is really the ultimate objective – appreciating why it does what it does.

Our thanks to the SPL guys who came around for a visit. The contrast couldn’t be more stark but if you haven’t experienced an SPL car you need to. And the answer to your question that you will ask when you have done so is “because you can”. Amazing.

If you want to attend or even enter, pop us your WhatsApp deets and we’ll add you to the group for future event deets.