Hello. My name is Richard, and I’m an audio junkie.
(“Hi, Richard.”)
It’s been zero days since my last critical listening session. I own more headphones than a person has ears. I have opinions about pressing plants. When a song comes on, I don’t hear the chorus — I hear the cymbal decay at 2:47 and whether the denoiser breathed on it. My family has learned that “one more song” is a unit of time with no fixed value.
I tell you this because tuning the Kraken’s sound isn’t a spec-sheet exercise. It’s an obsession with a workflow. Here’s what that actually looks like.
The Loop: Tweak, Analyze, Stare, Repeat
The daily ritual runs on our custom analysis software, and it’s beautifully monotonous: make a slight change to the engine — one parameter, one nudge — then run a full analysis and do a cross-visual comparison: the before and after, side by side on screen, waveforms and spectra overlaid, hunting for exactly what changed and only what changed. Then listen. Then tweak again.
One session might be thirty of these loops. It’s the audio equivalent of adjusting a picture frame one millimeter at a time for four hours. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, the best part of my day.
The Secret Weapon: We Know These Records By Heart
Here’s an advantage no instrument can replicate: we grew up on the music we’re testing. These aren’t lab signals — they’re the records that lived in our houses. When you’ve heard a song a thousand times across four decades, you don’t need a chart to know something’s off. The engine touches a note wrong and it registers like a typo in your own name.
And we stack the deck further: we test with different masterings of the same album and different condition grades of the same pressing — the mint copy, the good copy, the garage-sale tragedy. Same music, different sources, so we learn what’s the recording, what’s the pressing, and what’s the damage. The engine has to get all three right, and we can tell the difference because our ears did the homework decades before the software existed.
The hardware side does its homework too — the learning profiles we’ve written about mean the engine knows each ADC and DAC’s personality before the music even starts. Calibrated gear, calibrated ears.
The Listening Rig: Three Headphones and an Apology to the Neighbors
Every candidate tuning faces the jury: three different brands of headphones — because every headphone lies a little differently, and a tuning that survives three different liars is probably telling the truth — and then the speakers, cranked to “the household has been notified” volume, because headphones and rooms disagree, and the Kraken has to sound right in both.
This feeds what we call the vinyl expectation process: the engine’s output is voiced against what a record should sound like — not a lab ideal, a record — and then the built-in EQ hands the final say to you. Our expectation sets the foundation; your taste finishes the mix. We tune the engine to be right; the EQ exists because “right” and “the way you like it” are allowed to be two different things.
The Question Everyone Asks: Do We Want Records to Sound Like CDs?
NOPE.
Full sentence: nope. If we wanted digital sterility, there’s a streaming app for that. The warmth, the ever-so-gentle analog roll-off, the way a needle in a groove feels — that’s not a defect to engineer away, that’s the entire point of the format. The Kraken removes what’s broken, never what’s vinyl.
The Expectations, In Writing
So here’s the contract, straight from the tuning bench:
1. Remove the artifacts that hurt the sound. Clicks, pops, crackle, hum, noise — the damage goes.
2. Know when to stop. This one matters: on a record in truly rough condition, the engine processes up to a calibrated point — and no further. Past that point, more processing stops helping and starts hurting: push harder and the sound deteriorates, and you trade the record’s artifacts for processing artifacts, which is a terrible trade. Restraint is a feature. The engine is tuned to walk away from the table while it’s still winning.
3. Make records sound like RECORDS. Cleaner, quieter, healthier — and unmistakably, warmly, gloriously vinyl.
That’s the whole philosophy, tuned one millimeter at a time, verified by three lying headphones, some very loud speakers, and a lifetime of knowing exactly how these songs are supposed to sound.
Now if you’ll excuse me — it’s been several minutes since my last critical listening session, and the bench is calling.
So… go drop a needle. The Kraken’s got the rest.