I road-tripped to Calgary to hang with the founders of Plunge Audio: Simon (been designing musician IEMs for a decade) and Justin (Juno award-winning musician/producer). The whole point was to get out of the usual sci-fi noise/consumerism loop and ask two actual veterans what matters in audio—plus the deeper “why do we even care about music” stuff. Also yes, their HQ has Pac-Man, and yes, the basement shop is where the prototyping madness happens (including carving prototypes out of a block of wood so they can literally just throw it in their ears and iterate). The biggest myth-bust: “the graph tells the whole story.” They basically nuked that idea. Measurements can help in R&D as a starting point, but when it goes in your ears, the subjective/tactile reality—transients, perception, context—can completely diverge from what you saw. We also got into the objectivity vs subjectivity debate (spoiler: if you think you found the objective answer, you’re wrong), and how your life situation can change what hits you emotionally. On the technical side, Justin’s stage-musician angle was super based: out-of-the-box tuning matters less once you’re in a live chain with EQ, rooms, engineers, and chaos—except soundstage. You can EQ a lot, but you can’t “fader” your way into a bigger space in your head. Then we ended with the most important question: meteor is coming—what’s your last song?