Philips launches competition to find the best sound

For those who value authentic sound quality, hearing every detail in a song matters. Now, Philips is inviting you to indulge your passion for those details through an innovative collaboration with the Grammy Award winning Metropole Orchestra, the largest professional pop and jazz orchestra in the world. On the Philips Sound Facebook page you can experience a complex piece of music that has been ‘visualized’ to actually show all the sound details in a recording – which can be heard faithfully with Philips’s range of high end audio products.

To take this even further, Philips has launched a competition on Facebook to find the real sound obsessives, who will get a chance to record a track with the Metropole Orchestra – and to have it produced by the Grammy Award winning producer, Steve Lillywhite.

Obsessed with sound visualizer
Bringing to life its obsession with sound, Philips has worked with The Metropole Orchestra, the world’s largest professional pop and jazz orchestra, to showcase the importance of hearing every detail through an exciting Facebook visualization. From September 1st, the visualizer hosted at facebook.com/philipssound lets you single out individual members of the 51 artists of the orchestra to hear exactly how that one player contributes to the whole orchestral piece. Through this, Philips shows that for those who understand what makes a quality sound experience, it’s the details that make the difference. No matter how obscure the instrument or unseen the musician, for sound obsessives, hearing those details is what takes a sound recording to new levels.

The visualizer can be found on the Philips Sound Facebook page alongside interviews with members of the Metropole Orchestra, Steve Lillywhite – as well as Philips’s other sound heroes and its own Golden Ears experts.

Obsessed with sound competition
Philips kicks off the global Obsessed with sound competition 2011, also hosted at facebook.com/philipssound. Judged by the Metropole Orchestra and Steve Lillywhite, as well as a host of other musical heroes like jazz saxophonist and band leader Benjamin Herman, Philips begins its search to find unheard talent with great sound across the world. Through the competition, Philips wants to help up and coming artists achieve professional sound quality that can often be impossible to produce. The winner of the competition will be flown to Amsterdam to have their track re-worked, played and performed by the Metropole Orchestra – and produced by music producer Steve Lillywhite

Submitting your entry to the competition couldn’t be easier. Simply upload your track to SoundCloud and enter the SoundCloud URL with your email address by closing date, October 31st. Ten finalists will then face the deliberation of a respected judging panel. The jury, including Steve Lillywhite, who has produced albums for U2, Talking Heads, Morrissey and The Pogues, as well as famous jazz saxophonist Benjamin Herman, will decide who the winner of the competition is ahead of the announcement on November 30th.

Visit Philips Sound to enter or to check out and comment on some of the entries, as well as get hints and tips on how to create great sound from our Philips Sound experts and heroes, including the Metropole Orchestra, Steve Lillywhite, jazz musician Benjamin Herman, movie score recordist Geoff Foster and electro-pop artist Frankmusik.