Sound Solver - 1 Year Later
Did you hear? Sound Solver has an anniversary coming up! November 1st, 2025 marks 1 year since orders first began shipping out to our awesome customers. I can’t think of a better topic for our first blog post. We have had quite an eventful first year in business, and I would like to share some of those milestones with you in this post.
Sound Solver started off as an idea in early 2024 for my own desktop. I couldn’t find a rack on the market that I really liked, so I designed my own. It soon dawned on me that others could stand to benefit from this design as well - that’s when Sound Solver officially became a “go”. With our first Instagram post in May of 2024 (a teaser of a prototype), we were off to the races. Over a series of months, prototypes evolved, a website was started, a survey of the audiophile community was conducted, and we located a reliable American-made source for our acrylic shelves since we lack the capacity to laser cut those ourselves at the moment. That community survey ended up being a key reason why certain design features were implemented into the final product. Many others underwent some level of tweaking based on the extraordinarily helpful feedback we gathered.
Evolution of the first prototype bracket and the final production version
In October of 2024, we launched a short 30-day preorder period with shipping beginning on November 1st. We had a very promising couple months of sales as we began to receive feedback from existing and future customers. We found out very quickly that a larger rack size would be needed to fit many of our customers’ gear. We launched our standard large size rack in January of 2025, and it has gone on to be our top seller.
Our large size desktop rack
Fast forward to February, 2025, when we had the fortune of having our racks displayed by Geshelli Labs at the Florida International Audio Expo in Tampa, FL. Geshelli’s own Sherri had reached out to me a couple months prior on Instagram about the possibility of receiving some of our racks. As I mentioned in a post shortly thereafter, this was a “pinch me” moment for me, as being contacted by a company with as large a presence and as stellar a reputation in the audio community as Geshelli’s was just totally unexpected and totally welcomed. Shortly thereafter, we also launched a new bracket style that is external to the rack itself, allowing wider components and offering a different look to the overall rack.
Our external bracket style
I then had the pleasure of exhibiting my products again with Geshelli Labs at Axpona in April. Axpona is North America’s largest audio show, so to have a small part in it as such a new company was amazing! Sherri, Geno, and company quickly became new friends of mine. They have been wonderfully open in helping me make inroads in the industry and being a sounding board to bounce ideas off of. For Axpona, we also teamed up in producing a very early prototype of a full-size rack for their 2-channel listening room. They showed off their upcoming monoblock amplifier – the Z-Block, a new DAC – the Torc, and a new preamplifier – the Giuseppe, all on my full-size custom rack. This rack featured shelf brackets 3D printed in the same style as our standard desktop racks – but MUCH larger! It also utilized hand-finished maple ply shelves and a flat-pack shipping arrangement. More to come on these in the coming months…
Geshelli Labs Headphone room at Axpona
Geshelli Labs 2-channel listening room at Axpona
After Axpona, we were very busy fulfilling orders and running the business, but we still managed to launch our new walnut shelf model in July. We released our large size rack in walnut first, followed by the medium size in September.
Our walnut rack supporting a stunning Geshelli Labs walnut stack
We have also received many requests for a smaller rack, and I’m happy to report that these will also be listed on the website very soon. In addition to all of our standard offerings, we began accepting custom rack requests in August and have fulfilled several of those requests already. We have completed racks for some really high-end gear from companies like Ferrum, Holo, and Bryston, among others.
A custom Sound Solver rack sized for Ferrum gear
Another request we have received from many is the addition of a headphone hanger to mount on the side of our racks. I am happy to report this is another new product coming soon to our portfolio. It will be backwards-compatible with all of our standard rack offerings, including both internal and external bracket styles.
Our new headphone hanger
Despite all this exciting product development, the most enjoyable part of this job remains hearing from our customers. We love seeing all the photos of our customers’ systems and this helps us understand how our products are actually being used, completing the feedback loop. Our customers and this community in general is filled with the greatest people, eager to learn more about our hobby and willing to give a new brand like us a try. We will forever be grateful.
- Grant, Owner/Engineer