If I Were to Build the Best
Rafi Mercer reflects on Koenigsegg’s hypercar mindset and asks what “the best” would look like in listening. The answer: nothing works without the human at the centre — presence is the real masterpiece.
By Rafi Mercer
I was listening to the Founders podcast this morning — the episode on Christian von Koenigsegg and his lifelong quest to build the best hypercar imaginable. Not a good one. Not a competitive one. The best. And somewhere between his carbon-fibre dreams and his refusal to compromise, a question drifted over to me:
If I had to build one thing — the best thing — what would it be?
A room?
A speaker?
A system?
Something else entirely?
The first answer that tried to volunteer itself was a speaker, because that’s where my mind naturally wanders. But the truth is simple: a speaker isn’t enough. You can design a perfect object, but if the room is wrong, or the ritual is rushed, or the person listening is distracted, the perfection dissolves.
Then I thought: perhaps it’s the room. A kind of cathedral for sound. But a room alone can’t save us either. I’ve stood in beautifully crafted spaces where the sound sang, but the people didn’t. You can design for the ear, but you can’t force someone’s attention. Without presence, even great acoustics feel hollow.
So I followed the thought all the way through and realised something obvious that I’d somehow stepped around:
You can’t build the best anything in listening without building for the human inside it.
The hypercar analogy actually makes this clearer. Koenigsegg never talks about the engine in isolation. He talks about the feeling — the human experience when everything works together. The car isn’t a machine; it’s a relationship between the driver and the road.
Listening is the same.
You can perfect the materials, the angles, the tuning, but without a human choosing to listen — choosing to be present — the whole thing is inert.
If I were to build something “the best,” it wouldn’t be a singular object. It would be a system shaped around the human moment itself. A room that encourages stillness rather than demands it. A speaker that doesn’t show off, but invites. A ritual that reduces friction rather than adds weight. A design that gently guides someone from noise into clarity.
And maybe that’s the point: the human factor cannot be engineered, but it can be welcomed. You can’t force someone to listen — but you can build an environment where listening becomes the natural thing to do.
The hypercar world chases speed; the listening world chases presence. Both are impossible without the person at the centre.
So if I had to choose my “one thing,” the best thing I could ever build, it wouldn’t be carbon or wood or copper.
It would be a feeling — the moment someone realises they’re hearing their favourite song as if for the first time again.
That’s the real masterpiece. Everything else is just the tools to get there.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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