You might think the BMW M8 Competition and its 617-horsepower twin-turbocharged 4.4-liter V8 don't need any help in the sound department, and you'd be right. It's hard to design an engine with eight or more cylinders that doesn't sound pleasant.

But there's always room for improvement, and titanium is the metal of choice for the most sublimely musical performance exhaust systems on the market. While the M8 Competition sounds burly and boisterous through a set of stock pipes, the example in this video, with its full-titanium exhaust kit from lauded performance exhaust manufacturer Akrapovic, sounds absolutely mental.

Granted, that's not the only modification that's been done to this savage BMW M8 Competition; it also benefits from some aftermarket turbochargers, a performance intake system from E-Venturi, and an ECU remap. The result of all this is 820 peak horsepower and up to 693 lb-ft of torque. You know, just in case the factory 3.0-second 0-to-60 time wasn't enough for you.

But none of those other mods have had as much of an impact on the sound as the titanium exhaust, which gives this M8 a crisp, raspy timbre the factory exhaust just can't match, with lots of crackling, popping goodness off-throttle.

If there's a downside to titanium, which is as lightweight as it is durable, it's the price; a full BMW M8 coupe exhaust kit will run you around $8,500. That sum would get you one heck of a nice E30 3-Series, giving you something to tool around town in whenever your M8 Competition is in the shop, but after actually hearing this Akrapovic exhaust at full-chat, that's not as easy a choice as we'd anticipated.

The BMW M8, launched for 2019, is the first 8-Series ever to wear BMW's fabled M badge. It comes standard with AWD and an eight-speed automatic transmission from ZF - a winning combination in terms of outright performance, but a regrettable one when it comes to driver involvement. Oh well.