Paul's Posts

For years, recording and mastering engineers have crushed the dynamic range out of music. Can AI put any of it back? The loudness wars have been a curse on recorded... Read more...

Active vs. passive

For decades, the audiophile orthodoxy said linear (passive) power supplies sound better and switch-mode supplies were for laptops and cell phones. But times and technologies change for the better. A... Read more...

Point of view

A musician on stage hears the music from inside the band. The rest of us hear it from out in the audience. The two perspectives sound nothing alike, and our... Read more...

Holy Grilles!

Speaker grilles aren't acoustically neutral. They were designed to do an aesthetic job, and the question of whether to leave them on or take them off has a real answer... Read more...

Winners and losers

The biggest single variable in your audio system isn't your gear. It's the room you put it in. Change the room and you change everything. We've covered this many times... Read more...

Stop the theft!

Soundstage isn't built in the DAC. It's already in the recording — the DAC's only job is to get out of its own way. A stereo recording carries spatial information... Read more...

Dynamics!

A system that compresses dynamics (and most do to some extent) doesn't just reduce loudness contrast — it removes the emotional impact from the music itself. Dynamic range is the... Read more...

Power tweak

Before you change a single piece of gear, get your speaker placement right — it makes more difference than almost any equipment upgrade you can make. Roughly half the system... Read more...

In the beginning

The power cord is the first link between the wall and your music, and treating it as an afterthought is a mistake. I've heard the pushback a hundred times: the... Read more...

The latest

Every few years a new semiconductor technology arrives with impressive specifications and a lot of enthusiasm behind it, and the question we always ask is the same: does it actually... Read more...

On or off?

Tubes are a consumable, and how you manage them changes how long they last and how they sound. The question of whether to leave a tube preamplifier on, switch it... Read more...

Burning up

The idea that audio components need hours of use before settling into their best sound is one of the most debated topics in our community — and the skeptics are... Read more...

Taming the beast

Getting low frequencies right in a listening room is one of the more challenging parts of building a great system — and one of the most overlooked. Bass behaves differently... Read more...

Becoming a Better Listener

Listening is a skill — and like any skill, it develops with practice, but only if you know what to practice. Most of us in the HiFi Family didn't arrive... Read more...

Same, but different

The idea that a lossless compressed file and an uncompressed file should sound identical is perfectly logical — and sometimes, in practice, it might not hold. FLAC and WAV are... Read more...

The Distortion We Love

Some of the best-sounding audio systems in the world are measurably imperfect — and understanding why might tell you something important about how sound actually works. Here's the basic physics.... Read more...

Center cabinet

That gear rack sitting between your loudspeakers is doing more damage to your soundstage than almost anyone realizes. It is one of the most common setups in audio. Two speakers... Read more...

Naming names

Readers occasionally ask why I will happily name a brand I admire, like Audioquest or Magico or Wilson, but rarely name a brand I think falls short. The answer is... Read more...

Big is better

More watts does not mean louder music, but it almost always means better music. This confuses people, and I understand why. If you have a twenty-watt amplifier and a two-hundred-watt... Read more...

Tweaking

Most high-end loudspeakers come with two sets of binding posts connected by a metal jumper or a short wire link. As most of us know, the idea is that you... Read more...

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