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Spin cycle
Is 45 RPM Really Better? 45 RPM gives the cutting engineer more room to work with — and a 33 LP gives the listener more music. Both are real advantages,...
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The same but different
Two DACs using the same off-the-shelf chip can sound completely different and... two DACs using completely different chips can sound nearly identical. The DAC chip (or technology) is but one...
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Pure bliss
There's a comforting piece of audiophile folklore that says most amplifiers run in pure Class A at low listening levels. It's rarely true. A pure Class A amplifier keeps its...
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Applause please
Two amplifiers can drive the same speakers in the same room and produce wildly different soundstages. The difference isn't power. It's character. Anyone who's auditioned a few power amps in...
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Look up
Like obedient audiophiles, we obsess over side walls yet almost always forget the ceiling exists. Sound doesn't share our priorities. Ceiling acoustics matter as much as the side walls and...
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In or out?
A recording captures the precise back-and-forth motion of air at the microphone. The loudspeaker should precisely reproduce that back-and-forth motion. But what happens if you reverse the plus and minus...
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Ihe Inside scoop
I trust that a great speaker cable feeds your loudspeaker. That said, do you ever think about the cable inside? Once connected to the amplifier, the signal enters a few...
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Audio warriors?
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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