Talking points include even/odd-order THD, active/passive bass traps, active xovers, DAP + tubes, fast ‘n’ loose facts, cassettes on the go again. Tune in as John and I cover these and more topics…

THD. Short for total harmonic distortion, its measurements show how much harmonic artifacts hifi components inject. It’s a complex subject with a math aspect. As an Irish country bumpkin, I give you the super-lite version. First we need to understand…

Some gals dig broad shoulders. Some guys are done in by long legs. These days accessories get me hot under the collar…

Classy warfare. A, A/B, D. Silicon Mosfets vs GaNFets. Ethernet copper vs fiber optics. Ball bearings vs viscoelastics. Dynamics, planars, electrostats and AMT vs ribbons…

MSG is one of the most misunderstood kitchen flavorings. It was invented in 1907 by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda who boiled down cubits of kombu seaweed to extract glutamate…

I’m a worthless piece of shit. Please let me in…

Peeling Tom? This time he’s not peeping but peeling; down to the bone. And there’s two of ’em. What am I on about?

Case closed! Is it, really?

This exploded Audeze graphic from their cookbook of planarmagnetic driver design shows symmetrical push/pull magnets…

It’s not short for full-metal clank but fibre media converter. It’s how you can pimp out your router…

Numbers. If you’ve been to a classical concert, you’ll have heard the first oboe play a non-vibrato A4 to which all other instruments in the orchestra tune themselves…

Swiss Made. Although chatting with audio designers of non-conformist hardware is essential to appreciate it fully, nothing beats…

C-Wave. Non-switching Continuum Processing. Ironless motors…

Oskar Heil protegé. Ongoing AMT developer at first ADAM now HEDD – for studio/home speakers and headphones. For that CV, we call on Klaus Heinz and his Heinz Electrodynamic Designs. When he first bowed the original HEDDphone…

August 10, 2011. A year past my September 2010 review of Voxativ’s original Ampeggio…

Mark Levinson gets UK citizenship. Of sorts. His company Daniel Hertz just signed…

Southend On Sea, Essex. It sounds picturesque. It’s where…

From Dune to done in $3’295/pr? That’ll be…

When Jarek Waszczyszyn’s press release for today’s Fram Arte hit…

The art of the steal. Press releases are all about stealing eyeballs; the more the merrier. So there’s…

Audite’s bite…

Anachrophilia. Love of spiders? That’d be arachnophilia. Close but no web…

The canton of Reference, 2023. It’s not the latest Swiss county; nor its swankiest zipcode. It’s Canton’s new 8-deep Reference range which dropped at this year’s Munich show…

No woman no cry; no hifi no sound. When it comes to enjoying music playback…

It wasn’t a quad bike for a son of anarchy with revoked driver’s license. It was a quad of review wobbles. The first wheel that came off…

Help! If you’re a new hifi manufacturer in the shits; or want to avoid them at all costs…

INS for insular? I ‘knew’ the emailer; which is to say, I’d reviewed his products. Now he asked whether I could help with a letter of recommendation for the American immigration and naturalization services…

For about a year Ivette had suffered a worsening clogged-up ear…

Dawid does Munich. Day One finished. Day Two wrapped. Done.

Show preview. At 145 entries deep, our teaser listing of what to see and hear in Munich just completed. Enjoy!

Ever since Steve Jobs’ carefully orchestrated product reveals, I remain curious how hifi companies adapt the recipe for their own YouTube versions. Here are three…

Had TNT just blown up one of my review shipments from the UK? The Irish Sea is quite narrow. You’d not think that…

Jaded jaundice jammed up? Some color commentary on a divisive subject…

Axxess is the fourth brand in the Audio Group Denmark family of Ansuz, Aavik and Børresen. Axxess will consist of…

A few sweet arguments against salty overpriced ‘audiophile’ servers; for local files only. If you buy music to own and support its creators with more than fractional cloud-streaming cents, you don’t need…

Cable risers or lifts. They give engineers the fantods and audiophile critics perfect ammunition to indulge in ridicule. I couldn’t care less. I use…

In late 2019 I visited Denmark’s Aalborg to learn about Audio Group Denmark and its brands Aavik, Ansuz and Børresen. Fast forward to early 2023 when I was invited once more…

As the world’s only country with the proper URL extension for our hobby, Finland aka dot.fi is home to Hypostatic and their current Blackbird model. That’s a…

Audiophile slang, translated…

The emailer was Jeffrey Jenkins of Carbide Audio LLC. “We just released an updated version of our footer called the Evo…

You too? Lumin’s U1, a pure streaming transport from ~2015, just hit the reset button. Voilà, the U2 successor with all-new processor, linear power supply, fiber-optic and dedicated USB⇒DAC ports plus PCM768 and DSD512 routing…

The word ‘cardioid’ already made many rounds in our pages circling Martin Gateley’s sound|kaos subs and prior to those, subs or bass systems from Bastanis/Zugspitz, Cygnus, Ecobox, ModalAkustik and Voxativ. We also heard it with the Silent Pound Challenger, Kii Three/BXT, a master tuning for Buchardt’s A700 and finally…

I’m skint. adjective. pertaining to being poor, out of money or broke. British in origin, it derives from ‘skinned’. “I’m way too skint to go drinkin’ tonight.” From my recent news post: In the UltraFi Olympics, Denmark just unleashed a whole team of Ansuz challengers spanning flagship cables and power distributors…

Adidas loses NY trial against Thom Browne over three-stripe design. That was the headline of…

12 for inches, D for dual. Voilà, the next chapter in Martin Gateley’s exploration of music’s Mariana Trench…

In hifi, anything not the signal which somehow arrives at the ear is distortion. In this context, the signal is what’s measured on an oscilloscope. What kind of dead-obvious distortion…

Get syng’d up three ways. With Syng’s Cell Alpha, you can. Inside the truncated sphere, this fully class D active omni…

Winning. The word could recall actor Charlie Sheen’s tiger-blood period when winning, $50K professional goddesses and cocaine crashed. For me it recalls…

En plein air. It’s French for outdoor painting. Now Airplain is Swiss for active speakers with…

Knuckleheads; dense enough so nothing penetrates. If true about nothing getting in, nothing should leak out either. Speaker cabinetry enjoys its own variants; boxes so inert that nothing gives. Internal air pressures incite no mechanical response. Welcome to what’s thought of as dead boxes…