Open-ear and bone conduction headphones get shelved together because they solve the same problem, but they are two different technologies with different failure modes. One plays sound at your ear from outside the canal. The other skips the ear canal…
A Bluetooth codec is the compression scheme used to squeeze audio through a radio link that was never designed to carry uncompressed sound. Every wireless headphone uses one. Which one it uses depends on what both ends support, and that…
For a system covering fifty to two hundred people, the powered versus passive question decides how much you carry, what you plug in where, and who is responsible for keeping the drivers alive. It is not a sound quality question…
The choice between one floor unit and a board full of stompboxes is usually framed as a tone argument. It is really an argument about switching, routing, and how much you want to carry. Both approaches can sound excellent. They…
Wattage is the number printed largest on a guitar amp and the least useful one for deciding what to buy. Power tells you how much electrical energy the output stage can deliver. Loudness depends on that plus speaker sensitivity, cone…
Battery figures on headphone listings are technically true and practically misleading. They are measurements taken under one narrow set of conditions, and almost nobody listens under those conditions. Once you know what the test looks like, the gap between a…
Active noise cancellation is not soundproofing. It is a real time subtraction problem. A microphone samples the noise arriving at the headphone, a processor calculates a signal that is the inverse of that noise, and the driver plays it alongside…
Headphones get sorted into three families by one physical question: what does the driver couple to? An over-ear cup encloses the whole ear and seals against the side of your head. An on-ear pad presses on the ear itself. An…
The common belief is that a powerful amplifier is dangerous to a speaker. In practice the opposite failure is far more frequent: a small amplifier pushed past its limit destroys more tweeters than a large one ever does. Understanding why…
Three very different products end up doing the same final job, which is turning a line level signal into enough current to move a woofer. An AV receiver, a two channel amplifier, and a pair of powered speakers all get…