Two packaging claims cause most of the disappointment in this category. The first is a range figure measured under conditions you will never stand in. The second is silence about the fact that some of these radios are illegal to…
A small box costing less than a set of cables can put a phone’s audio into an amplifier built decades before Bluetooth existed. The idea is simple, the execution has more variables than the product pages suggest, and picking the…
Studio monitoring headphones and consumer headphones are built to answer different questions. A monitor is trying to show you what is on the recording, including the parts you would rather not hear. A consumer headphone is trying to make the…
More complaints about earbuds trace back to fit than to any other cause. Weak bass, poor noise cancellation, buds that work loose on a run, one side quieter than the other: all four have the same root, and none of…
The IP code on a set of earbuds is not a marketing invention. It comes from IEC standard 60529, it is defined precisely, and it is measured under specific laboratory conditions. Knowing what those conditions are is the difference between…
Two numbers decide whether a headphone will play loud enough from a given source: impedance, measured in ohms, and sensitivity, measured in decibels of sound pressure per milliwatt or per volt. Together they answer the only question an amplifier is…
A turntable is the only source component where the user still assembles part of the signal path. Four things decide whether it works properly: the cartridge and how it is set up, the phono stage that follows it, the ground…
A USB microphone and an XLR microphone can use the identical capsule and sound the same. The difference is where the electronics live. Understanding that one fact makes every other tradeoff obvious, and it explains why people who start with…
Almost every microphone argument online is really an argument about rooms. The transducer type changes how much of your room ends up in the recording, and that single difference decides more outcomes than any brand comparison. Here is how the…
The wired versus wireless argument used to be about sound quality. It largely is not anymore. Bluetooth codecs improved, cancellation matured, and the gap that once separated the two narrowed to something most listeners would struggle to identify. What replaced…
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…