@Featured

An audiophile digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is a device that converts a digital signal into an analog waveform that your speakers can produce and your ears will ultimately understand. DACs are in everything these days. They are ubiquitous devices that perform… Read the Review »

PSB was founded in 1972 by Paul Barton, a designer who believed speakers should sound natural without adding or subtracting anything from the original recording, which the company refers to as the True to Nature design philosophy. Equally important for the… Read the Review »

Call me what you want… publisher, editor, entrepreneur, schmuck or just Hey You and I likely will respond quickly and with a smile. Despite running my own publishing business for nearly all of 25 years, I still pretty much consider… Read the Review »

Updated October 2026: The Mark Levinson No. 5909 has been discontinued. Its replacement is the DALI IO-12 (buy at Crutchfield). Read our DALI IO-12 review. Ask 1,000 people at The Mall of America if $999 is a lot of money… Read the Review »

Watching the Internet come to life as a commercial entity in the 1990s, when I was in music/business school, was most eye opening. From the time that I got to South Central Los Angeles to celebrate the pending West Coast… Read the Review »

The Paradigm Premier 700F (buy at Crutchfield) is a mid-level floorstanding speaker from Paradigm priced at $1,800 per pair, which puts it right in the fray with many of the best players in the high-value speaker market. These moderately tall… Read the Review »

Updated October 2026: The iFi xDSD Gryphon has been discontinued. Its replacement is the iFi iDSD GR 2 (buy at Crutchfield). The iFi xDSD Gryphon (Updated October 2026: the iFi xDSD Gryphon is no longer sold, so we now link… Read the Review »

Two weeks ago, I was on the phone with a public relations executive I hadn’t spoken with in a few years. Frank currently represents PS Audio, Audio-Technica and a few other audiophile brands and he was confirming that he had… Read the Review »

An integrated amplifier doesn’t have to be physically large to be high performance and fully featured. When I read the initial press release for the Pro-Ject MaiA DS3 I thought, “There’s an amplifier that seems to fulfill all the requirements needed to… Read the Review »

Some folks prefer a tube-based preamplifier in their audio system while others prefer a solid-state preamplifier. By tube-based, I mean an audiophile preamplifier which uses a vacuum tube as its principal gain device. In contrast, a passive preamplifier attenuates the… Read the Review »

Sonus faber has a longstanding heritage of making audiophile loudspeakers for music lovers. It all started in 1983 when fine Italian craftsmanship met fine music appreciation in Monteviale, Italy. Not much has changed since, except that we’ve had advances in… Read the Review »

Things have changed quite a bit in the audiophile world as compared with just a few years ago when I left the business to try my hand at being an executive at a publicly traded Fortune 500 company. The pink… Read the Review »

The Anthem MCA 225 Gen 2 (buy at Crutchfield) is a two-channel class A/B audiophile power amp from Anthem, one of the better-known names in Canadian amplifiers, which also has three- and five-channel siblings in the 325 and 525. It… Read the Review »

Greensboro is much like any other mid-sized, sleepy college town in the Southeast. Home to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), part of a statewide system that quite surprisingly encompasses 17 colleges, universities, and institutions of higher learning,… Read the Review »

You may be surprised to learn that Cleer Audio sells an audiophile-oriented, wired-only audiophile headphone set. Cleer’s primary user base consists of younger, on-the-go listeners who are seeking headphones that perform at a higher level but also look really cool.… Read the Review »

Audiophiles love wired headphones. Younger tech fans and music enthusiasts love everything to be wireless. For the past few months, I’ve reviewed nearly every high-performance Bluetooth headphone, from brands such as Sennheiser, Bowers & Wilkins, Mark Levinson, Focal, Technics, Apple,… Read the Review »

Parasound has been offering high-value audiophile gear for three generations now,  including many higher-end products designed by legendary consultant John Curl. Today, they offer a broad range of products, including some revered integrated amplifiers, but if you’re looking to move beyond… Read the Review »

When I was 19 years old, I remember literally begging my boss, Christopher Hansen, to go to CES in early 1994. I was off from college, and back then the show was the Super Bowl of all things audio. What… Read the Review »

Scansonic is relatively unknown speaker brand at this point in the United States, but is uniquely related to some more familiar speaker brands such as Raidho Acoustics and ScanSpeak. In fact, it was developed to showcase ScanSpeak driver technology. Scansonic… Read the Review »

Acoustician Bob Hodas, who has tuned and pretty much every good recording studio—from Sony Music and Electric Lady Studios to Van Halen’s 5150 and so many more—also works with enlightened audiophiles seeking real-world, non-voodoo tuning of their rooms. This can mean… Read the Review »

The Naim Audio Mu-so all-in-one speaker/music system (buy from Crutchfield) is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the merger between electronics firm Naim Audio and French speaker juggernaut Focal. The second-generation Naim Mu-so, aka the Muso 2, is a very… Read the Review »

Most of us have probably listened to music through two-way bookshelf-sized loudspeakers at some point or another. What exactly is a two-way bookshelf loudspeaker? It is a loudspeaker that has two drivers: a small driver called a tweeter that handles… Read the Review »

Our verdict: The $699 Bowers & Wilkins Px8 pairs carbon drivers and a metal-and-leather build with clear mids and effective noise cancelling, though the bass can still blur a bit. Bowers & Wilkins has since released the Px8 S2, our… Read the Review »

One of the advantages of living in a big city is all of the access to various services, products, and experiences. Being a resident of a major metropolis gives you access to cultural, medical, culinary, and—in the case of the… Read the Review »

There was a time when you could walk through Circuit City or other major electronics retailers and see speakers similar to MartinLogan’s ElectroMotion CLS on display alongside all of the traditional cones-in-cabinets speakers. These days, though, there’s a good chance… Read the Review »

One of my stated goals as a consumer is to support local retailers. Sure, I buy my fair share of crap from Amazon.com just like everybody else but when possible, I try to shop local. One store that I used… Read the Review »

It wasn’t long ago that a five-liter V8 engine generated 225 horsepower. Today, technology allows 260 horsepower from a much smaller four-cylinder engine – and the fuel economy is far superior. Well-designed bookshelf loudspeakers from a reputable manufacturer like Focal… Read the Review »

Like many of you, I don’t have a perfect listening room, so having room correction built into a preamplifier can be a game changer. The Anthem STR preamplifier (buy at Crutchfield) has Anthem’s ARC GENESIS room correction, bass management for… Read the Review »

It should be obvious that a clean record makes for a better listening experience. There are a multiplicity of ways to clean your records. When you pull a rock through a canyon (which is what a record player does) it… Read the Review »

Small subwoofers make the audio world a better place. I am not sure how the audiophile community once missed out on this news story, but with a modest sub, any music lover can add the entire lower octave of music… Read the Review »

Given that many of today’s audiophile DACs, phono stages, and even many modern audiophile amplifiers have their own internal volume controls, it may not be clear why you would ever want to integrate a preamplifier into your modern audiophile music… Read the Review »

Retro is all the rage these days, and a number of companies have taken that mantle leaving the musty pawn shops and cluttered old record stores that sell 1970s gear and turned it into a modern audiophile sales boom. McIntosh… Read the Review »

Our verdict: The $349 Sennheiser Momentum 4 offers adaptive noise cancelling, aptX Adaptive, up to 60 hours of battery life and top-class bass. The headband can feel tight on larger heads during long flights. See how it compares in our… Read the Review »

One of the biggest audiophile fallacies is a pricier or more exclusive product is going to perform better than a more affordable or mass-market solution. Perhaps that was once the case, but new-school audiophiles are increasingly supporting manufacturers who deliver… Read the Review »

If you have a pair of ears, or even only one functioning ear, it’s impossible to avoid the “I” word these days. Most of the inflation news today is bad, and that makes sense as bad news creates media-based user… Read the Review »

Our verdict: The $11,000 Trinnov Amethyst is a stereo preamp built around Trinnov’s Room Optimizer room correction, with an active crossover option, so you can measure and fix how your system performs in your room in about an hour. Purists… Read the Review »

Recently, I’ve been asking audiophile industry executives what they think of Chi-Fi or “Chinese Hi-Fi (aka: audiophile components made in China, sold directly to  clients all over the world at often hard-to-conceive-of prices). It has been notable how many were… Read the Review »

Our verdict: The $799 Focal Bathys bring Focal’s audiophile sound to wireless noise-cancelling headphones, with an elegant luxury finish and a built-in USB DAC. The Focal/Naim app can be confusing at first. See how they compare in our audiophile headphone… Read the Review »

The Schiit Modi 3e (buy at Amazon) is the latest update to Schiit Audio’s popular low-cost digital-to-analog converter line. The company calls this one a “do-all” DAC, because it accepts coaxial and optical digital inputs, but also Schiit’s own Unison… Read the Review »