Almost every headphone listing quotes a frequency range, and almost none of them quote it in a way that means anything. Meanwhile the measurement that would tell you how a headphone sounds, a frequency response graph, appears on very few…
Wired in-ear monitors are the one corner of personal audio where the money goes almost entirely into acoustics. There is no radio, no battery, no charging case and no app. That focus is the argument for the format, and it…
A headset for calls is judged by how you sound to other people, which is the opposite of how music headphones are judged. That single difference explains most of the design decisions in the category, including several that look like…
Two people can buy the same earbuds, read the same specification sheet, and end up describing two different products. Usually nothing is wrong with either pair. The difference is the seal, and the seal is created by the boundary between…
Three kinds of playback get used for mixing at home, and they fail in different directions. Studio monitors are designed so that problems are audible. Hi-fi speakers are voiced so that music is enjoyable. Headphones remove the room from the…
A wireless microphone is a radio transmitter with a capsule on the front. Everything that goes wrong with one goes wrong for radio reasons: the wrong band, too little link margin, a reflection cancelling the direct signal, or a human…
Choosing a powered PA speaker is mostly a matter of matching three things: how many people are in the room, what you are putting through it, and how far the box has to throw. Wattage figures on a marketing panel…
Playing at home is a volume problem before it is a tone problem. Almost every guitar amplifier design assumes it will be turned up, and almost every home assumes it will not. The difference between a practice amp and a…
Most multi-effects units arrive with a few hundred factory presets, and most of them are demonstrations rather than working sounds. They are built to show off the widest possible range in a shop, at a volume and through a system…
A polar pattern describes how sensitive a microphone is to sound arriving from each direction. It is set by the acoustics of the capsule, not by a filter you can add later, and it changes a recording more than the…
A USB microphone is not a compromised version of a studio setup. It is the same signal chain with the boxes rearranged. Capsule, preamplifier, analog to digital converter, and a USB interface all live inside one body instead of being…
Dynamic and condenser microphones are not two grades of the same thing. They convert sound into electricity by different physical mechanisms, and that difference decides how much of your room ends up in the recording, how much level you need…
A USB DAC dongle and a desktop DAC do the same three jobs: receive a digital stream over USB, convert it to an analog voltage, and amplify that voltage enough to drive a headphone. The difference is not really sound…
A digital to analog converter (DAC) turns a digital audio stream into an analog voltage. A headphone amplifier takes that voltage and supplies enough swing and current to move a driver. Your phone, laptop, tablet, and game console already contain…
Three numbers appear on almost every passive speaker specification sheet, and together they answer one question: will this amplifier drive these speakers loudly enough without running into trouble. Sensitivity tells you how efficiently a speaker converts power into sound, impedance…
In a surround mix, the center channel carries the large majority of dialogue. Not most of it in a loose sense, but as a deliberate mixing convention: speech is anchored to the center so it stays locked to the screen…
Outdoors there is nothing to reflect sound back at you. Indoors, walls and ceilings return a large share of a speaker’s output to your ears; outside, that energy leaves and never comes back. The practical consequence is that a speaker…
Three numbers decide whether a portable speaker suits you, and all three are routinely misread. The IP rating is a lab test with specific limits, the battery figure is measured at a volume nobody uses, and the wattage on the…
In a small living room the honest comparison is not about sound quality in the abstract. It is about how many boxes you can place, how many outlets you have, whether the television remote needs to control the volume, and…
“Wireless subwoofer” describes the signal, never the power. Every powered subwoofer needs a wall outlet, including all of them sold as wireless. What the wireless part removes is the long audio cable running from the receiver or soundbar across the…