Frank McIntosh started building tube electronics in 1949, and his exemplary build quality and performance standards made McIntosh Labs one of the most admired brands in the business. No wonder McIntosh Labs has a special place in the hearts of audiophiles all around the world. McIntosh owners loyalty to the brand is unmatched, some have …

Audeze came out of nowhere in 2009. Its very first headphone, the LCD-2, put establishment brands like AKG, Beyerdynamic, Grado, Sennheiser and Stax on notice.  Nine years later, the LCD-2 is still in the line, and it still makes most other brands’ full-size headphones sound rather puny. They all lack the LCD-2’s visceral bass and shockingly wide dynamic range. In …

An audio buddy recently asked me, “When will the LP bubble burst?” and I was at a total loss for words. The thought had never crossed my mind. Enlarge Image LPs aren’t just black anymore! Steve Guttenberg/CNET Back in the early 1980s it looked like the CD would kill the LP in a year or two — digital would permanently …

Some headphone audiophiles crave extreme dynamic punch or ear-massaging bass. Others are happiest only when their music sounds fully transparent. For the latter group, the king of clarity arrived in 2015 with Shure’s KSE1500 electrostatic in-ear headphone amplifier system.  The sound was revelatory, but the best stuff never comes cheap, especially in audiophile land. The KSE1500 sells for $2,999 in the US, …

Schiit Audio, yes it’s pronounced just like you think, but that didn’t stop Schiit from becoming a force to be reckoned with in the affordable audiophile gear marketplace. Most of their products are priced well under $1,000 and I’ve reviewed a lot of them but for one glaring exception, the Schiit Yggdrasil digital converter that debuted in 2014. It’s the …

The Woo Audio WA33 Elite Edition tube headphone amplifier improved the sound of every headphone in my collection. I’ve heard my share of great sounding tube amplifiers that don’t sound all that much different than solid-state amps, but that’s not the case with the WA33 Elite. It sounds richer, more voluptuous, and fuller bodied than the best solid-state designs. Don’t …

The Fluance Ai40 is the third self-powered speaker I’ve reviewed in three weeks. It follows the Adam Audio T5V and Kanto YU6 speakers, and while the Ai40 is around half the price of the other two, it’s the one that really got to me. There was some undefinable something about the sound that was more engaging than the other two …

Pretty much everybody else is now happy with a single Bluetooth or sound bar speaker, but stereo speakers are still the choice for audiophiles. I get it: One speaker takes up half the space of two and costs roughly half as much, but I’d be derelict in my duties if I failed to mention what’s lost with a single speaker. …

I love desktop speakers, I really do. Since they don’t have to fill an entire room with sound they can be small, and when you’re listening from just 2.5 to 5 feet (.8 to 1.5 meters) away from the speakers you hear a lot more sound direct from the speakers; when you’re further away you hear a higher proportion of …

I get a lot of headphones to try out, but don’t be jealous, most aren’t all that interesting. Not bad, just very average so there’s nothing at all memorable about most of them.  When I popped on these Creative Aurvana Trio headphones my ears perked right up, however. The sound was anything but ordinary. The clarity and open quality was …