One of the most important factors in selecting the right hi-fi components is room size. If you’re lucky enough to have a big living space (over 500 square feet), I’d recommend floor-standing speakers. Big rooms also soak up amplifier power; smaller rooms need a lot less. Here in NYC, most folks live in small apartments, …

Are people more obsessed with reducing clutter now than they were in times past? A mastering and recording engineer friend recently told me he was selling off all of his CDs and LPs, and from now on Spotify would be his only music source. I was taken aback by that remark; this man has spent his entire working life making …

Moving forward from the earliest days of Edison cylinders in the late 1880s, there is a long list of consumer audio formats that garnered popular support, while many others disappeared without a trace. The 78 RPM record, 45 single, and LP all enjoyed mass acceptance. Reel-to reel tape never took off, but 4- and 8-track cartridges had a good run, …

InEar is a new name to me, but it’s an established German maker of high-end headphones. ALO’s Ken Ball contacted me a few months ago about trying out some InEars and he sent over two models, the StageDiver 2 and StageDiver 3. They look similar to custom-molded in-ear monitors from Ultimate Ears and Westone, but the StageDivers are universal-fit models …

I reviewed the first Devialet back in 2010, and that advanced tech amplifier, the D-Premier, rocked the audiophile world. At the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Devialet is showing its next generation amps. There’s the new flagship Devialet 240, along with the more affordable Devialet 170 and Devialet 110, which can either be placed on a table or …

Nelson Pass is one of America’s leading amplifier designers, but he doesn’t change his products all that often, the last time was in 2006, so when he does it’s a big deal. I was knocked out by one of Pass’ earliest designs way back in the late 1970s, and over the decades he’s always made some of the best sounding …

It was bound to happen. Focal, known to audiophiles all over the world for its statuesque Utopia series of high-end speakers is readying its first sound bar system. It’s the 3-inch deep, “uni-body” aluminum Dimension, which can be placed in front of a display or mounted to a wall and provide a five-channel audio experience. The Dimension sound bar’s speakers …

Beyerdynamic makes some of my favorite headphones, but the company readily admits that an audio chain is only as good as its weakest link. Take their T 51 p on-ear headphones I raved about in November, they sound fine plugged into a phone, but to really hear the T 51 p, or any high-end headphone really strut its stuff you …

Founded in 1980, Krell Industries‘ amplifiers have long set the benchmark for sound quality, and at CES 2014 the company took the wraps off its latest generation iBias, high-efficiency power amps. That’s a really big deal because while Krells have always sounded great, they sucked a lot of AC power out of the wall socket. They ran hot, so hot …

If you listen to more music than watch movies at home, a top-notch integrated stereo amplifier may be a better choice than an AV receiver. I’ve said that for years. But a lot of the better-sounding integrated amps are feature-challenged, and some offer nothing more than an input selector for analog sources and a volume control. Some don’t even have …