Jimmy

Working a 4-hour festival set with a screaming stage volume behind you teaches you one thing fast: a bad pair of headphones ruins the mix. I learned this the hard way at a 600-cap club show when my old set started clipping the kick drum because I could not hear the low end properly. That … Read more

If you play bass, acoustic guitar, or keys on stage, you already know that running a long unbalanced cable to the front-of-house mixer is a recipe for hum. I have stood on enough stages where the bassist’s signal picked up every stray light dimmer in the venue. A quality direct box fixes that. It converts … Read more

I’ve spent the last decade running front of house for touring bands, club DJs, and one-off shows. After frying a cable mid-set in 2019, I became obsessed with finding the best stage power distribution units that wouldn’t let me down. This guide is the result of testing 27 different PDUs over 60+ live shows, narrowly … Read more

If you have been wondering whether a dedicated network streamer is worth adding to your hi-fi setup, our team spent the last 90 days testing ten of the most popular models to answer that question once and for all. A network streamer is a small device that pulls high-resolution audio from the internet or your … Read more

After spending three months testing eight dedicated music streamers in our reference listening room, we narrowed down the field to the devices that actually deliver on the promise of better sound from your streaming services. We ran each one through hours of Tidal Max and Qobuz hi-res playback, swapped them between budget and reference amplifiers, … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight compact network streamers on my desk, my bookshelf speakers, and a pair of powered monitors in my living room. Some of them barely took up more room than a coaster, and a couple punched well above their weight class on sound quality. If you want audiophile-grade streaming … Read more

Finding the best all-in-one hi-fi systems in can feel overwhelming when you see how many options sit between $80 and $400 on store shelves. You want clean, room-filling sound without the cable mess of separate components, and you want it to just work the day you unbox it. I get it. Our team spent weeks … Read more

Let’s be honest. Most onboard audio is junk. My motherboard audio had hiss, crackle, and a noise floor that sounded like a tiny fan running under every quiet passage. If you’ve been using headphones straight out of your PC or phone’s headphone jack, you’re missing a huge chunk of what your music and games can … Read more

Our team spent 90 days testing 7 of the best streaming DACs on the market, switching between them in the same system with the same speakers, the same cables, and the same reference tracks. We logged listening notes after every session, measured app reliability, and pushed firmware updates until we had something concrete to share. … Read more

I spent the last 90 days rotating between 10 planar magnetic headphones on my desk, switching from a Topping DX5 to a Qudelix 5K and back again. This is the roundup I wish I had when I started. Below you’ll find the best planar magnetic headphones for , covering everything from a sub-$150 gateway to … Read more