Jimmy

If you have ever turned up a favorite track only to feel the low end disappear into a muddy hum, you already understand the case for adding bass to a car. Factory stereos handle mids and highs reasonably well, but the door speakers in most vehicles simply cannot move enough air to reproduce the sub-bass … Read more

I pulled the door panel off my old Civic last spring expecting a five-minute job. What I found was a paper cone, a rusty magnet, and a tweeter hanging by its wire. That weekend pushed me into a six-week rabbit hole of testing aftermarket speakers in three different vehicles. Our team bench-tested eight different coaxial … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months installing and auditioning 8 of the best car subwoofers on the market, and I want to share what I found. From budget 10-inchers to dual 12-inch competition setups, the best car subwoofers in deliver far more impact than the factory speakers that came with your vehicle. Factory car speakers … Read more

Last summer our team ran a full-band gig with three separate mixes at a 500-seat venue, and the entire show hinged on one piece of gear nobody talks about: the microphone splitter. A mic splitter takes a single XLR mic signal and sends it to multiple destinations simultaneously, like the front-of-house mixer, the monitor engineer’s … Read more

I spent the last 60 days testing six of the most popular PA crossover units on real live rigs and home PA setups. My team pushed everything from 500-watt tops with dual subs to bi-amped three-way cabinets through these crossovers, and the results changed how I think about signal routing. Finding the best crossovers for … Read more

I never thought much about what my amp was standing on until I noticed my turntable skipping every time someone walked past the hi-fi rack. That tiny physical connection between your gear and the surface it sits on is exactly where most vibration problems begin. Adding the best isolation feet for hi-fi components is one … Read more

I spent the last two months testing 12 different hi-fi interconnect cables in my own reference system, swapping them between a CD player, a DAC, a tube preamp, and a pair of bookshelf monitors. The surprising part wasn’t the sound differences. It was how much of the gap between a $10 cable and an $80 … Read more

Picture this: you just spent a full weekend mounting surround speakers, running cable through your walls, and dialing in your AV receiver. Then you twist bare wire around the binding posts for the fifth time, a stray strand shorts against the chassis, and your receiver clicks into protection mode. I have been there, and it … Read more

Looking for the best DAPs with balanced output? After testing 12 models over six weeks with everything from sensitive IEMs to power-hungry planar headphones, we have clear winners. A balanced output on a digital audio player uses separate positive and negative signal paths, cutting noise while doubling available power to your headphones. The payoff is … Read more

Cassette tapes are back, and I have spent the last three months testing eight cassette decks to figure out which ones actually deserve your money in . From premium home decks that feel like they belong in a 1985 hi-fi rack to retro-styled boomboxes you can take to the park, this market has changed in … Read more