I don't know about you guys, but I'm like one of those husbands/boyfriends/partners who sit outside surfing the web at women's clothing stores. So while "the girls" were out shopping and getting pedicures in Seoul, I decided to take a couple hours' detour to the Yongsan ETLand which is about a 10 minute walk away from the massive Yongsan subway station (take Exit 3).I suspect in the

Last time, we discussed small room acoustics and audiophile listening rooms. In that article, I used an idealized loudspeaker with flat frequency response from 40Hz up. As I'm still traveling, away from my gear, I figured for this article, let's look around published data in audio articles to examine room effects and consider what this means.One widely available and consistent source of objective

In the post "What are the most important audio components?" a few years ago, I said that we need to understand the various audiophile "domains": audio hardware, room acoustics, quality of your music, and of course personal mental engagement. Each of these have a part to play in the achievement of and personal judgment around sound quality.Of those domains, it's hard to speak about personal mental

Significant changes in the UI from the previous CTXMatrixBeta release.I want to remind 2-channel "immersive sound" lovers about the potential for using stereo crosstalk cancellation (XTC) / ambiophonics playback to enhance the 3D soundstage. You might have already heard of uBACCH in the audio magazines and on forums - why not try a similar effect for free (or through a small

It's taking a bit longer for my testing of the inexpensive I²S/IIS/I2S-HDMI DDC boxes due to some unexpected results which I'm chasing down currently; hopefully that gets resolved or understood soon.In the meantime, let me address something that folks might be curious about related to this topic of the I2S-HDMI interface... Does the HDMI cable make a difference to the sound quality?As with much

Hey everyone. I'm still waiting to finish the measurements and write-up of the USB DDC boxes discussed last time (a few things I need to double check on!). In the meantime, I thought I'd share some thoughts and pictures with you of a visit I made to a friend, Paul's, place. You'll see that he is much more of a "subjectivist" than I am.Above, we see his listening room which is capable of

This SMSL unit also does MQA decoding for those who want the feature. Unlike the Douk, this box only has an LED to indicate MQA decoding status but does not tell us the PCM or DSD samplerate.While I've tested some inexpensive devices (like the Topping D10s DAC) which have the ability to convert USB 2.0 input into S/PDIF output, I have not specifically looked into these Digital-to-Digital

It's an interesting experience I think to pop into local "brick and mortar" audiophile stores when traveling (like this, this, this over the years). This past week, I've been in San Francisco visiting family. We happened to stay within walking distance from what I think is the most well-stocked audiophile gear store in the city - Audio Vision San Francisco - located in the Nob Hill

For this post, let's discuss a few other audiophile items that have come my way in recent weeks.First, let's talk about something I haven't brought up for awhile now: sample rate conversion (SRC).A few weeks ago, Spoon (a.k.a. Steven Elkins of Illustrate) sent me an E-mail about his new src.hydrogenaudio.org page evaluating and ranking the qualities of various software sample rate converters

Let's have some fun this week on miscellaneous topics.Occasionally, I'll highlight items I've either written or found on audio discussion forums I think would be good to share. One reason I decided to start doing a blog beyond just contributing to forum discussions was precisely because while the public forums are great for interactions with community members, meaningful posts often become

Last week, I discussed the miniDSP UMIK-2 USB measurement microphone and as I mentioned then, it's not often that we see much discussion about these devices among audiophiles even though they are important in helping us chase down sonic problems and of course to calibrate the sound system. To me, that calibration process is an essential part of achieving a truly "accurate" sound system once we

Well, as mentioned previously, it was a great holiday season and here's another gift from Audio-Santa 🙂 - the miniDSP UMIK-2 measurement microphone. I bought this through Solen.ca here in Canada and they did a great job with the order and quick shipment. Amazon Canada often has limited stock of miniDSP products.I'm sure the miniDSP company is well known to many

Over the holidays, Santa brought me a new SVS SB-2000 Pro subwoofer (currently US$900 black ash, US$1000 piano black, Canada: black ash, piano black) for the system in the sound room. As you can see, I got the slightly more expensive shiny piano black version. As usual, I bought this from typical consumer channels.On this blog, we've talked about full-range sound, including the

Hope you're all having a wonderful Christmas-New Year Holiday season!On Christmas morn 2025, as I relaxed in the sitting room waiting for the rest of the family to get ready for some holiday festivities, listening to holiday music, I could not help but marvel at the fact that my little Logitech Squeezebox Radio sitting over the fireplace, released back in 2009 continues to go strong all these

After writing the article recently about New Record Day's "AI assisted research" on the P.I. Audio / GR-Research UberBUSS, I thought it was disturbing seeing this recent, rather juvenile, video from Danny:As we can see, there is this ongoing conflict between Danny and Amir/Audio Science Review (ASR) over the years. Obviously, ASR has been highly critical of some GR-Research products like

Hey there guys and gals, since I've been in the mood for bling this end-of-year season (as per recent discussion of the Fosi Audio LC30), let's grab another one of these VU meter boxes - as you can see above, it's the Douk Audio VU30 Pro (typically around US$150, Canada link, AliExpress), a 2024 upgraded version of the Douk Audio VU3 (non-Pro) which came out back in 2021.Similar to the

These days we have AI making hit music, and AI actors coming soon. The AI industry is "hot" and impressive, seemingly the answer to all kinds of queries we may have right at our keyboards! I think it's absolutely true that with the advent of LLM's and multi-modal deep learning models, we have even more ability now to learn, analyze, and summarize all kinds of information unheard of just

A couple of weeks back, I evaluated the Rotel RSS-900 speaker switch and in that article, I mentioned this device, the Fosi Audio LC30 VU Meter and Amp/Speaker Switcher (less than US$150 street price). Notice that I have the "Black" version (Amazon Canada link, AliExpress) which doesn't look like it's as easily available as the typical "Yellow" meter version and it also has a slightly higher

Hey everyone, once awhile I'll take a look at stuff YouTube offers me in the feed that might be interesting. I see that in the last few months, there has been this channel called "The HiFi Five" and in Episode 6 (November 19, 2025) they invited Dennis Burger of SoundStage! for a discussion. I found this video actually quite interesting as an illustration of objective/subjective mindsets

For this post, let's spend some time looking and listening to the above device. It's the Rotel RSS-900 "speaker selector", MSRP around $200. This has been on the market for awhile now, I think released back around 2004. Here's the manual for it. I was graciously lent this box by a friend to check out as this is not a kind of product I've published on in this blog.As you know, these days,