Since I started this blog, I've used the tagline "A 'more objective' take for Audiophiles" (later adding the word Rational). This was intentional because back in the early 2010s, the environment was quite different than today. At that time, computer audiophilia was primarily about playback of local music libraries on hard drives (collapse of NAND flash drive prices for SSD in mid-2012 soon

Through my years as an audiophile, I've come across articles in magazines and online talking about hobbyist "aspirations". At audio shows, and seemingly each new issue of magazine we read, we're introduced to the latest and greatest piece or gear, the next "must have" item to consider in this never-ending path of upgrade to satisfy luxury consumeristic appetites.Given that it's "Summer Musings"

After writing the articles looking at room acoustics over the last month, I thought this would be a good time to discuss another observation about the psychology and culture of the audiophile hobby and some of the claims that people make.As I noted last time, room treatments like the IKEA Mittzon absorption panels are far from the exciting products highlighted in magazines each month or even

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hublot Big Bang Unico, ~US$20k+ depending on model.Hey everyone, I just got back from the wonderful trip to Central Europe and figured I'd extend some thoughts expressed in the previous article: The Luxury of Sound and Time: Audiophile products, the Rolex and Timex Analogy.That article went online October 12th and I was surprised to see Stereophile posted their article “In Defense of

Hey guys and gals, not much time this week to test stuff but to start I thought I'd show some pictures of the black version of the inexpensive aluminum footers that were discussed last week.I got these black-colored ones (AliExpress) for my center channel, the Paradigm Signature C3 v.3 which is a 3-way, 4 speaker design that sits on my wood/glass component rack. (You can see other

As you can see through my posts, I'm obviously not averse to trying out "cheap audio guy/gal" products. 😏 I trust that this is completely consistent with my perspective on audio hardware for the most part being mature technologies, refined over decades already. For the high-fidelity audio reproduction pursuit, we can achieve excellent quality at very reasonable prices. Many (not all of course)