In August, AVTech Media Ltd. announced it was discontinuing the print version of Sound & Vision magazine. I was surprised it had lasted as long as it did. When I was editor of Home Entertainment magazine over a decade ago, we were putting out larger issues than S&V was putting out recently, and we couldn’t stay afloat with a much smaller staff. Sound & Vision can trace its lineage to audio magazines from the 1950s, but also weaves into my own (more recent, thank you very much) history. This is going to get a little navel-gazy, but I’ll bring it back around, I promise.
Read more: The Constancy of Change (Goodbye, Sound & Vision)
Take a look at the two camera lenses in the image below. It’s OK if you don’t know anything about photography. For this analogy to work, you can get the gist just from the picture. As far as the top-line specs go, these lenses are the same. They both fit Canon cameras, have a 50mm focal length (nicely between a telephoto and a wide angle), and are a “fast” f/1.4, which means they can take images in really low light and create a soft background when taking close-ups.
How much are your ears worth? All ears are equal, and even if some are more equal than others, it’s all infinite, right? Invaluable, or at the very least, irreplaceable? Our headphone hobby requires at least some hearing acuity, and yet I see very little discourse about the potential damage loud sounds can do to your hearing, permanently.
Just 18 months ago, we saw the fall of the controversial format called MQA, also known as Master Quality Authenticated. After being spun off into its own company by its creators, the resulting company, MQA Limited, went into administration. A few months later, its assets were purchased by an unlikely suitor: Lenbrook Industries, owner of the Bluesound, NAD, and PSB brands. This seemed like an odd mix.
If you’ve never heard of Temu, it’s an online marketplace similar to Amazon, Etsy, and what eBay has become. Broadly speaking, it’s a way for consumers to purchase products more or less directly from manufacturers. Said products are usually shipped straight from China. Quite often—and this is why Temu has become so popular—it’s a way to get extremely inexpensive products. Are they high quality? Absolutely not, but they are highly cheap.
I review a lot of headphones and earphones. Many of my reviews appear here in these virtual pages, but I also cover a lot of mainstream stuff for other outlets. Recently, I’ve had a few pairs of delightful weirdness come across my desk that I’m not reviewing on Solo, but I felt them worthy of a mention here. They’re ostensibly sports earphones, in that they’re intended primarily for outdoor exercise. Broadly, they’re considered “open” designs, though how they achieve that varies greatly. The overall idea is they let ambient sound in, while also supplying you with music.
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