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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)

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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.

Read more: Is Accuracy the Only Option?

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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.

Read more: The Opposite of Headphones

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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.

Read more: The Death and Immediate Rise of MQA (Again)

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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.

Read more: How Terrible Is Temu?

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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.

Read more: The Delightful Weirdness of Open Earbuds

  1. The Formats Time Forgot
  2. The Return of the Cassette
  3. Do You Need a Headphone Amp?
  4. The Highs and Lows of the Consumer Electronics Show
  5. 2023: A Year in Headphones (and Other Stuff)
  6. Perfect Noise Canceling?
  7. The Rise and Fall and Maybe Rise Again of MQA
  8. Have Your Music Tastes Changed?
  9. Beware AI “Reviews”
  10. Six Months In
  11. Why Do People Think Headphones Are Magic?
  12. Recalibrating the Ears
  13. Is There Such a Thing as a Perfect Pair of Headphones?
  14. Everyone Should Own These Headphones
  15. What is the Soundtrack to Your Life?
  16. The Endless Hassle of Connecting to In-Flight Entertainment
  17. In-Ear vs. Over-Ear for Travel
  18. Traveling as an Audiophile
  19. Greetings!
  20. A Fond Farewell
  21. When Is the Amp Important?
  22. Evaluating the Knowles Preferred Response Curve
  23. Do We Really Need All These Target Curves?
  24. The Problem with Hearing Correction in Headphones
  25. RF: A Phantom Menace?
  26. Understanding Current
  27. The Big Mistake Many Headphone Makers Keep on Making
  28. How Consistent Is the Quality of Headphones and Earphones?
  29. David Chesky’s New New Revolution in Headphone Sound
  30. Why You Shouldn’t Always Rely on Measurements
  31. The Shocking Truth About Truck-Stop Earphones
  32. Are There Valid Objections to the Harman Curve?
  33. Is It Possible for Headphones to Sound Fast? (Or Slow?)
  34. The Four Things that Recording an Album Taught Me About Audio
  35. What Playing Music Taught Me About Audio
  36. Voicing Headphones, Part 3: Campfire Audio's Ken Ball and 64 Audio’s Vitaliy Belonozhko
  37. The #1 Red Flag in Audio Articles, Ads . . . and Everything Else
  38. How Not to Go Deaf from Headphone Listening
  39. What’s the Future of High-End Headphones?
  40. How Audio Writers Are Killing the Audio Industry
  41. Why Buying High-Quality Headphones Is a More Responsible Purchase
  42. Does It Make Sense to Demo Audio Over the Internet?
  43. The New Standard That Killed the Loudness War
  44. Headphones 2020: The Year in Review
  45. Three Cases Where Measurements Didn’t Work
  46. How Much Can We Really Tell From Listening?
  47. Balanced Armatures: Why You Might (or Might Not) Want Them
  48. The Coming Revolution in Headphone Sound Quality
  49. Can Accuracy in Music Reproduction Exist?
  50. The Biggest Lie in Audio
  51. Voicing Headphones, Part 2: HiFiMan’s Fang Bian and Focal’s Mégane Montabonel
  52. What Will the Next Generation of Headphones Be Like?
  53. How Far Have Headphones Come?
  54. Voicing Headphones, Part 1: PSB/NAD's Paul Barton and Dan Clark Audio's Dan Clark
  55. How Will Headphone Testing and Reviewing Change in the 2020s?
  56. What the AKG K371 Headphones Tell Us About "Slow Listening"
  57. Where Are We At With The Harman Curve?
  58. Why Headphone Amps Are More Interesting Than Speaker Amps
  59. 2019’s Most Important Headphone Presentation
  60. Noise Canceling Is Much More Complicated Than We Thought
  61. How Does Aging Affect Audio Perception?
  62. Noise-Canceling Headphones for 17 Cents?
  63. Is Chesky Dumping Binaural?
  64. Why My Fi Ain't Hi-Fi
  65. Latency: A New Concern for Audiophiles?
  66. How to Read Our Headphone Measurements
  67. Eardrum Suck: The Mystery Solved!
  68. Should Audio Gear be Considered Luxury Goods?
  69. Headphone Equalization Using Measurements
  70. Why Is It So Hard to Rate Headphones?
  71. Five Things Headphone Enthusiasts Get Right (and That the Two-Channel Guys Get Wrong)
  72. The Best Possible Way to Test Audio Products (and Why Most People Don't Do It)
  73. Will aptX Adaptive Improve Headphone Sound?
  74. Is the miniDSP EARS the Death of Headphone Measurement? Or its Savior?
  75. What Are Measurements Good For?
  76. How Much Noise Do Your Headphones Really Block?
  77. Why We're Launching "SoundStage! Solo"

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