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Details: Written by: Brent Butterworth; Created: 01 August 2021

In the latest round of debate about MQA, I was dismayed to see the company once again tout its endorsements from mastering engineers. This is an “appeal to authority,” a common logical fallacy. It’s often seen in ads for audio products—the advertiser uses the endorsement of an authority figure (such as a musician or recording engineer) to supplement or substitute for marketing claims based on demonstrable features and benefits. Appeals to authority are even more common in promotions for things like books, movies, and countless consumer products.

Details: Written by: Brent Butterworth; Created: 01 July 2021

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Headphones and smartphones have brought good sound to more people than high-end audio could ever reach. (Also, depending on the headphones, bad sound to more people than high-end audio could ever reach.) But headphones are also exposing billions of ears to sound—often very loud sound—for many hours a day. “Average people are now exposed to as much loud sound in the course of a day as audio engineers have been,” Jodi Sasaki-Miraglia, doctor of audiology and director of education and training for hearing-aid company Widex USA, told me.

Details: Written by: Brent Butterworth; Created: 01 June 2021

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A longtime audio-industry friend of mine, whose job straddles the consumer and pro audio realms, called me up a couple of days ago to thank me for my review of the HiFiMan HE400se open-back headphones. After seeing the review on Facebook, he bought a set out of sheer curiosity—they’re only $149 USD—and he actually considered my rave review something of an understatement. “I have headphones that are close to $2000 that don’t sound anywhere near as good as these,” he raved.

Details: Written by: Brent Butterworth; Created: 01 May 2021

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The recent closing of New York City’s Lyric HiFi—for decades, one of the most esteemed high-end audio dealerships in the US—portends a dicey future for the high-end audio industry. This doesn’t surprise me, because high-end audio has changed radically in the last 30 years. As I see it, the industry, while certainly capable of producing exciting products that deliver real improvements people would be happy to pay for, focuses too much of its resources on creating products that chase fads instead of pursuing innovation. I think high-end audio writers (and podcasters and YouTube influencers) are mostly to blame.

Details: Written by: Brent Butterworth; Created: 01 April 2021

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Watching a segment of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight made me think a little deeper about the products I review. As Oliver reported, half of all plastics ever produced were made since 2005, and fewer than 9% are ever recycled. As I walked around my house later, perusing the piles of headphones, speakers, soundbars, and other tech doodads either coming in for review or waiting to be packed up and shipped back, I realized that most of the products I review—and the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of them bought by consumers—will end up in a landfill in ten years.

Details: Written by: Brent Butterworth; Created: 01 March 2021

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There’s much to love about YouTube (Rick Beato, Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing “I Say a Little Prayer”), but it’s coming at a price: the dumbing down of the audio industry. I got some inkling of this future in 1990, the first year of my audio career, when an acquaintance asked me, “How are those Bose speakers? I heard them on a TV commercial, and they sounded pretty good.” He was in the oil biz, not the audio biz, so I didn’t blame him for failing to grasp that he was hearing not a Bose system, but recorded music played through his TV speakers. Yet thanks to the Internet’s negligible barriers to entry, people who claim to be audio experts are now making the same mistake he did.