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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

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Last month’s look at the return (kinda) of cassette sent me down a rabbit hole of old and forgotten formats. One stop on that adventure in format wonderland was the MiniDisc recorder review that also went live today. While MD holds a special place in my heart, it is by no means the only format that has been relegated to the attics, closets, and thrift shops of time.

Read more: The Formats Time Forgot

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It’s normal, understandable even, for younger people to be curious about things that happened before they were born. Raised in the zeitgeist of their elders, they have a natural interest in finding out more about the current and past culture and world. Jokes and stories in movies and TV, conversations between parents and family members, all reference things from their common world that are all new and foreign to someone new and foreign to the world.

Read more: The Return of the Cassette

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As expensive and elaborate headphones have risen in popularity, so too have headphone amplifiers. Big and small, cheap and pricey—it’s a huge market. Well, huge as far as tiny audiophile niches go. Which is to say, it’s a tiny market. I’d bet even the best-selling headphone amp would be a rounding error compared to AirPod sales.

Read more: Do You Need a Headphone Amp?

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

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