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The music you listen to is rarely, if ever, recorded straight from the musician onto a recording medium. There are almost always extra steps, most notably mixing and mastering. There’s a sort of black magic to both processes, and the people who do it well are always in high demand. In short, they’re largely what makes a song sound the way it does. A pan here, an EQ tweak there—they let you hear individual instruments (or not), hear the room (or not), and so on.
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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PSB is one of those companies that doesn’t get the mainstream recognition of the Boses and Sonys of the world, but among audiophiles and enthusiasts, they’re well known and widely respected. Decades of great-sounding and well-made speakers, almost all of which also measure objectively well, have done a lot to endear the company to a wide, if still vaguely niche, audience.
Sound:
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Measurements can be found by clicking this link.
Much like with stock picking, key to selecting an audio component is researching the company behind it. Among my selection criteria are brand reputation and the length of time the company has been in business. Equally important, of course, is researching the component itself. When selecting a headphone amplifier, I try to find out its true power ratings, design goals, sound signature (I like my amplification slightly on the warm side of neutral), and the likelihood it could soon be supplanted by a newer model. What complicates matters is the sheer variety of designs, shapes, and sizes of headphone amplifiers and their abstruse specification sheets, which confound even seasoned audiophiles at times.
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.
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