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Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 July 2012

Beats by Dr. Dre Living in a bigger city is a singular experience. Putting over a million people from all walks of life into a melting pot of a few square miles is . . . interesting. One is as likely to share a bus with a coffeehouse hipster as with a promising young attorney, or to share sidewalk space with bleary-eyed medical residents as with crazy people who yell nonsensical nothings at passersby. It’s a beautiful cross section of society that spans young and old, rich and poor, and brings together the tech-obsessed with the tech-averse.

The bus is a microcosm of all this. Sort of. Every morning and afternoon that I get on the No. 40 bus, I invariably take a seat next to, across from, or behind someone listening to music and staring at his or her smartphone. To be more precise, I should have said and rather than or -- more often than not, most every rider my below-average vision can make out seems to be staring at his or her smartphone with rapt attention. As I waited to exit the rear door of the 40 bus last week, I noticed that all eight seats in front of me were filled with passengers. Three had iPhones, three had Androids, one read from a Kindle, and the last, bless her, was texting on an "antiquated" non-smartphone.

Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 June 2012

The early 20th century was remarkable for a variety of reasons. The field of physics was expanding, thanks to the discoveries of such scientists as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and Pierre and Marie Curie. Traditional political systems were in a state of unrest as empires fell alongside barriers of social stratification, and existentialism began to germinate as the works of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche spread. Powered flight came to be in North Carolina, while the Model T began rolling off production lines in Michigan. And with little of the recognition that it perhaps deserved, the Edison Effect found a home in a vacuum tube that illuminated far more potential than it did light: the triode.

Read more: A Better Way

Details: Written by: Ron Doering; Created: 01 March 2012

Ron Doering As regards this splendid hobby of ours, the summer of 2011 was significant for me. First I reviewed Thorens’s then-new TD 309 turntable ($1849.95 USD), fell in love with it, and sold my long-serving VPI HW-19 Jr. to make room for my new acquisition. What I heard from the Thorens was a dramatic advance in terms of background quietness, and greater detail extracted from the grooves. Indeed, the TD 309 is one of the very few turntables I’ve heard that can make a convincing argument for why, when everything in the playback chain is working well, vinyl can sound so much better than CD. I also appreciated the included Audio-Technica cartridge which sounded fine, even if the turntable deserves much better, as well as no longer having to switch pulleys to play a 45rpm disc, or deal with the VPI’s obligatory record clamp.

Details: Written by: Hans Wetzel; Created: 01 February 2012

Hans Wetzel Asked what he thought consumers wanted, Henry Ford once posited that they would ask for a better horse. Seeming to have taken this quip to heart, the late Steve Jobs spent the first decade of the 21st century building products that, far from being derivative, were tabula-rasa creations when compared to the market’s other offerings. The iPod’s click wheel and the iPhone’s touchscreen were bold design decisions that flew in the face of convention, and went on to redefine entire segments. Along with the sheer braggadocio of the iPad to exist at all when industry pundits were unable to divine how consumers would even use such a device, Jobs’s advances are emblematic of both his design savvy and his understanding of how people interact with technology.

Until a few years ago, the bucking of convention in high-end audio was a laughable impossibility. With antiquated vacuum tubes and vinyl still very much at the center of many audiophiles’ systems, and SACD/CD players the rest, it would have been foolish for a manufacturer to release a product that was fundamentally different from those offered by competitors.

Computer-based audio, however, has made high-end audio available to those out of reach of the listening rooms of local dealers. Many USB digital-to-analog converters are now available for well under $1000, and offer properly good sound for a remarkably small sum. In concert with continuously falling hard-drive prices, computers are now, arguably, the best and the cheapest source component for a high-end audio system. Output some lossless digital music to a small USB DAC and integrated amplifier connected to half-decent speakers, and you can enjoy superlative sound for a recession-appropriate amount of money. It is bloody fantastic to be able to sit on a couch with a laptop and have your entire music collection at your immediate, lossless, and upsampled disposal.

Details: Written by: Colin Smith; Created: 01 January 2012

Humble Homemade Hifi We at GoodSound! have a well-deserved reputation for appreciating high-value products. To be one, an audio component doesn’t necessarily have to be inexpensive, but it does have to offer performance far beyond what a reasonable listener should expect from a product at its price. Examples that come to mind are Aperion’s Verus Grand line of speakers and Anthem’s MRX A/V receivers. But unlike those stellar products, the latest grand bargain that’s come to our attention isn’t a manufactured product at all.

Members of the do-it-yourself loudspeaker community have long followed the happenings at Humble Homemade Hifi, a site that must be considered to be at the center of the amateur speaker-design universe. The man behind the site, erstwhile architect and present entrepreneur Tony Gee, has been sharing his insights about speaker engineering and his many speaker designs since the turn of the century. There have been many of the latter: 63 are listed on the site’s history page, and detailed cabinet and crossover plans are available for most of them on Gee’s download page.