Headphonesty

One of them was recorded with a cold. A good vocal recording can expose several parts of your system at once. You can hear whether a singer has enough body, whether S sounds become sharp, whether breaths stay clear, and whether the voice holds a stable place between the speakers. Audiophiles voted for these albums because each one puts vocals under a different kind of pressure, from bare a cappella tracks to dense pop mixes and live recordings.

The performance also created a striking reversal involving Neil Peart and Rush’s original live setup. For 39 years, Rush fans knew Aimee Mann’s voice on “Time Stand Still” without ever seeing her sing it with the band. Rush performed the song on several tours after its 1987 release, while Mann remained separate from that live history. Then, in 2026, Geddy Lee reached out and asked her to join them for one night. Even that almost did not happen. Here’s how Mann finally made it onto a Rush stage.

The new machines are shipping, but their actual mechanism suppliers are still missing from the spec sheets. On August 16, Naim community forum manager Richard.Dane told owners that the company had searched for a replacement disc drive for the Uniti Star and come up empty. One month later, FiiO put the DP11 on sale in China for 999 RMB. PS Audio had already lost its PMG Super Audio CD (SACD) Transport after the drive maker ended production. Shanling, meanwhile, now sells the CD50 for $299.

It counts what somebody typed into Discogs. Vinyl buyers have learned to be suspicious of simple phrases like “from the original master tapes.” After MoFi’s 2022 DSD disclosure, the wording on a jacket or product page can matter almost as much as the record itself. That is what makes PressPick’s latest all-analog count so striking. In its Oct. 1 snapshot, the database put just 0.7% of the reissues it tracked in the all-analog category.

Most of them want a bigger amplifier instead. The usual fix for thin bass is easy: add a subwoofer. But when we asked our Facebook audience what they would choose for bass-heavy music, 632 comments quickly turned into a debate over whether you need that extra box at all. Some listeners went straight for bigger woofers. Others backed speakers that use horns, transmission lines, passive radiators, multiple smaller woofers, or even a powered subwoofer built right into the cabinet.

The early numbers look promising, but they still leave the most important part of the argument unresolved. In 1973, Dual sold a direct-drive turntable that worked its own tonearm from the first groove to the last. Fifty-three years on, a deck that does the same job is a prototype on a show stand, and it has a rule to get past. That rule holds that high-performance turntables are fully manual.

The meter reading made the result even harder to dismiss. Before he played a note, the builder behind the YouTube channel pierogi engineering made a call. Speaker cables filled with liquid mercury, he said, would dull the top end of his music. Mercury conducts electricity about 57 times worse than copper, so the prediction looked safe. Then he listened. In a video published March 26, 2026, he compares music sent through four mercury-filled tubes with ordinary copper by ear.

Several older classics still impress, but modern designs bring very different solutions to difficult loads. “Can drive almost any speaker” sounds simple until you look at what speakers actually ask from an amplifier. Their impedance can fall far below the number printed on the spec sheet, sometimes down near 2 ohms. We asked audiophiles which amps they would trust when that happens. Then we checked the votes against measured power, current limits, protection systems, and manufacturer guidance.

His own catalog happens to overlap with the conditions he says made it possible. A serious stereo system gets one pair of speakers, positioned for one chair. In a 2019 Audiogon thread about playing two different pairs at once, commenters warned that the setup could destroy coherence and compound phase problems. One Tuesday afternoon this month, a hi-fi brand founder tried it anyway.

The fix is already sitting inside most of them. Some of the most collectible CDs from the early 1980s were mastered with extra treble that the player was supposed to remove during playback. But while modern hardware should have little trouble handling a feature that dates back to the format’s first years, several new CD players do not. One of the most recent examples is the $599 SMSL PL200 MKII, which leaves that boost intact on affected discs despite otherwise near-spotless CD test results.