Honest headphone, speaker, DAC and amplifier reviews from weeks of real listening, with side-by-side comparisons and buying guides built from the verdicts. Zero sponsored takes.
The best product on the list is rarely the right one for your ears, your room or your budget. Start from where you are: a product you already have in mind, two you are torn between, or none.
A years-old HIFIMAN flagship, cheaper than ever: Stealth Magnets, a nanometer diaphragm, a wide open soundstage, and a fun, bright tuning - mind the treble peaks and the large fit.
The latest reviews, newest first, each with the catch that comes with it.
Browse all 71 reviews
Speaker Amps & Preamps A807.8
A $200 Class D integrated amp with Bluetooth, USB-C, optical, coax, RCA and TRS inputs and a one-knob menu, whose sound came surprisingly close to an amp at ten times its price.
DACs DA 2568.2
Twenty years of one engineer's work in a €1,600 box: a published schematic and firmware, reclocked coax and optical, RCA only, PCM to 24-bit/192 kHz, and every omission deliberate.
Microphones & Recording OC168.7
A $449 cardioid condenser built around the CKR6, a ceramic-ring capsule hand-assembled and measured in Vienna: 148 dB max SPL, 14 dB(A) self-noise, one high-pass filter.
Microphones & Recording K6887.2
A dynamic broadcast microphone with both XLR and USB-C outputs, so the audio interface is already inside it: cardioid rejection, 130 dB max SPL, on-body gain and mute.
Accessories Network Router UEF7.8
A wired-only audiophile router with a linear power supply, EM cell, ULF generator and carbon fiber voicing. In my system it lowered the noise floor on everything I stream.
Accessories Parametric Tower8.5
A freestanding acoustic tower that scatters and absorbs at the same time - handmade Czech oak over a recycled PET felt core, placed wherever the room needs it.
Four rules, applied to every review without exception. The median score across all 71 reviews is 8.1, and nothing has scored above 9.3.
Brands have zero editorial input. Pre-publication review is never granted. The site carries no advertising and no affiliate links, so a negative review ships with nothing for a brand to withdraw.
Two-week minimum on the chain, multiple sources, multiple genres. No first-impressions reviews. No demo-room verdicts.
Every score is one writer's judgment, weighed on the same five published axes and set against the gear its category is compared on. Scores compare within a category, and a score that changes keeps the old one on the review, with the date and the reason.
Most flagship units are lent by their maker or distributor and go back after the review, and a loan never buys a verdict. We never accept payment to influence one - and we publish it if a brand tries.
A product under review is swapped into the same fixed chain, with everything else held constant, and heard sighted with the volume set by ear. Each piece is a published review.
DAC Denafrips Enyo 15th Anniversary
Headphone amplifier HIFIMAN Serenade
Open-back headphone HIFIMAN HE1000se
Loudspeaker Triangle Australe EZ
Digital source Denafrips Hermes 12th Anniversary
Power conditioning Synergistic Research PowerCell 14Every review is signed by the writer who tested the gear, and each writer's page lists everything they have reviewed and the verdicts they have given.
Jakub Charkiewicz, founder and lead reviewer, has written 66 reviews and 12 buying guides since .
Bastien Beauchamp, reviewer, has written 5 reviews since .
Eight review hubs, one per kind of gear, each filterable by price and specs and each stating what earns the points in its category.
Microphones & Recording Condenser, tube, dynamic and USB microphones, plus audio interfaces. 4 reviewsEvery pick is a product we reviewed, and a guide only goes up once there are enough qualifying reviews to fill it.
All 12 guidesThe highest-scoring pair from each category: two products from the same class, within half a point of each other, and the better buy on score and price.
All 35 comparisonsCalculators, blind tests and analyzers. Every one runs in your browser: no signup, no upload, no tracking.
The same reviews on video: long-form listening sessions, A/B comparisons and the occasional teardown. New videos most weeks.
How scoring works, what the verdicts mean and which gear we cover.
Every review carries one score from 0 to 10 and a verdict, and each verdict has its own score band: Reference 9.2-10.0, Highly Recommended 8.2-9.1, Recommended 7.0-8.1, Mixed 5.5-6.9, Pass 0.0-5.4. The bands do not overlap, so a score names one tier. The single exception is a score exactly on a tier's floor (9.2, 8.2, 7.0 or 5.5): that makes a product eligible for the tier, and the verdict may hold it one tier lower where price, competition or reliability argue against the higher one. A score is one writer's overall judgment after weeks of listening, set against the rest of its category; the five published rubric weights guide it and do not compute it. The full method, and how a changed score is recorded, is on the About page.
Reference is the top verdict, for scores of 9.2 and up: a product that sets the standard in its class, and rare by design. It does not mean the product suits everyone - price, taste and the rest of your system still decide that. It is also a different thing from the test chain, the gear every review is compared on: a piece is in the chain because it stays the same from one review to the next, and three of its six pieces score below 9.2.
Gear from 34 brands so far, most of all HIFIMAN, SMSL, Sivga, Taga Harmony, Denafrips, Kiwi Ears, Melodika and Monosaudio; the brands page lists the other 26 with their reviews. Category, merit and reader requests decide what gets reviewed next; brand relationships do not.
Listening. Every review is sighted listening over weeks on the fixed chain its category is compared on, with levels set by ear, and none is a blind test. Nothing is bench-measured in-house: the impedance, sensitivity, power and noise figures a review quotes are the maker's published specifications, corrected on the review when the maker's own page says otherwise. That puts the large differences a review describes, such as a headphone's tonal balance, on firmer ground than the small ones, such as what a cable changes. The how-we-test page sets out what a score can and cannot tell you.
