Technical guides

The upgrade that improves home theater sound the most won’t cost you a new speaker. It’s taming room reverberation until the RT60 sits between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds, the range where dialogue stays intelligible and effects sound tight. And the honest first move, before you spend a cent on panels, is to measure how much

Good 5.1 speaker placement comes down to three angles and one distance: the center at 0° (straight ahead), the front speakers at ±30°, the surrounds at ±110°, all five the same distance from your sofa, with the tweeters at ear height. That is the reference layout for 5.1 (the ITU-R BS.775 Recommendation), the base Dolby

The short answer to FLAC vs MP3 is this: with a 320 kbps MP3, most people cannot tell the lossy file apart from the FLAC in a blind test; with an MP3 at 128 kbps or below, they can, and easily. What decides whether you hear it is not the format label but three measurable

Here is the reference decibel chart, running from 0 dB (the faintest sound you can hear) to 140 dB (a firecracker at arm’s length, where the damage is instant): a whisper sits around 20 dB, a conversation 60, a vacuum cleaner 70, a nightclub 100, and the front row of a concert 110. But there

Are Bluetooth turntables worth it? Yes – on one condition that has nothing to do with Bluetooth: a Bluetooth turntable is worth it if the deck underneath would still be a good deck with the radio stripped out. Bluetooth is just another output, like the RCA sockets next to it. What decides whether your records

When to replace earpads is not a question of months on a calendar. It comes down to six signs: the foam no longer springs back when you press it, the surface cracks or flakes, bass sounds weaker than it used to, more outside noise gets in, you can feel the hard ring against your ear,

Pink noise vs white noise, settled in one line: pink noise carries the same energy in every octave and therefore rolls off 3 dB per octave, while white noise carries the same energy per hertz – which packs half of its total energy into the top octave alone, from 10 to 20 kHz. That single

Surround sound not working after a firmware update? It’s almost always because the update reset your audio output to stereo PCM, broke the HDMI-CEC/eARC handshake, or changed the format your TV sends out. Nothing is broken: it’s a matter of re-fixing three things – the digital audio output (set to passthrough/bitstream), the eARC/ARC + CEC

How to store vinyl records, in one sentence: upright, like books, somewhere stable at around 20 °C (68 °F) and 40-50 % relative humidity, away from sunlight and any heat source, in a polyethylene inner sleeve inside the jacket and a plastic outer sleeve around it, with dividers every 15 cm (6 in) so no

Sound becomes dangerous above 85 decibels (dB) with prolonged exposure, and above 120 dB it can damage your hearing instantly. But the number that really matters isn’t just how loud it is, it’s how long: hearing damage is a dose, level times time. At 85 dB your ears can take about 8 hours; at 100

The short answer: lossless audio is worth it only if your whole playback chain preserves it, and for most people listening over Bluetooth it never gets that far. The lossless file isn’t the problem – it’s that between the file and your ears sits a chain: the wireless codec, the DAC, the headphones, the room,

For decades, the MP3 marked a turning point in audio distribution by flooding devices with entire albums that took up a fraction of the space of WAV files. Today, that storage limitation is meaningless, since even the most basic cell phones typically exceed 64 GB, and bandwidth continues to grow unabated. Furthermore, encoding techniques have