Technical guides on acoustics and sound, explained step by step: how your gear works, how to improve your room and get the most out of it.
The belief that more data always equals better sound quality stems from a misinterpretation of the technology. In the realm of images, a higher number of pixels does add sharpness, but when it comes to audio, exceeding certain limits is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Sampling rate and bit depth are the two factors that
Hearing frequency by age drops by about 2 kHz per decade after 30. In a study that tested 645 people in Madrid up to 20 kHz, the typical person at a normal listening level hears up to about 19 kHz before 20 and 18 kHz in their 20s, then reaches 16.5 kHz in their 30s,
When a speaker sounds distorted – harsh, raspy, “blown,” or crackling – it is almost always one of these seven causes, and the good news is that most of them mean neither a dead speaker nor an expense. The trick to getting it right isn’t guessing, it’s noticing when it distorts: whether it only happens
If you have a wet phone and it’s water-resistant (IP67 or IP68), wipe it dry, set it speaker-side down on a lint-free cloth and don’t plug in a charging cable for at least 5 hours, which is the window Apple gives (and no wireless charger until it’s dry). If it isn’t water-resistant and it went
An expensive turntable pays off up to the first properly adjustable manual deck, and past that point diminishing returns set in fast. The lab data is clear on this. Hi-Fi News puts every turntable it reviews through the same test bench, and in its reports a £375 manual deck turns with 0.05% wow and flutter
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
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
I spent money on a good soundbar, but it turned out the furniture was the reason for the poor sound quality. I’ll explain what’s physically going on and how to fix it without spending a dime.
To organize and hide TV cables without opening the wall, run them down a paintable cord cover to the baseboard and bundle the rest behind the media console with hook-and-loop straps. To hide them inside the wall, drop the low-voltage cables (HDMI, coax, network and speaker wire) through the stud bay or a conduit, and
If you own an entry-level or mid-range turntable and your amplifier has a standard phono input, the short answer is this: a moving magnet (MM) cartridge with an elliptical stylus. It works with any phono stage, it lets you replace just the stylus when it wears out, and it is the biggest sound upgrade you
The short answer: replace a turntable stylus every 500 to 1,000 playing hours – not after a set number of years. Put in usable terms: if you play a record a day, that is roughly every two years; if you play one a week, five years or more is fine. And if you own a
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