Technical guides

To clean vinyl records without damaging them, you need two habits. Before every side, a dry carbon fiber brush with the platter spinning and no pressure. And when a record is secondhand, covered in fingerprints or crackling like frying bacon, a wash with distilled water and a few drops of surfactant (the ingredient that lets

How many speakers do you need for Dolby Atmos? At least 8, a layout written as 5.1.2: five at ear level, one subwoofer and two height or ceiling speakers. That base is enough to hear the three-dimensional effect, with sounds arriving from above. A balanced setup goes up to ten speakers (a 5.1.4), and the

A room under about 160 sq ft (15 m²) can take five speakers and a subwoofer, as long as the surrounds sit beside the couch and the sub is placed and tuned for the handful of bass modes the room has. With the couch against the back wall, the surrounds go on the side walls,

The thinnest TVs on the market compromise audio quality. Teufel explains why this happens and what solutions are available to restore the sound you deserve.

In a 270-320 sq ft living room with average-sensitivity speakers (87 dB), about 30 W per channel covers normal listening and about 90 W covers loud listening, with 100 dB peaks at your seat. On average the amp only delivers 0.9 W per channel at normal volume and 2.8 W when it’s loud, and the

You can enable lossless audio at no extra cost if you already pay for Spotify Premium, Apple Music, or Tidal, because the lossless tier ships inside those plans and all you do is flip a switch in the quality settings. Flipping it is only the start. However good the file is, the way the sound

For music, a file at 256 or 320 kbps in MP3 or AAC sounds the same as the original to almost any ear under normal conditions. Moving up to a lossless format like FLAC (which keeps the full sound of a CD) roughly triples the file size and only shows on very demanding material played

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,

By 2026, almost every major music streaming service delivers lossless audio, so the raw quality gap between Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer is small, and over Bluetooth it is practically nil. This music streaming quality comparison lays out what each one gives with real figures. Four of them reach hi-res 24-bit/192

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

Auto calibration leaves your sound half finished. In a couple of minutes it measures the room with its microphone, balances the levels and works out the distances, and it gets those right almost every time. Where it falls short is elsewhere, in the size it assigns to your speakers, the crossover it picks and a

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