During a recent seminar, Michael Fremer remarked that there are three big trends in audio’s high-end today: vinyl, high-resolution audio, and headphones. He’s spot on. But there is another major trend overlooked in that count. […]
At this point, I’m not sure how you could have wandered through the head-fi high-end without stumbling across Cavalli Audio at some point. In short, Cavalli makes some of the best headphone amplifiers on the […]
Cypher Labs has teamed up with Coffman Labs to create an amazing looking and sounding headphone amplifier, called Prautes ($3,900). This thing has tubes and knobs and textured sides and I get all quivery just […]
HiFiMAN has a large catalog of personal audio products, including digital audio players, headphones, amplifiers and everything you’d need to connect them. Where I’ve seen them, repeatedly, is on the headphone front with the sonically […]
iFi Audio is a fascinating brand, focusing (almost) exclusively on portable personal audio. Audio-Head‘s Brian Hunter took a look at some of their earliest offerings for Part-Time Audiophile last year and has another stack of their components in for […]
“Go big or go home” is what flashed through my head when I saw the Headamp table in CanMania this year. I mean, seriously. “Look at me! I am PURPLE! Ha HA!” Said another way, […]
Clear Tune Monitors is a new-to-me custom IEM company, catering primarily to the pro audio crowd. Prices range from $250-$800. Unfortunately, I was unable to really spend any time with them as they bugged out […]
Stereodesk’s Fred Crane and Profundo’s Bob Clark were on hand with some extremely fine imports, including an update from Heed Audio and the magnificent Viva Audio line up. The Viva gear I’d just seen — […]
Oppo Digital and I go way back. Well, no, not really. I mean I’ve been buying their DVD players for years. The sheer number of features at their absurd price points meant happy days for me […]
CEntrance’s Michael Goodman was here to promote the new venture, called Glove Audio. I first saw and heard Glove at Newport this year, and I was very impressed both by the quality of the build […]
Brannan Mason, the public facing half of Noble Audio, brought a set of Chord Electronics‘ Hugo DACs to the party at CanMania for use with his company’s outstanding in-ear monitors. The Hugo, a battery-driven, USB-connected device, […]
Jolida had a set of nifty little bits at CanMania this year, all targeting the personal audio enthusiast obviously. The new kid of the block was a cute little prototype, tentatively called “Rowen”, after Jolida […]
What do you think of when someone says Woo Audio? Me, I think “tubes”. Not any particular vacuum tube, actually, but tubes. You know. Generally. Oh, and headphones. Headphones and tubes. More properly, headphone amplifiers that are built […]
The Astell&Kern digital audio players have greatly impressed as being some of the very best of their kind. Which is kind of an odd thing to say, I suppose, because this market was swallowed whole […]
Alex Sventitsky of WyWires has been making some very serious inroads into audio’s high-end in the last few years; I’ve been tripping over his cables (sorry about that time with that thing at the place, […]
MrSpeakers, is clearly on a mission. His flagship headphones, the Alpha Dog, is actually famous — it’s the first headphone to use 3D printing, in this case, in creating the highly sophisticated closed-back ear cup […]
Capital Audiofest 2014 saw a very interesting evolution this year with the introduction of CanMania, a dedicated headphone/personal-audio show-within-a-show, organized by Audio360‘s Warren Chi and PTA Alum Frank Iacone. This is something of a trend, […]
Is it ruining the suspense to say that the Zu Audio room at CAF received quite a few votes for Best-In-Show? Probably. But for those in attendance, it was hardly a surprise. It’s true, the rooms […]
The Core Audio/Hawthorne room sat next to the CanMania showroom, commanding a large and open space. It was also really hard to miss — the charming Melinda Smith was outside, directing traffic for much of […]
Tim Stinson of Luminous Audio and Mike Bettinger of GAS Audio have teamed up to create a new phono preamplifier, the Arion, which will be sold under the Luminous Audio brand. Mike’s $5,995 design has […]
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