Welcome to the Best Headphone Gear section of the Part-Time Audiophile Buyers Guide for Summer 2022. The Guide is more than “We heartily endorse this [fill in the blank].” This collection represents our enthusiasm. Every product […]
Editor’s Note: Before we dive into Hubcon 2022 coverage, let’s take care of the elephant in the room—what the hell is Hubcon? Hubcon is a gathering of Part-Time Audiophile writers and editors. During our planning […]
This is not for the faint of heart, or wallet. If you think headphones have reached overwhelmingly high prices spare your time and don’t read this review. You have been warned. Walking down the Munich […]
Going deep, abyss deep has been a trademark for JPS Lab’s/ Abyss Joe Skubinski, designer of the absolute flagship headphone for years. The AB-1266 has been among our favorites here at Part Time and I […]
A good Dr. should never insist on having his patients pushing themselves to the limit but this is audio and the limit of what is possible is a good thing with only one major hiccup, […]
I approached this year’s Rocky Mountain Audio Fest with a strange mix of excitement and trepidation. The long-time venue of the Denver Tech Center Marriott was in the midst of significant construction which literally shut […]
Scot had me covering several CanJam titles but one of the best headphone rigs was outside of the tent in the Tower at the Marriott. Here I found Joe Skubinski’s Abyss Headphones paired with the Woo […]
Wells Audio has some good marketing advisors — they’ve come crashing into the headphone market with some serious offerings, all scattered across a variety of price points. First up is the Enigma, a $3,699 headphone […]
Woo Audio, purveyor of fine tubed gear for the discerning head-fi’er, have finalized their portable — the WA8 Eclipse ($1,619 Black or Sliver, $1,709 Gold — but note that these are intro prices, which will […]
by John Grandberg The proliferation of really-high-end headphones is undeniable. Back in the day, a $500 headphone was considered expensive, and the few thousand-dollar-plus models in existence were typically limited-edition rarities. Nowadays? Not so much. […]
Hitting the CanJam at RMAF is a highlight for me, and an instant reminder of the health and vibrancy of (at least one corner) of the high-end audio industry. This year, there were too many […]
The hype around the LampizatOr products from Poland has also been building for a while, but my experience with that brand has been zip. I got a chance to fix that when I ran across Bruce Brown […]
Woo Audio offers a remarkably deep bench for those headphonistas interested in vacuum tube amplifiers. But when it comes to the 300b, arguably the finest audio tube the world has ever known, Woo Audio has only a couple […]
It was the best of times. It was the not-best-of-times. But whatever it was, and wherever it lies on the Arc of Interesting, 2014 saw some pretty amazing stuff and some truly inspiring stories, and […]
I’ve seen a few interesting developments over at the LH Labs’ crowd-funding adventure for the Geek Pulse and Geek Soul, two DAC/headphone amplifiers, aimed at bringing their high-end sound to a less costly price point. […]
I got to meet Joe Skubinski of JPS Labs and Abyss Headphones at RMAF this year, which was fun after spending so much time this year with his flagship headphones, the Abyss AB-1266. I was […]
I can keenly recall a time in my not-too-distant past where I was openly dismissive of headphones as even a passable translator of audio joy. Said a bit more bluntly, I thought the entire segment to […]
Market and Value High-End Audio, as a market segment, is a weird and fickle beast. It’s not really even a single market at all, but rather an odd agglomeration of (not unrelated) segments, including consumer […]
My buddy Michael Liang of Woo Audio ushered me right over to the lucite case. “See?” he said. “We’re going portable.” In the case was a blank, a white plastic mock-up of what might someday be called […]
I’m going to confess something. Ready? Headphones and headphone audio systems can be hard to like. The issue is context, for me. I come at audio’s high-end by way of two-channel and multi-channel audio systems. Big […]
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