May - June 2026
Audio Discourse
Gentrification of Audio or Development in Three Stages
Editorial, April 2026 from High Fidelity The audio industry is a battleground where views, opinions, and various solutions clash, all aiming to lead us...
The Electromagnetic Environment Your Music Lives in and Why 2026...
This article is part of an ongoing series examining electromagnetic field theory and its application to high-fidelity audio reproduction. The...
Musings About AI, Audio, and Music
Being a music and audio person, I have some thoughts about how AI will relate to our listening consumption in an increasingly AI-laden era. Unlike much...
Hi-Fi's Ultimate Flaw
Roger Skoff finally reveals all. For most of a century—even before some early genius coined the term "high fidelity"—audiophiles, music lovers, and...
Hardware Reviews
Analog Relax EX500 Moving Coil Cartridge: Easy on the Eyes and...
Every once in a while, one encounters a high-end audio product where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Performance that punches far above...
Harbeth Super HL5plus XD2 Loudspeakers
Harbeth Audio Ltd. is a British company founded in 1977 by the former head of the BBC's research department, Dudley Harwood. In the early 1970s, while...
Onix Zenith XST20 SACD/CD Transport: Impressive Build Quality, a...
Flashback to October 1982: the Compact Disc had just been unveiled in Japan to great fanfare, and the era of Perfect Sound Forever was suddenly upon...
Kubala-Sosna Ovation Speaker Cables: All The Truth, Nothing But...
Current interconnects, speaker cables and power cords deliver far better sound than in the early days of high-end audio. Sadly, buying audio cables...
Music Reviews
Can It Get Any Better? Three Superb Reissues from Uncle Tupelo,...
Uncle Tupelo, Anodyne. Rhino High Fidelity (33 RPM LP) Anodyne was Uncle Tupelo's swansong album and was released in 1993 on the Reprise label....
…and Steve says...Listening to All My Records, Part 7
For those readers new to this column, please read the introductory comments in Part one HERE. Since such a large part of my record collection was...
MoFi 45 rpm "No Secrets" by Carly Simon
I was twelve when Carly Simon released her third album "No Secrets." Even at that age, I was not into commercial pop music much, so I never owned this...
Ólafur Arnalds, Sunrise Session III
Ólafur Arnalds, Sunrise Session III. Olafur Arnalds, composer and pianist; Sandrayati, RAKEL, Salóme Katrín, vocals; with string quartet. Universal...
Red And Ernie
Recently, while doing some research, I discovered the existence of an album that in all my decades of obsessive record collecting I had never seen nor...
Acoustic Sounds' Organ Grinder: The Incredible Jimmy Smith...
James Oscar Smith was an American jazz icon who helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, forging a link between jazz and 1960s Soul—or the...
MoFi's The Butterfield Blues Band - East West
This was the line-up who was the first to play "electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. This caused quite a disturbance from the folk-purists...
Recent Finds No. 72 NativeDSD Shows Again Why Not To Allow...
I so often bring to you music in ultra-high resolution, but there are so many wonderful recordings not originally recorded in DXD or DSD256. I listen...
Our Friend the Audio Analyst
E259: 2026 Florida International Audio Expo Highlights with...
Today, I join my friend and colleague Maurice Jeffries in his “New Apartment Lounge” in Orlando. We share our thoughts on some of the highlights.... . . Read More »
Our Friends at High Fidelity
R.E.D. A Few Words About How Audio is Changing
We deeply believe in "development" and "progress." Especially in audio. On the other hand, we know that newer is not always better and that old...
Spendor A4.2 Loudspeakers
Spendor is an English company specializing in the production of loudspeakers, founded in 1968 by Spencer Hughes Its first product designed for...
Show Reports
AXPONA 2026: Rooms with Aural Views: Here's My Favorite Eight!
Black velvet, acoustic-dampening curtains cover the surrounding walls of the darkened 12' x 15 'x 8' Chesky Audio hotel room packed with guests seated...
AXPONA 2026
AXPONA! The trade show where all the sounds and other spectaculars of the high-end audio community come together to listen, listen, and then listen...
