Dedicated to Headphones and Earphones

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Finally, a new music-streaming service. Just what everyone wanted. Just what the world needed. Pure Audio promises “high-quality, immersive sound experiences that transport listeners into the heart of the music,” as opposed to the high-quality offerings from, you know, Apple, Amazon, Qobuz, and Tidal. But OK, sure.

Read more: Is There Space for Another Music-Streaming Service?

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A few years ago, I titled one of my first SoundStage! Solo columns “The Endless Hassle of Connecting to In-Flight Entertainment.” At the end of the article, I mentioned that some airlines were rolling out upgraded entertainment options that included the ability to connect to your own Bluetooth headphones.

Read more: Bluetooth in the Sky

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Do you remember your first audio system? What were your first headphones and audio player? I use the term “audio player” broadly to cover portable devices and home gear. Were you plugging a huge pair of “cans” into the front of a record player, or was it a Koss CD player with eight whole seconds of anti-skip technology?

Read more: The Power of Nostalgia

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As I’m writing this, the last of the historic and horrific Los Angeles fires have finally been extinguished. A bit of rain, far less than we typically get this time of year, has quenched the dry brush and doused the remaining embers. I was lucky. My house was never in any real danger, largely thanks to the wind’s direction, though for several nights I could see the fires in the distance from my porch. They were close enough that, for at least one night, my friends and I had packed go-bags in case we needed to evacuate.

Read more: Fire and Music

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As I mentioned last month, one of the things I planned to check out at CES was MEMS, or micro-electromechanical systems. These tiny devices, made by California-based xMEMS Labs, are a different type of driver for both earphones and headphones. I was able to get a closer look not just at the currently available drivers like what you’d find in the Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi earphones, but some upcoming variations and several other uses of the technology that look equally, if not more, fascinating.

Read more: MEMS!

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If the title didn’t give it away, I figured this was a perfect time to take a look at some tech and tech-adjacent things coming in 2025. In all three cases, they have potential ramifications for 2026 and beyond as well. Perhaps that’s a bit too grandiose. Maybe it’d be less hyperbolic to say “here’s some stuff you should be aware of” when it comes to the narrow niche we cover here at SoundStage! Solo.

Read more: Headphones 2025 and Beyond

  1. Don’t Call It a Gift Guide
  2. Do You Care About Features?
  3. The Constancy of Change (Goodbye, Sound & Vision)
  4. Is Accuracy the Only Option?
  5. The Opposite of Headphones
  6. The Death and Immediate Rise of MQA (Again)
  7. How Terrible Is Temu?
  8. The Delightful Weirdness of Open Earbuds
  9. The Formats Time Forgot
  10. The Return of the Cassette
  11. Do You Need a Headphone Amp?
  12. The Highs and Lows of the Consumer Electronics Show
  13. 2023: A Year in Headphones (and Other Stuff)
  14. Perfect Noise Canceling?
  15. The Rise and Fall and Maybe Rise Again of MQA
  16. Have Your Music Tastes Changed?
  17. Beware AI “Reviews”
  18. Six Months In
  19. Why Do People Think Headphones Are Magic?
  20. Recalibrating the Ears
  21. Is There Such a Thing as a Perfect Pair of Headphones?
  22. Everyone Should Own These Headphones
  23. What is the Soundtrack to Your Life?
  24. The Endless Hassle of Connecting to In-Flight Entertainment
  25. In-Ear vs. Over-Ear for Travel
  26. Traveling as an Audiophile
  27. Greetings!
  28. A Fond Farewell
  29. When Is the Amp Important?
  30. Evaluating the Knowles Preferred Response Curve
  31. Do We Really Need All These Target Curves?
  32. The Problem with Hearing Correction in Headphones
  33. RF: A Phantom Menace?
  34. Understanding Current
  35. The Big Mistake Many Headphone Makers Keep on Making
  36. How Consistent Is the Quality of Headphones and Earphones?
  37. David Chesky’s New New Revolution in Headphone Sound
  38. Why You Shouldn’t Always Rely on Measurements
  39. The Shocking Truth About Truck-Stop Earphones
  40. Are There Valid Objections to the Harman Curve?
  41. Is It Possible for Headphones to Sound Fast? (Or Slow?)
  42. The Four Things that Recording an Album Taught Me About Audio
  43. What Playing Music Taught Me About Audio
  44. Voicing Headphones, Part 3: Campfire Audio's Ken Ball and 64 Audio’s Vitaliy Belonozhko
  45. The #1 Red Flag in Audio Articles, Ads . . . and Everything Else
  46. How Not to Go Deaf from Headphone Listening
  47. What’s the Future of High-End Headphones?
  48. How Audio Writers Are Killing the Audio Industry
  49. Why Buying High-Quality Headphones Is a More Responsible Purchase
  50. Does It Make Sense to Demo Audio Over the Internet?
  51. The New Standard That Killed the Loudness War
  52. Headphones 2020: The Year in Review
  53. Three Cases Where Measurements Didn’t Work
  54. How Much Can We Really Tell From Listening?
  55. Balanced Armatures: Why You Might (or Might Not) Want Them
  56. The Coming Revolution in Headphone Sound Quality
  57. Can Accuracy in Music Reproduction Exist?
  58. The Biggest Lie in Audio
  59. Voicing Headphones, Part 2: HiFiMan’s Fang Bian and Focal’s Mégane Montabonel
  60. What Will the Next Generation of Headphones Be Like?
  61. How Far Have Headphones Come?
  62. Voicing Headphones, Part 1: PSB/NAD's Paul Barton and Dan Clark Audio's Dan Clark
  63. How Will Headphone Testing and Reviewing Change in the 2020s?
  64. What the AKG K371 Headphones Tell Us About "Slow Listening"
  65. Where Are We At With The Harman Curve?
  66. Why Headphone Amps Are More Interesting Than Speaker Amps
  67. 2019’s Most Important Headphone Presentation
  68. Noise Canceling Is Much More Complicated Than We Thought
  69. How Does Aging Affect Audio Perception?
  70. Noise-Canceling Headphones for 17 Cents?
  71. Is Chesky Dumping Binaural?
  72. Why My Fi Ain't Hi-Fi
  73. Latency: A New Concern for Audiophiles?
  74. How to Read Our Headphone Measurements
  75. Eardrum Suck: The Mystery Solved!
  76. Should Audio Gear be Considered Luxury Goods?
  77. Headphone Equalization Using Measurements
  78. Why Is It So Hard to Rate Headphones?
  79. Five Things Headphone Enthusiasts Get Right (and That the Two-Channel Guys Get Wrong)
  80. The Best Possible Way to Test Audio Products (and Why Most People Don't Do It)
  81. Will aptX Adaptive Improve Headphone Sound?
  82. Is the miniDSP EARS the Death of Headphone Measurement? Or its Savior?
  83. What Are Measurements Good For?
  84. How Much Noise Do Your Headphones Really Block?
  85. Why We're Launching "SoundStage! Solo"

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