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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

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This isn’t a gift guide. OK, it’s kinda a gift guide. Recently I received an email from a reader who was spoiled by choice. They had a reasonable budget but couldn’t decide what to get. Fair enough—there are a lot of options out there. I figured, given the time of year, that a sort of gift-guide-related post might help point people like them in a specific direction. Maybe it’s a gift for yourself, or a gift for someone who’s interested in a style of headphones with which you’re not particularly familiar.

Read more: Don’t Call It a Gift Guide

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For most people shopping for audio gear, sound quality is obviously paramount. Or mostly paramount. Usually paramount? In your calculations for a potential pair of new headphones or earphones, how much weight do you give features? Are there certain must-have features, or is sound quality the only consideration?

Read more: Do You Care About Features?

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In August, AVTech Media Ltd. announced it was discontinuing the print version of Sound & Vision magazine. I was surprised it had lasted as long as it did. When I was editor of Home Entertainment magazine over a decade ago, we were putting out larger issues than S&V was putting out recently, and we couldn’t stay afloat with a much smaller staff. Sound & Vision can trace its lineage to audio magazines from the 1950s, but also weaves into my own (more recent, thank you very much) history. This is going to get a little navel-gazy, but I’ll bring it back around, I promise.

Read more: The Constancy of Change (Goodbye, Sound & Vision)

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Take a look at the two camera lenses in the image below. It’s OK if you don’t know anything about photography. For this analogy to work, you can get the gist just from the picture. As far as the top-line specs go, these lenses are the same. They both fit Canon cameras, have a 50mm focal length (nicely between a telephoto and a wide angle), and are a “fast” f/1.4, which means they can take images in really low light and create a soft background when taking close-ups.

Read more: Is Accuracy the Only Option?

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How much are your ears worth? All ears are equal, and even if some are more equal than others, it’s all infinite, right? Invaluable, or at the very least, irreplaceable? Our headphone hobby requires at least some hearing acuity, and yet I see very little discourse about the potential damage loud sounds can do to your hearing, permanently.

Read more: The Opposite of Headphones

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

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