What we are listening to.
The brands on our roster, the gear we have reviewed, the pieces worth pointing at and the occasional opinion — written after we have had the equipment in the showroom. Specifications and prices come from the manufacturer and are cited at the foot of each piece; the judgments are ours.
All pieces
Bowers & Wilkins, and what luxury sound actually costs
From the 700 series to the Nautilus — where the money goes, and where it stops mattering.
The Roster
Lutron: lighting and shading, done once
Why the keypad on the wall is the part of the system your guests will judge you on.
The Roster
Focal's high-fidelity lineup, ranked
Utopia, Stellia, Clear MG and Hadenys — which one is actually the end of the road.
The Roster
Control4: the smart home solution, honestly assessed
Twenty years of installing it. What it does better than anything else, and what it still does badly.
The Roster
ELAN control systems: the quiet alternative
Less talked about than Control4, and in several rooms we would pick it first.
The Roster
Samsung Lifestyle TVs: The Frame, The Terrace and where they belong
Genuinely good answers to two problems most integrators solve badly.
KEF LS Luxe — the LS soul, sculpted
Ross Lovegrove, 12th-generation Uni-Q and 380 watts a side in a genuine art piece.
Gear Review
KEF XIO: a soundbar we can recommend without flinching
Six Uni-Q MX arrays and 820 watts in one bar — KEF's first soundbar, and it is not a compromise.
Gear Review
Eversolo T10 + AMP-F8: a matched stack that punches above its price
Reference streaming transport meets 500W of Class-AB, with an OCXO clock and SFP fiber.
Gear Review
Focal Bathys: wireless that a two-channel listener can live with
A 40mm 'M'-dome driver and a real DAC inside a wireless closed-back. The hi-fi survived the Bluetooth.
Gear Review
madVR Envy Extreme MK3
The processor that makes a good projector look like a much more expensive one.
Gear Review
madVR Envy Core: the same magic, less of it
Dynamic HDR tone-mapping frame by frame, in the smaller Envy box. Most of the magic, less of the money.
Why we certify a system before we agree to cover it
A response-time guarantee is only worth something if we can actually keep it.
From the Bench
The network is the house
Nine out of ten “the system is broken” calls are a network problem wearing a costume.
From the Bench
What twenty years of service calls taught us about specifying
The decisions that cause trouble are almost never the ones clients worry about.
25 of 25 pieces