When properly calibrated and dialed in, many high quality AV receiver brands can deliver the envelopment and excitement of home theater surround sound.  But none of them make us want to listen to music the way a great stereo system can.  2-channel audio represents the more exacting challenge for music listening...it's up to the 2 speakers to create the soundstage image, with all the detail and dynamics present in the recording, without the potentially distracting influence of additional speakers' sound coming from multiple locations.

There are many reasons to listen to music on headphones.  You can hear details in a recording that might go unnoticed through conventional speakers.  There is an intimacy of listening to music without the effects of “the room.”  And, most of the time, you don’t get “turn that music down” from a less enthusiastic family member!

From earbuds to state-of-the-art high-end over-ear “cans,” there is a breadth and variety of high performance headphones on the market today.  We can break down the types in several ways.  There is the physical “form factor,” which can be categorized as in-ear, on-ear, or over-ear.  Comfort is a factor, as is the appearance of the ‘phones if wearing in public is a consideration.

In our last newsletter/blog we explored the convenience and wide variety of choice that streaming music brings to the table. Now for something completely different—playing LP records! This form of music playback has had somewhat of a renaissance the last several years. Many folks love the warm, full sound of records and the whole experience—from reading the liner notes to owning the physical medium, to even the occasional tick or pop!

In 1970, the vast majority of Greater Boston area home music systems featured FM radio tuners and record players equipped with "changer mechanisms" so listeners could put on a stack of up to 6 records to play sequentially. By 1980, we had cassette tape decks with the ability to create "mixtapes" and "auto-reverse" so that you could program your favorite tracks and enjoy 90 minutes of uninterrupted bliss. By 1990, CDs had arrived and we had multi-disc players with anywhere from 5 to 200 (or more!) discs and we soon began to see digital database managers programmed to execute playback to suit our desires. This was the beginning of the world we now inhabit, where we play songs arranged in playlists from digital files and listen to music anywhere and everywhere.