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Reviews of Attainable Hi-Fi & Home-Theater Equipment

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Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 January 2026

Y’all, I lied. In Part One of my list of favorite albums list, I indicated that only the record in the top spot was immovable, and everything else was arbitrary—that anything from the first list could swap places with anything on the second (at the time unpublished) list, and it wouldn’t really matter. And in my defense, I believed that at the time I wrote it. But as I stepped back to re-read the first article in preparation for writing this follow-up, I realized there was, indeed, a bimodal distribution of the albums contained in these two lists.

Details: Written by: Super User; Created: 15 December 2025

Here’s something for you young ’uns in the audience to look forward to. As I was preparing to unbox the new DALI Kupid bookshelf speakers (US$600, CA$600, £299, €339 per pair), I thought to myself that it’s been months since my last DALI review. Maybe even over a year? Could that be possible?

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 December 2025

Of all the phrases to enter the common parlance in the past few decades, perhaps none has been so misused and misunderstood as “meme.” In the internet age, it has come to mean intertextual images or GIFs posted on social media mostly for the lulz.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 November 2025

Let me just warn you right from the giddy‑up: I’m going to be throwing some weird-sounding vocabulary at you here. But the concepts are simple, and I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. At least I hope it will.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 15 October 2025

I’m just going to lay all my cards on the table: it feels awkward to me that, nearly five years into my tenure with SoundStage! Access, I’ve never reviewed a bit of WiiM gear. It feels a bit akin to running a publication about affordable Belgian-style saisons without ever mentioning Hennepin Farmhouse Ale, or about the best e-readers without talking about Kobo. For a while now, I’ve almost felt like doing my first WiiM review at this point would make things more awkward by shining a light on my negligence to date. But at some point, you have to stop letting awkwardness be justification for continued awkwardness and just do the thing. And the new WiiM Amp Ultra (US$529, CA$749, £499, €599) seems as good a motivation as any for finally ripping off the adhesive bandage.

Read more: First Look: WiiM Amp Ultra

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 October 2025

To the surprise of absolutely no one, I’ve just about had my fill of evil multinational corporations and their draconian control over every aspect of our daily digital lives. Thing is, though, that’s normally a principled stance. But recently, it’s become a pressing problem that I have to resolve soon if I want to keep earning a living. Apple and Microsoft both seem dead set on making it nearly impossible to function without spending gobs of money I don’t have, and I’m responding in the only way I know how: outright revolt—by trying to make Linux work for me despite the fact that the open-source OS wasn’t designed to do a lot of the things I need it to do.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 15 September 2025

Here in my third decade as a hi‑fi journalist, it still surprises me from time to time that there are legitimately major brands whose products I’ve never reviewed. Q Acoustics is one such brand, and I point that out merely as a way of underscoring my excitement during the unboxing process. A speaker with proper British pedigree, with a gorgeous design and good engineering for US$1199 per pair? Sign me the heck up. It took all the restraint I could muster to open the packaging for the new Q Acoustics 3050c properly—with a knife and all that—instead of just ripping into the cardboard like an unhinged beast.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 September 2025

There’s one aspect of making a career out of a hobby that is rarely discussed. Sometimes life gets in the way of your hobbies. We’ve all been there. But unless you’re independently wealthy, a trust-fund baby, or retired, life can’t get in the way of your income. So what happens during those periods when pastimes are a luxury, work is a necessity, and you’re stuck in a paradox because your pastime is your work?

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 15 August 2025

Every once in a while, I feel compelled for whatever reason to justify the existence of these unboxing blog posts, because it’s not about consumerism or SEO or anything else of the sort. Bottom line: it’s about telling a story slightly tangential to that of my in-depth gear evaluation—one that, I feel, gives you a more thorough overview of the product and the experience it delivers.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 August 2025

I don’t often dig deep into the sausage-making process in my editorials, since I think most of the decisions we make behind the scenes at the SoundStage! Network are quite a bit more boring than many people would suspect. Each of the SoundStage! editors has a lane, it’s not difficult to figure out what is and isn’t our beat, and we rarely have to worry much about which product categories are right for each of us. But when KEF reached out to me with an offer to review its new outdoor speakers, it prompted a lot of editorial discussions about whether outdoor audio—typically the domain of expensive custom installers—had any place in a publication focused on home theater and affordable hi-fi.