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

As I hinted at in a recent editorial about the stranglehold boomers have on the audiophile hobby, “what even is an audiophile?” is a peculiarly fascinating question. As my podcast cohost Brent Butterworth is fond of saying, biking magazines aren’t filled with editorials about what it means to be a cyclist, nor were knitting magazines (when those still existed as more than an expensive but gorgeous curiosity) clogged up with navel-gazing pieces about the identitarian components of being a knitter.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 15 February 2026

Looking back at the blog post documenting my unboxing of KEF’s Q3 Meta in late 2024, I find it sort of adorable how much I went on about how large those standmount speakers are. Granted, for a two-way design, the Q3 Meta is a hoss. I needed only one glance at the packaging for the company’s three-way Q Concerto Meta (US$1399.99, CA$1799.99, £1099, €1198/pair), though, to be reminded that everything is relative.

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

If you read or write about hi‑fi for any meaningful length of time, you start to notice that certain editorial motifs pop up with predictable regularity. There is, of course, the story about one’s formative years as a hi‑fi enthusiast, which can fuel editorials for years. There’s the story about converting a normie to the cult of hi‑fi, or just having conversations with regular people about our hobby. You can run that one every couple of years and have something new to say.

Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 15 January 2026

If you’re of the opinion that looks don’t matter when it comes to hi-fi gear, it should go without saying that I very much disagree. If you lean toward thinking that looks do matter but only differentiate pricier audiophile components, I’ve also got a bit of a bone to pick with you. And I sort of feel like I can simply point to any of iFi Audio’s Zen components—the Zen DAC 3 digital-to-analog converter and headphone amp (US$229, CA$279, £229, €229), for example—and rest my case.

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.