Brent Butterworth

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 29, 2012

Like wine, sushi, and plumbers, headphones can get a lot more expensive than most people realize. At Sound+Vision, we focus on under-$500 models. But when Dr. Fang Bian, the visionary entrepreneur behind the HiFiMan headphone company, asked if I’d like to try the company’s top-of-the-line, $1,299 HE-6 headphone and its new $1,599 EF-6 headphone amplifier, I thought it’d be a great chance to give our usual listening panel a sample of what only the most devoted and/or wealthy headphone aficionados usually get to hear.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 24, 2012

Every time I visit Vancouver vintage gear dealer Innovative Audio, I find it difficult to keep my mind focused on anything.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 17, 2012

As I said in Monday’s coverage of headphones and Wednesday’s coverage of speakers, Denver’s Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is the biggest, most exciting, and most important of the regional hi-fi shows that have sprung up all over the U.S. and Canada.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 17, 2012

If you’re looking to hear the latest speakers, there’s no better place to go than Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. Last weekend’s show was packed with new speakers, ranging from bookshelf designs to huge towers, budget models to budget-busting models, and ordinary to exotic.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 16, 2012

Tube-shaped subs are popular with DIY-ers because they’re easy to construct. Just grab a cylindrical concrete form at Home Depot, slap some ends?on it, and you’ve got a nice subwoofer enclosure. But SVS features tube-shaped subs in its line not because they’re easy to build; it’s because the form factor makes them perfect for certain rooms. At 16.6 inches in diameter, the company’s PC-13 Ultra takes up less than half the floor space of its comparable box-shaped sub, the PB-13 Ultra. A PC-13 Ultra can slip almost unnoticed into a corner, while the PB-13 Ultra can slip unnoticed into... well, maybe an aircraft hangar.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 14, 2012

The CanJam section of the annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, which took place this weekend at the Denver Tech Center, is one of the best places in the U.S. for audiophiles to sample headphones and headphone amps.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 11, 2012

The surest way to future success is to repeat your past successes. Like that line? I made it up. If you think it’s a lot of B.S., I present as irrefutable evidence the careers of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Also the Paradigm Millenia CT, a 2.1 speaker system based closely on the MilleniaOne, our 2011 Product of the Year.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 10, 2012

As a guy who spends a lot of his life on biztrips and bike tours, I find Apple’s AirPlay wireless audio technology to be almost useless. Give me Bluetooth, baby! Bluetooth lets me haul my Soundmatters FoxLv2 to exotic locales (Houston, Indianapolis, etc.), zap it with music or Internet radio from my Motorola Droid Pro or my iPod touch, and enjoy the same listening options on the road that I have at home—minus my vinyl collection and turntable, of course.

But the new Libratone Zipp makes AirPlay almost as convenient as Bluetooth.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 03, 2012

Room correction systems that optimize your audio system for the acoustics of your room have been around for more than a decade — but frankly, they’ve never won me over, and I’m finally starting to understand why.

Brent Butterworth  |  Oct 01, 2012

With so many audio connection technologies available now, it’s gotta be tough to be an audio product manager. Smartphone fans want to connect via Bluetooth. iTunes enthusiasts want AirPlay. Computer audio nuts expect a USB connection. A few old-schoolers demand a hardware dock for an iPod. And there’s that one guy who still owns a Zune and needs an analog input.

What to do? If you’re Samsung and you’re trying to make a “statement” product, you throw it all in. The $699 DA-E750 includes all of the above technologies — plus DLNA, plus a fold-out “dual dock” that works with Samsung Galaxy phones as well as iPhones, iPads, and iPods.

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