The Audio Equipment Guide

Once a particular model becomes desirable, it becomes surprisingly easy to rewrite the actual requirement around it — which is exactly backwards, and exactly how most poor purchases happen. An XLR connector doesn’t by itself prove a circuit is balanced, and a genuinely balanced connection brings no audible benefit over a short, quiet domestic run regardless of what the cable costs. And a used network streamer can be in flawless physical condition while being functionally dead — because the service it depended on was discontinued, not because anything actually broke.

This volume covers the full purchasing decision for a two-channel or home-cinema system: how to judge specifications, measurements and listening tests in proportion, how to compare fairly at matched level, then equipment class by equipment class — receivers, amplifiers, DACs, streamers, turntables, loudspeakers and subwoofers — through to the cables, networking, power and racking that hold a system together. It closes with the real risk calculus of buying new, ex-demonstration or used.

Placement, measurement and correction belong to Volume II; diagnosing a fault once you own the equipment belongs to Volume VII; stereo-specific application is developed fully in Volume V. What this volume gives instead is a defined, repeatable requirement against which any product — however fashionable, however expensive — can actually be judged before money changes hands.