Jessica Monroe

Working from a home studio in means dealing with noise you’ll never get rid of – leaf blowers, neighbors, family members on Zoom calls, HVAC hum. After testing 10 different pairs over the past few months in my own studio setup, I can tell you that the best noise-cancelling headphones for home studios solve a … Read more

Practicing electric guitar at midnight without waking the entire house is a rite of passage every guitarist goes through. I have spent years plugging into amps, audio interfaces, and headphone amps trying to find the perfect silent practice setup, and I can tell you that the wrong pair of headphones can make a $2,000 guitar … Read more

If you live for chest-thumping kick drums, snarling 808s, and the kind of low-end that makes your skull rattle, regular balanced earbuds just will not cut it. I have spent the last three months testing eight bass-heavy IEMs across EDM, hip-hop, trap, and dubstep, and the gap between flat studio monitors and proper basshead in-ears … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months rotating twelve Moondrop IEMs through my daily listening rig, and I’m still impressed by how much sound the brand squeezes out of every dollar. Moondrop is a Chinese audio company that has reshaped the budget and mid-range in-ear monitor market since 2015, and their house “harman-neutral” tuning shows up … Read more

If you have just dipped your toes into the audiophile hobby, picking your first serious in-ear monitor can feel like choosing a starter Pokemon — every option claims to be the best, and the community forums can be brutally opinionated. I have spent the last few months rotating through almost the entire 7Hz lineup on … Read more

I spent six weeks testing eight DAC/amp combos with dedicated preamp outputs, hooked up to everything from budget bookshelf speakers to studio monitors and a pair of floor-standers. Most DAC/amp guides focus on headphones, which leaves speaker listeners guessing. This roundup is different. Every pick here has a proper preamp output that actually drives speakers, … Read more

Finding the best Adam Audio studio monitors for the money in is harder than it looks. ADAM Audio makes German-engineered ribbon tweeter monitors that range from bedroom-studio budget to flagship professional rigs. After our team spent weeks measuring and listening across all three series, we narrowed it down to twelve models that actually earn their … Read more

Finding the right studio monitors can make or break your mixes, and Kali Audio has built its entire reputation on delivering professional-grade monitoring at prices that home studio owners can actually afford. I have spent months testing Kali’s lineup across different room sizes, genres, and production workflows to figure out which models truly stand out. … Read more

Smartphone manufacturers have been removing the headphone jack for years now, leaving audiophiles scrambling for decent audio solutions. If you are tired of carrying dongles that break, get lost, or introduce noise into your signal chain, the best USB-C IEMs with built-in DAC offer a clean, all-in-one solution. These in-ear monitors have a digital-to-analog converter … Read more

I spent the last six weeks cycling through eight different desktop DAC/amp combos at my workstation, swapping my Sennheiser HD 560S between each one and logging how they handled everything from Tidal Master tracks to late-night gaming sessions. The truth is, most built-in PC audio outputs fall short once you plug in a pair of … Read more