Authors

I'm Dave, and I'm the cheapskate of the team — and proud of it. My whole thing is finding the gear that punches three times above its price, the so-called "giant-killers," because most people don't have forty grand for a system and shouldn't feel bad about it. I've heard the megabucks stuff, and a lot of it is gloriously good; I've also heard $800 setups that get you 85% of the way there. I'll always tell you where the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

I'm Eleanor — most people call me Nell. I came to this from the studio side, so I spend more time with headphones on my head than speakers in a room, and I've learned to hear the difference between detail and brightness pretending to be detail. I'm obsessive about fit and comfort, because the best-sounding headphone in the world is useless if it's clamping your skull after twenty minutes. I review everything from $200 daily-drivers to silly flagship planars.

Hi, I'm Hannah. Speakers are my thing — specifically, the conversation between a speaker and the room it's in, which is where most systems are won or lost. I did acoustics at uni and never quite got it out of my system. I'll measure your room's bass response and then gently break the news that the $20,000 speakers aren't the problem, the untreated wall behind your sofa is. Stand-mounts on good stands are criminally underrated and I will die on that hill.

G'day, Jonno here. I spent the better part of twelve years as a custom installer building theatres — everything from a media room squeezed into a Queenslander to a fully blacked-out, acoustically-treated cinema with a hundred grand of gear behind the screen. The thing nobody tells you is that the room matters more than the boxes, and I'll bang on about acoustics until you're sick of me. If you're planning a theatre, talk to me before you spend a cent on speakers.

I'm Marcus, and I'll be honest up front: I trust a measurement before I trust my own ears, because my ears lie to me daily. I spent fifteen years designing audio electronics before I started writing about them, so when a brand tells me a number, I want to see the graph. That doesn't make me cold about this hobby — I love a system that disappears as much as anyone — it just means I'll tell you when an expensive box is selling you confidence rather than performance.

Hello — I'm Priya. I ran a second-hand record shop in Fitzroy for the better part of a decade, which is a polite way of saying I have three thousand records and nowhere to put them. I listen to vinyl through valve amplification because I like the ritual as much as the sound, and yes, I know the measurements aren't perfect — I don't care, and I'll explain why on the page. If you want someone to tell you a turntable is "just a motor and a bearing," I am not your person.

I'm Sofia, and I get to play with the silly stuff — the statement amplifiers, the reference loudspeakers, the cost-no-object systems that most of us will only ever hear at a show. Someone has to, and I take it seriously: at this level the price stops mapping to performance and starts mapping to engineering, craft and ego, and part of my job is telling you which is which. I love the extreme end of this hobby, but I'm not dazzled by a big number on a price tag.

Theo here. By day I write software, by night I argue with people on forums about whether bit-perfect playback is "solved" (it mostly is, and then it isn't). I cover the digital end — DACs, streamers, servers, the whole messy ecosystem of getting a file to sound its best. My promise to you: I'll separate the genuine engineering from the audiophile folklore, and I'll never tell you a $500 streaming bridge sounds "blacker" unless I can explain why.