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These are the list of my favourite speakers. Awards are just awards and it does not mean that you should only look at gold award. Maybe that silver or bronze fit better your needs and budget and is therefore a perfect pair for you. I will give 5 awards and additional 10 more speakers that I really love. Somewhere here is certainly a perfect speaker for you. Best Budget Speaker -Dali Kupid Don't let the price fool you, and don't let the size fool you either. The Kupid is the s

Hello and welcome to my channel. Let's go through my favorite amps that you can buy now. I will give 5 awards. The gold, silver and bronze, and best budget, and best value. After that I will quickly go through alternatives that I also recommend. The thing is that it does not mean that the gold award is the best amp out of the bunch, it just is best in the crossroads of price, value, quality and versatility. But for you bronze might be the one, or best value that will best fit

Every show leaves you with one product you keep circling back to. Not always the most expensive, not always the loudest in the room. Just the one your mind returns to on the flight home, the one you find yourself defending in conversations days later. For me, at the first-ever Vienna edition of High End 2026, that product was the For full coverage of High End Vienna 2026: part 1: https://www.hifidaydreaming.com/post/i-was-at-vienna-high-end-2026-and-this-are-my-favorite-devic

This marks the start of Part 2 of my Vienna High End coverage — if you'd like to see Part 1, click on the link below. https://www.hifidaydreaming.com/post/i-was-at-vienna-high-end-2026-and-this-are-my-favorite-devices-part-1-musical-fidelity-ortofon-a Volumio I stopped by the Volumio booth, where they had the Rivo Ultra on a big, shiny display. It does look like a Volumio product, but at the same time, it completely departs from their usual philosophy of no-screen, smaller de

I never made it to High End in Munich, but here I am in Vienna in 2026, right at the epicenter of everything hi-fi. High End — formerly anchored in Munich for decades — relocated to Vienna's Austria Center for 2026. The move was scrutinized before a single speaker played a note. It didn't need to be. The first Viennese edition landed well: rooms were busy, product pipelines were stronger than expected, and manufacturers showed up with hardware that suggests high-end audio may

There's a particular kind of audiophile frustration that nobody talks about loudly enough. You've spent real money on a DAC. You've agonized over its chip architecture, its output stage topology, its measurements. You've read every review. You bought it. It sounds good. Maybe even great. But there's something slightly veiled about it, something that doesn't quite let go, a faint hardness in the upper midrange that you keep telling yourself you'll get used to. You don't get us

Introduction There are products that arrive with careful PR management, measured expectations, and a polite round of applause from the press. And then there are products that land like a fist on a table — ones that make you put down whatever you were doing and actually listen. The MC X40 is the top model in Ortofon's new MC X range, and it proves to be by far the best in absolute terms — sacrificing some of the rough-and-ready character of the lesser models for a sound that

This Review was written by Kristina Savić Disclamer After a while it is time for me to review my No1 outdoor source of audio joy. Thanks to my audio reviewer colleagues who were willing to send me this DAP for an honest review, here we are. There are no expectations made upon me and nor am I biased towards this product. I just write what I observe from personal experience. Introduction Hidizs has been a well known player in this audio world for 17 years and they have set the

This Review was written by Kristina Savić Disclaimer Although there are some manufacturers of IEMs that I really like and respect, due to their constant quality implementation or build philosophy or development direction, I am always ready to accept there there are flaws and I am in no position to be stopped in speaking about it, so these are my thoughts, not compensated or influenced by anyone. Introduction Being in business for more than 15 years Hidizs have stated by their

Fosi now carry many hats, but for one or other reasone they never truly tap their toes in market that is most popular in HIFI, and that is a streamer market. Fosi build amps, and then came headphone amplifiers, DAC/amp combos, a turntable, and now this: the S3, a network streamer with a built-in DAC and preamp stage, priced at $259.99 and aimed squarely at the digital front end of a serious two-channel system. Fosi Audio has spent the last few years building a name around com

Introduction: FiiO's Unlikely Vinyl Ambition There's a certain audacity to FiiO entering the turntable market at all. The company built its reputation on digital — dongles, DAPs, DAC/amps — things with chips and firmware and USB-C ports. Analog is philosophically the opposite direction. Vinyl demands patience, physical ritual, mechanical precision engineered in the analogue domain. It doesn't update over Wi-Fi. And yet, FiiO's presence in the turntable category is no longer a

Here is a particular conversation that happens whenever Fosi Audio releases something new, and it goes roughly like this: "It can't be that good for the money. Can it?" For nearly a decade now, the answer has been "yes, mostly," and that "mostly" has been doing an extraordinary amount of work in carrying the brand from a Shenzhen Class D amplifier specialist into something that looks, at least on paper, like a full hi-fi systems company. Crisis of Identity The Merak is the mo

I admire Luxsin, a brand-new company on the hi-fi market, and with just one device they did it right. The success of the X9 lay in the combination of great sonics, a very forward-thinking UI, intuitive software and features, really great build quality, and price. And that last thing — price — might not be the best highlight you can have, but considering what I already mentioned, alongside a high-end DAC and great headphone amplification, it really is a true flagship that offe

EH lineup continues to impress Hello once again, FiiO EH family of headphones... headphone. Everyone was so impressed by your older brother EH11, your smaller, thinner, and cheaper but nonetheless older brother. And there are big shoes of expectations for you to fill. And I am also in that boat of expecting a lot from you, I loved EH11. Telling by just holding you, well you are not giving a run for the money for more expensive models, but this is just an okay plasticky build,

Intro Thieaudio is a brand most of us first met in the IEM aisle. The Monarch line, the Hype series — these are the products that helped shape what a modern, premium Chi-Fi in-ear looks and sounds like. Full-sized headphones have been a more sporadic affair for them, which is exactly why the new Cypher arrives with a curious mixture of expectation and quiet skepticism. At a $399 MSRP, the Cypher lands squarely in the most contested corner of the open-back market — the same co

FiiO has spent the last few years transforming itself from a “budget portable audio brand” into something much bigger. And with the new K17 R2R Pro, it feels like the company is now aiming directly at the serious desktop audiophile market. This isn’t just another DAC/amp. It’s: DAC streamer headphone amplifier EQ workstation desktop control hub …all packed into one relatively compact chassis. And honestly? This might be one of the most feature-loaded desktop audio products Fi

After my time with the AUVA EQ isolators, I was fairly sure I had figured out Stack Audio's whole design philosophy: take a principle from mechanical engineering that has been well understood for decades outside of hi-fi, apply it intelligently to an audio component, and let the measurements do the talking. The Serene Mat and Serene Stabiliser confirm that hunch — but they also take the same approach into a much stranger and more interesting environment: the groove of a vinyl

Introduction There is a quiet conviction in everything Sivga makes. The Dongguan-based outfit has, since its founding in 2016, refused to participate in the race-to-the-bottom aesthetics that define so much of the budget headphone market. Where others reach for matte plastics and edgy industrial silhouettes, Sivga reaches for rosewood, Zebrawood, hand-polished metal, and a kind of quiet, neo-retro elegance that feels closer to a vintage hi-fi cabinet than to a 2026 consumer e

For decades, “wireless audio” has mostly meant one thing: wireless music… connected to speakers with giant cables running across your floor. Now Pro-Ject is trying something genuinely different. Its new Wireless Box E flips the usual streaming amplifier concept upside down by attaching a compact mono amplifier directly onto the back of a passive speaker—eliminating the need for traditional speaker cable runs almost entirely. And honestly? This might be one of the more interes

If you follow this channel, you will know that I did a report from the Shenzhen International Audio Show. And I had a few picks of my favourite gear. First was Sendy Audio Peacock, but in hindsight that was probably because it was synergised with the great Kylin DAC/AMP. But the second one was none other than the Matrix Audio TS1 streamer. I loved how it looks, how it feels like a premium build, I liked the interface, I liked the really good headphone output, and I of course