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Sometimes, you just need noise. Good, old-fashioned, wonderful noise. No Bluetooth, no cute input lights, no digital displays. Just a big, grunting monster of an amplifier that you can use to mess things up.

It’s often easy to forget in the seemingly endless mission for better and better sound, but the role of a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) isn’t just to improve the audio quality. It’s also there to make it easy to send the audio where you need it.

Did you know that you can still buy actual hi-fi systems? As in, two speakers and a dedicated CD/tape-deck/AM-FM tower - the kind of thing you used to see in dorm rooms in the 1990s. On that note: meet the SO8000.

When you make the best headphones on the planet, you can afford to sit back and enjoy the acclaim. And yet Focal, a French company who produce the astounding Utopia headphones, refuse to settle.

If you’ve never heard the name Modular, or Mod-1, we aren’t surprised. Until recently, we hadn’t either. But Modular has released a pair of wireless headphones that might just dethrone the uber-popular Beats by Dre Solo3 Wireless.

When they’re not producing the world’s best headphones, French audio wizards Focal spend their time producing some rather good speaker systems. We recently spent a month with one of these, the Focal Sib Evo 5.1.2.

Wireless speakers have become the quiet juggernaut of the audio industry. Ever since features like Bluetooth and WiFi became commonplace, manufacturers have been tinkering, slowly freeing us from the chaos of wires and ceiling speakers.

Portable amps are tricky little things. While they unquestionably make your sound better, they don’t have the luxuries that desktop models do. They can’t be heavy, or feature cool-looking tubes, or have loads of connections.

If it weren’t for the fact that the Audiofly AF1120 in-ear monitors are in the conversation for the best we’ve ever listened to, we would have chucked it in long ago. Because there are so. Many. Tangles.

Gamers have officially been blessed with the industry’s newest gaming headset: the HyperX Cloud Orbit S. If you’ve been keeping an ear to the ground, you’ll have heard the buzz about this team-up between HyperX and AUDEZE.

Stereo amps can be boring as hell. The companies that make them are more often than not concerned with treating the internals, and ignoring what things look like on the outside. The NAD D3020 V2 is different.

Beyerdynamic make some of the best headphones on the planet. They’ve been doing it for quite a long time, so they know a thing or two about sound. But they have surprisingly few Bluetooth models...

Sonos rules the world of home audio. They make the best-sounding smart speakers you can buy, even despite challengers from the likes of Bose and Apple. But the one thing they’ve never done is create a portable Bluetooth speaker you can take outside.

If you’re going to call a floorstanding speaker the Ultra, then you’d better have a set of brass balls backing up that particular claim. Then again, the Ultra Towers are easily among the best floorstanding speakers out there.