Our 10 Best Gear Awards

The best gear of the year.

Wadia's best ever CD player is much, much more than just a CD player

With the demise of HD-DVD and the LP's renaissance I thought this would be a great time to review a state of the art CD player.

Formats with real staying power, like CD and LP, inspire passionate collectors who own many hundreds or as in my case, thousands of discs. I still buy an occasional LP and average one or two CD purchases a week, so whatever the future brings I'm going to be listening to CDs for a long time. I just hope it's over something as good as Wadia's 781i CD player.

Computer Audio 101: Revving Up a New Spin for CD Playback

For years now, hobbyists have been transforming their computers into audio source components, a natural endpoint for all kinds of digital music.

Conceptually, it's quite simple—store, instantaneously access, and manage an entire library of music on your computer. No more sorting through piles of CDs. Yet, serious audiophiles (especially those not computer savvy) have traditionally been hesitant to embrace this "techno" alternative to their tried and true CD players.

They should take a new look, as the computer can be the powerful audiophile device.

A mini survey of ear-bogglingly good headphones and headphone amplifiers

I'd like to let you in on a little secret: You can buy terrific headphones for next to nothing. That's not to say they all sound great, but a bigger budget definitely buys better build and sound quality.

For this roundup I've selected three contenders for the world's best headphone: the Denon AH-D5000, Grado Labs GS-1000, and the Ultrasone Edition 9, plus a pair of headphone amplifiers, Benchmark's DAC1 USB and Woo Audio's WA5-LE.

An Audio Lover’s Video Player.

Over the past year, Denon has quietly assembled an interesting array of Blu-ray players designed to suit a host of budgets and systems—from the digital-only DVD-2500BTCI transport ($999) to the recently announced “entry-level” DVD-1800BD ($749).

Residing at the top of the chain is the reference DVD-3800BDCI ($1,999), a beefy unit whose build quality and high-end components befit that higher price tag.

Serve it Up – Audio and Video Servers Galore

Maybe you've got a huge collection of digital music, and you'd really love to listen to it throughout your home, instead of simply on your iPod.

Perhaps you want to rip your DVD collection to disc and secret the cases away in storage.

No matter the particulars, chances are you have digital media you want to enjoy in the more comfortable parts of your home—away from the desktop. Enter media servers.

Digital Out

At first glace, this appears to be just another iPod dock. What makes it special is on the inside (awww, isn't that sweet)—so hidden, in fact, that if you didn't know about it beforehand, you may miss it.

You see, this is the first iPod dock that is able to extract a digital signal from the iPod, keeping the signal digital (depending on your system) all the way to the speaker terminals on your amp. Even if your setup isn't digital that far, wouldn't you rather rely on the digital converters in your receiver/pre-pro than the $300 iPod? Me too.

Can't Afford a new Rolls? How about this instead?

Hyundai is trying to be Toyota. And Honda. And why not, they're both some of the most respected and successful car makers out there. With the Genesis, Hyundai aims right in the middle of the luxury sports sedan market.

To help them with that image, they enlisted Lexicon to design the audio system. The only other car with a Lexicon audio system is the Rolls-Royce Phantom. So it's in good company.