Specs and arithmetic, not adjectives
Most hi-fi advice asks you to trust somebody’s ears. That works when you know whose ears they are and you have learned to translate their vocabulary into your own. It works badly the rest of the time, which is most of the time, and it works not at all when the person writing has never heard the product either.
This site does something narrower. We take what manufacturers publish, apply published acoustics and calibration standards, and compute answers you can check yourself. Then we show the arithmetic.
That means we can answer questions like:
- Will this receiver actually drive these speakers to reference level at my seating distance, or will it run out first?
- These speakers dip to 2.9 ohms. Does my amplifier’s manufacturer commit to that load, or do they quietly not mention it?
- I have nine amplified channels and I want 7.1.4. Which two channels have to go to an external amplifier, and does my receiver’s pre-out set actually allow that?
- How much more power would it take to close a 4 dB gap, and is that a realistic upgrade or am I chasing it?
And it means we cannot answer questions like “which of these sounds better.” We do not know. We will tell you who does.
Why this site exists
Two things happened to hi-fi information at roughly the same time.
The first is that AI summaries got good at the easy half. Ask what a DAC is, or how far apart to put your speakers, and you get a competent paragraph without clicking anything. The pages that used to answer those questions are being hollowed out, and honestly they deserve it — they were mostly the same paragraph.
The second is that the hard half got harder to reach. The best measurement work in consumer audio is scattered across a forum, a one-person lab, and an open-source aggregator that assumes you already know what directivity flatness means. The best-known lab-testing site put much of its data behind a paywall. Meanwhile the search results for “best speakers under $500” filled up with sites that have never seen a speaker.
The gap in the middle is where a buyer actually lives: they have a room, a budget, a shortlist, and a question that requires joining several published facts together and doing some multiplication. That is a question a summary cannot answer well and a listicle does not try to.
That gap is the whole site.
What we build
Tools. Calculators that take your actual room and your actual shortlist and give you a number, with the formula and the standard it comes from shown underneath. Not “enter your speaker’s sensitivity in dB per 2.83 volts per metre” — pick your speaker from a list, because you should not have to go find that number to use a calculator about it.
A gear database. Specifications transcribed from manufacturer sources, with the measurement conditions attached, the cross-brand incompatibilities flagged, and gaps left as gaps. This is unglamorous work and it is the part nobody else has bothered to do.
Constraint guides. Articles that answer deterministic questions from published specs. Which receivers publish a real 4-ohm rating. Which processors support a given Atmos layout without an external amplifier. What a given standard actually requires, quoted from the standard.
Nothing else. No reviews, no listening impressions, no “best of” lists assembled from other people’s reviews.
Being straight about what this is
This is a commercial site. We earn affiliate commission on some links to retailers, which is how it gets funded.
It is also run by someone with no formal acoustics training and no listening room, which is an odd thing to put on an About page and exactly why it belongs here. Every other calculator site in this niche is anonymous. We would rather tell you what we are and let you weigh it.
The full method, including where our model breaks and which of our numbers are estimates rather than manufacturer figures, is on the How We Work page. It is worth reading before you trust anything here.
Sites we send people to
We are not trying to replace these and we link out constantly:
- Audio Science Review — the reference dataset for objective DAC, amplifier and speaker performance
- Erin’s Audio Corner — the best independent Klippel speaker measurements in English-language consumer audio
- Spinorama.org — open-source aggregation of CEA-2034 data from several labs, filterable and comparable
- Audioholics — engineering-led explainers and original measurement methodology
- What Hi-Fi and Stereophile — for the listening impressions we do not provide
Contact: corrections@hifisystems.net · Corrections: corrections@hifisystems.net