Free Republic

I’ve lost track of how many Schitt headphone amplifiers and digital converters I’ve reviewed, but their all-new Mani phono stage is a very different kind of product. Mani amplifies the minuscule voltages generated by a turntable phono cartridge, so your LPs can be played over AV receivers, desktop powered speakers, boom boxes, etc. The little Mani’s all-metal chassis measures a scant 5 × 3.5 × 1.25 inches (127 × 89 × 32 mm). It works with moving-magnet (MM) or moving-coil (MC) phono cartridges. Mani has four user-selectable “gain” modes (30-, 42-, 47-, and 59-dB), so it’ll sound great with any...

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud. Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get...