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The Wirecutter Show Episode 37: Level Up Your Sound System

BRENT: Tracy Chapman Fast Car is generally regarded by audio scientists who have proven this in testing as the best song for evaluating audio equipment. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CAIRA: This episode is called Level Up Your Sound System. ROSIE: Hey, team. CHRISTINE: Hi. ROSIE: I've been shopping. CAIRA: For? CHRISTINE: Shocking. ROSIE: No, it is shocking. I have to say since starting to work here, I think I have shopped less, but I've been shopping recently for a new speaker setup in my apartment. CHRISTINE: Tell us more. ROSIE: I'm a big, I'm indoctrinating my children in the sense that we dance as often as possible. We dance through the decades, if not evening dance parties, certainly weekly. Their vibes are great. However, we only have one main speaker in our living space, and so I've been thinking about maybe Sonos or maybe some kind of connected system system. CHRISTINE: Don't do it, don't do the Sonos. CAIRA: Christine is scared. CHRISTINE: I have the Sonos and. ROSIE: Don't be suckered into it? CHRISTINE: I just find it problematic. ROSIE: Well, that's the thing. I'm like, I don't quite know what my options are and I know that Wirecutter has done a lot of coverage on speakers and I would like something great, something that is going to sound great in our space, but I also really don't want to spend that much money. CHRISTINE: But you don't have to. ROSIE: No. CHRISTINE: Actually we bought some speakers this year and we got some for under 200. It was really great, a paired set. But yeah, we had gone through this similar situation, Rosie, where we had something in our living room, something in our kitchen, nothing connected, and it was annoying. You want to be able to turn on the music and have it pumping. ROSIE: Right. I cobbled together or I've collected, maybe, is a better way to put it, these little Bluetooth speakers that I can put around the house, but it's time for an upgrade. CHRISTINE: Yeah, there's just so many options and sometimes you need a guide, and we do have a guide here at Wirecutter, not just a written guide with recommendations, but a physical person who can actually walk us through this. ROSIE: A human being. CHRISTINE: In our little journey through speaker world. So we're going to have Brent Butterworth on the show today. He is our senior writer who covers audio devices and he has literally decades of experience testing speakers specifically in all kinds of audio equipment. And he's also a musician, so he has a very high bar for good audio. And I think what's lovely about this episode today is he has some really great advice about how to find great speakers that won't cost you a lot. CAIRA: Or almost free things that you can do to upgrade the speaker system that you already have. CHRISTINE: That's right. So if you've got a couple Bluetooth speakers hanging out in your house, he can give you some hot tips for how to make them better. CAIRA: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to Brent. CHRISTINE: So after the break we will chat with Brent. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Brent Butterworth, who's a senior staff writer covering audio devices, musical instruments, and recording gear for Wirecutter. Brent has been reviewing audio gear since the nineties and he worked as a testing consultant for some of the world's largest audio companies. He's a huge music fan who plays upright bass, ukulele, guitar, and records his own music. Brent, welcome. BRENT: Thank you. It's so nice to be here. CHRISTINE: Brent, before we jump in, I want you to tell us a little bit about how you test speakers. Paint us a picture of how you do this. BRENT: As much as possible. I think the standard procedure that we do that me and Lauren Dragon, who's our headphone editor, do is we get in as many products as we can. We give them a listen and weed out the ones that we know people aren't going to like, because going to be some. CHRISTINE: Duds. There's always duds. BRENT: Some poor products that just aren't going to make it, and then we narrow it down and then we bring in listeners and get second opinions. Because people have different opinions about audio. CAIRA: It's very subjective. CHRISTINE: Yeah. BRENT: One of the really key things is it's good if it's not people that are really super hardcore audio people, if you have what they call in scientific testing, a low anchor, and that's one that can I say sucks? CHRISTINE: Yeah, I know I say that. BRENT: Where people can go, oh, okay, that one's bad, so at least I know that one's bad. And then they relax and they can judge the rest of them. ROSIE: So what are you asking your listening panel to look for, Brent? BRENT: The key thing, I think, for most people that's the easiest to evaluate is voice quality because we listen to voices all day long every day. Does the singer sound natural or do they sound excessively boomy or do they sound excessively sibilant or whatever? That's what gets people comfortable is if they can listen to the voice, then they can start listening to the instruments. And then if they're more into audio, if they're musicians, I can start to ask them about distortion, and sometimes they'll bring that up, and distortion is when things start to sound unnatural. We've all heard that if you hear really cheap little speakers and things like that. The classic example is the drive-through speaker at Taco Bell or wherever. ROSIE: Which sounds like it's underwater. BRENT: I'm not picking on Taco Bell. They're pretty much all bad. ROSIE: Are you often going to get distortion at louder volume? BRENT: Almost always, yeah. ROSIE: So are you cranking these speakers up when you're testing? BRENT: I do both. I actually, I crank them all up. There's a ZZ Top track that was produced by Rick Rubin who was notorious for really loud recordings that I play and I measure them with a sound level meter and I crank them up as loud as they'll go, and I measure that sound level. And then for my listening test though, I usually bring it down to a normal level. Yesterday we were just testing record players at Wirecutter, turntables with built-in speakers, and we started with everything at matched levels and normal, moderate listening levels and we did all that, but then we turned everything up full blast to see what it would do, and that changed some people's minds because some of these things would play really loud and some of them wouldn't. CAIRA: I got to sit in on your record player testing yesterday, which was really fun. I didn't know that you were doing that and I was just in the office, which is great. And you played Beyonce, you played Led Zeppelin, and who was the last? It was a country singer. BRENT: It was Steve Earle. CAIRA: Steve Earle, and it was all amazing. You really could hear the difference in the sound qualities, especially based on the genre of music. We were wondering if you have a favorite song to play when you're testing speakers. BRENT: Tracy Chapman Fast Car is generally regarded by audio scientists who have proven this in testing as the best song for evaluating audio equipment. CAIRA: So I went to go buy my stereo system that I have now. He only played Bohemian Rhapsody because he said the same thing. He was like, this is the best song to listen to if you're testing the quality of speakers. BRENT: It's not. Great song. Not so great for testing speakers. CHRISTINE: Well, what is it about this Tracy Chapman song that makes it so awesome? BRENT: The more the song fills up the frequency band, the better it is. So it has some bass in it, some bass guitar, and then it has acoustic guitar, which is real, a lot of high frequency and delicate and you can hear if the acoustic guitar sounds bad, it'll sound muffled or it'll sound grating or somewhere in between. And then you can hear her voice, and the way her voice is recorded on that is really clear, but a lot of speakers start to make it sound distant or a little bit like she's singing in a cardboard box or something like that. So I put that on with a speaker and it's just like, nope. Or maybe I get a $30 speaker, I'm like, oh, that was a good speaker. You can tell so much and once you get used to doing this, you can tell so much in about 30 seconds. ROSIE: All right. So Brent, I'm guessing the majority of people in your professional life are deep into the topic of audio. This episode is not necessarily going to be for them. Today is for the curious novice, so those of us kind of looking to take our indoor or outdoor audio setup to the next level, ideally without breaking the bank. If I come to you for advice, what questions are you going to ask me in order to lead me in the right direction before I make a purchase? BRENT: I usually ask how much money they want to spend. Then I can, some people are like no more than $30. Okay, I know where I'm at with that. A lot of people are just like, whatever I have to get good sound. And I start to ask them what kind of music they'd listen to because some kind of music, if they're jazz and classical fans, they don't need deep bass. They can get by with some fairly small speakers. If they're listening to a lot of hip hop or EDM or something, they need something with more bass, otherwise, some of the music is just going to disappear completely. And then where are they going to put the speakers? Are they going to put it in a bedroom? Are they going to put it in a big giant living room? Do they want to have dinner parties? Do they want to have, people sometimes have, I can't conceive of this, but sometimes people have dance parties in their homes. ROSIE: Oh, hell yeah. CHRISTINE: Come on. CAIRA: Why is it so inconceivable? ROSIE: Weekly. BRENT: We sit at home and close our eyes and listen very intently, seriously. But it depends on do they want to use it outside. A lot of people want to use their stuff outside, in which case it probably needs to be waterproof to some degree. I usually just start talking to them about what they're going to do with the speaker. ROSIE: If you're thinking about sound systems then, what are the categories that are available? BRENT: Okay. The big one I think for most people nowadays is a wireless speaker, and that can be a Bluetooth speaker, it can be anything from the little things you buy for $20 up to about $1,500. But usually they're small and they're portable and they're waterproof to some degree, and you hook them up to your phone and you play whatever, and some of them sound great, some of them don't. The next step up from there is going to be probably a pair of stereo speakers, which could be what we call computer speakers that you put on your desktop or maybe on a bookshelf or something. And they're pretty small, but a lot of them sound really, really good. Then you go up to what we call bookshelf speakers, which is a bigger, probably want to put them on a stand or something because a lot of them are big, and that's when you start to really get into serious high quality sound, and a lot of the bookshelf speakers for, we have a pair in there for 400 bucks. It's been a top pick for probably five years and oh, they sound so good. They're just really, really, you'd have to really spend a lot of money to beat them. CHRISTINE: And these bookcase speakers and the computer speakers, these are generally ones that are wired, right? You're going to plug them in, they'll have a wire coming out of them, or are there ones like that that are also portable and you can move them around without being plugged in? BRENT: Yeah, there were usually wired. You plug them into the wall, you Bluetooth into them, you WiFi into them. Some of them you can hook up a record player, some of them you can hook your TV to them, all sorts of stuff. CAIRA:: What is the difference, in your opinion, between a great Bluetooth speaker and a bad one? BRENT: The fundamental thing is you put it on with Tracy Chapman Fast car and it sounds good. So it's the voice clarity, and a lot of them, they don't have that. Between you and the speaker is a lot of plastic grills sometimes, and sometimes that rattles and there's a lot of electronics. All of these have digital sound processing inside them and they can make bad decisions when tuning that, they can make good decisions. And so it's just how natural it sounds. But then as you get into a lot of the really tiny ones, you've probably heard, they don't have any bass. So there's a tune by Audrey Nuna called Damned Right, that starts with bo bo bo bo, bo bo bo bo, and you play that on those little Bluetooth speakers and it's like the tune hasn't started. You're like, what happened to the tune? Because you cannot hear that bass. It just filters it out because it knows it can't do it. CAIRA: Right. So when you're playing a song and you're like, I feel like the song started five seconds ago, but I'm not hearing anything, it's probably your speaker. BRENT: Yes. So with a lot of these things, they just can't do it. And there's one of our top picks called the JBL Go4, it's maybe 40 or $50. It's the size of, if anybody remembers cigarette packs, it's a thick cigarette pack, but they come in cute colors. You could probably throw it across the room and it wouldn't break and you could dunk it in a meter of water and it won't break. And it actually sounds - classical jazz, I put on my jazz stuff in the morning and it sounds good. I listen to it all the time, and a lot of Wirecutter staffers have bought that same speaker and love it. But then you get into the bigger ones and I think we have $100 pick. It's got the Fender logo on it, the people that make the guitars and the guitar amps. It's actually made by a German company called Teufel, and it sounds really good. It's actually got some bass. You can play hip hop stuff on it or something and it's not going to shake your floor, but you won't feel like you're missing the music and it sounds really clean. CHRISTINE: I think that most people just use one Bluetooth speaker at a time. But you told us something when we were preparing for this episode that surprised and delighted me that you can actually pair Bluetooth speakers, which I later that day told my husband. And we did it. We did it with our budget pick from Tribit and it was great. Tell us more, how do you know if you can pair Bluetooth speakers? BRENT: Almost all of the ones made in the last four or five years can be paired. That's if you have the same speaker from the same company, there's usually a button on it that allows you to pair it and you have to look in the manual. They all pair a little differently. Some of them you have to go into an app to pair it. You compare them for stereo, so you get a bigger sound. Some of them, you compare them in mono, so they both have the same sound, so you can put one in another room. I like to have sound on my back patio and sound in my kitchen, which is right next to my back patio. CHRISTINE: And for stereo sound, what would be the difference in what I would hear if I paired these speakers in stereo versus mono? BRENT: So stereos came out in the late fifties, and you have a separate left speaker and a right speaker, and so the music producers will pan some of the sounds to the left and some of the sounds to the right. Usually the vocals will be in the middle and you might put the guitar a little to the left, and if you have a drum kit, you might spread it from left to right so it sounds more like a drum, a full set of drums in front of you rather than just a bunch of drums crammed into one little tiny space. So it sounds more like an actual band on stage. And mono, everything comes out of one speaker, and so it's the same, even if you have two speakers paired, it's the same in mono, it's the same sound coming out of both speakers and it's not like you're going to suddenly hate whatever band you like because they're in mono. But if you want a big, more exciting, more spacious sounds, you're going to want stereo. And that's one thing that one Bluetooth speaker can't give you. So you pair the two in stereo and you put them six feet apart and you put yourself in between the two so you're getting an equal balance of the two, and then you get this big enveloping sound. If you're in the right place, it sounds like there's a band in the room. CAIRA: We've covered a solid Bluetooth speaker situation. What happens if you want to graduate beyond that? What do you suggest is the next step up? BRENT: The computer speakers that we have, they range from little things that you might just plug into your laptop to get louder sound out of your laptop, to things that you would actually use first low-end music production. So a little bit more serious of a speaker, but usually those will have amplifiers, well, I think they all have amplifiers built in, all the ones that we pick now. And so you plug them into your computer, Bluetooth into them from your phone. Some of them you can hook up a record player. Those will have usually a separate woofer for the bass and then a tweeter for the high frequencies. So they'll sound clearer in the cymbals and acoustic guitars and voices will sound clearer, but then those low frequency boom, boom, boom, things will start to sound a lot fuller and more satisfying. And those of us who do brand concealed audio tests have a saying, "bass wins". If your product has more bass, it's probably going to win. If your product's bass-deficient, it's probably going to lose. ROSIE: Why is that? BRENT: People like bass. CAIRA: It's fun. BRENT: To a point, I don't like it when I'm hearing a lot of bass from my neighbors or when I hear one car going down the road with loud bass. But people like bass because it's visceral, gets you moving a little bit. Nobody dances to a violin, I guess you could, technically. The bass is what gives you the pulse and the rhythm of the tune. So if you don't have any bass, you are missing a big giant chunk of the tune. CAIRA: So we've talked about the basic Bluetooth and now we've talked about a little bit more complicated speakers. Are wired speakers the next step up, the classic two speaker system, and if so, why would somebody choose to do that to themselves? BRENT: It will sound better. As they say, you will hear what the artist intended because every record that you've heard was mixed on two stereo speakers like that. And they can be wireless in terms of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. They all plug into the wall. In most cases, you'll have a wire connecting the two speakers. You may have an amplifier for them. There's all sorts of different configurations, but generally speaking, that is going to be the best sound and it's going to be what the artist intended for average use. You can buy our bookshelf speaker picks. So we have a Polk in there, I think it's 230 a pair. They sound really, really, really good. CAIRA: I want to talk about the amps a little bit more because it's a word that just keeps popping up and a lot of people may not really know what an amp is or what it does. Can you just explain what stereo amps are, what they do, and why people will probably need one for a two speaker system? BRENT: Basically what an amplifier does is the signal that comes out of your Bluetooth from your phone or maybe your record player or maybe you have a CD player, those are coming back, any of those signals, it's really low voltage. It's a volt or something. It's not much. It's really weak and it's enough maybe to drive a set of headphones, but it's not enough to push speakers back and forth. You got a big cone, you got to move back and forth, and you got to move a lot of air, as they say. So the amplifier just basically boosts that signal that comes out of whatever your source is, your record player or your phone or whatever. And so it boosts it to the point where it can drive a set of speakers. But with normal speakers, like those Polks I talked about, any amp will drive those. You can buy a 20 $30 amp off of Amazon and it will drive those and actually sound okay. CHRISTINE: Okay. Brent, I just want to pause for a moment because we've talked about a lot of different types of speakers and it would just help me, personally, to be able to run through the options. So if you are wanting to just dip your toes into getting a basic sound system, the most affordable and accessible option would be to start at a Bluetooth speaker. You could get one, you could get two if you want to pair them and do stereo sound. Next go for two speakers. BRENT: Right. CHRISTINE: And you have a couple of options there. You could go with small computer speakers, which have a built-in amp, so you don't have to buy an extra amp. They're pretty affordable. They sound pretty good. If you want to go up from there, you would get bigger bookshelf speakers and some of those have an amp built in and some you have to buy a separate amp, right? BRENT: Yeah, if you're more of a serious music listener, I would definitely go with the two speakers, absolutely positively. But any of the two speaker options is going to be good for you. CAIRA: We are going to take a quick break and then when we come back we'll talk about the most common mistakes people make with their audio equipment. Be right back. CHRISTINE: Welcome back. This episode we're talking all about speakers and the things you can do to upgrade the audio equipment in your home. So Brent, you mentioned earlier we were talking about how you can really jump up in quality of sound when you get to speakers, especially if you're getting these wired speakers, maybe they're either computer speakers or bookshelf speakers, these larger ones. I am personally intimidated by shopping for speakers. My brain shuts off a little bit, but I am curious, we talked a little bit about price before, but what do you think people should expect to pay to get something good in the category of wired speakers? BRENT: Okay, those Polk ones. CHRISTINE: The Polk ones you mentioned earlier, BRENT: Those are 230 a pair and then you'll need an amp, but almost any amp will work. We have a budget pick though, from a company called Micca, I think those are about a hundred a pair. And I was just using them the other day with the Wim amplifier and I'm just like, oh, these things sound really good. I was listening to one of my own recordings, too, so I know what it's supposed to sound like and they're shockingly good. So you can do that if you want. I think the Polks are a better place to start. They're going to have more bass, but I would recommend going up to 2 or 300 for your amp and then you're up to 500 bucks. CHRISTINE: That seems reasonable. CHRISTINE: Brent, where does something like Sonos fit into this world of speakers? Is it a computer speaker? Is it something else entirely? BRENT: It's something else entirely. They have the whole category of Wi-Fi speakers to themselves. Lots of other speakers can do that, but they are the ones who really pioneered it. What the Wi-Fi does for you is you can stream music into lots of different rooms of a house. You could put different Sono speakers in different parts of your house and they all synchronize, so they all sound good, and the Sono speakers themselves are actually, by and large, really good speakers. CHRISTINE: Everyone I know who has a Sonos in the last couple of years has done nothing but complain about their Sonos. They like the sound of it, but the app seems to be pretty glitchy. There seems to have been some quality control issues over the last year or so. What are some other options in this category? Do you have to go with Sonos or if you want this wireless experience where you can have the speakers all over the house, they're all connected, maybe you have one that you can take outside. Is there another option out there besides Sonos? BRENT: Absolutely. There's Apple Airplay 2, which lets you do more or less the same thing. There's Google Chromecast, which lets you do more or less the same thing. Apple Airplay 2 and Google Chromecast are available in a wide variety of speakers from different brands, which Sonos is not. The Amazon Alexa speakers can do the multi-room thing, too. You can go buy those things for 40 bucks a pop or something like that, 50 bucks a pop, and you can sprinkle six of them around your house for almost nothing, and they'll all talk to each other and their app is pretty easy to use. ROSIE: And so for these streamers, Sonos, even Alexa, I apologize for anyone listening on a speaker. BRENT: Oh no. ROSIE: Are you going to get the option of listening to music in mono and in stereo for all of those? BRENT: Yes. So you can pair those so you can say, okay, I want one in my bedroom and one in my kitchen or whatever. Or you can say, I want two in my bedroom so I can sit in my bed and listen to stereo and just one in the kitchen. And you can actually configure them all within the apps. Apple has their own thing and different companies like say JBL or a Bowers and Wilkins or somebody will have their own app that lets you configure everything. ROSIE: So Brent, these two terms, Bluetooth speakers and wireless speakers, talk about the differences and what do we actually mean? BRENT: So Bluetooth is a wireless technology. I think we've all Bluetoothed our phone into our earbuds or into our car or something, and you don't have a wire connecting them. There are other wireless technologies like Wi-Fi based technologies, like Sonos, where the audio device is streaming wirelessly from your home network or maybe from your phone or your iPad or your whatever. People also sometimes talk about wireless speakers as speakers that don't have any wires attached to them at all. A stereo pair of speakers probably has a wire connecting them so they can talk to each other. And then they have probably a wire somewhere that plugs them into the wall for power. So the only thing that's purely wireless is a portable Bluetooth speaker. There are no wires. And then once you go beyond that, you're going to be running into wires. Sorry. ROSIE: All Bluetooth is wireless, but not all wireless is referring to Bluetooth. Fair? BRENT: Correct. ROSIE: What are the functional differences between connectivity via Bluetooth versus connectivity via Wi-Fi? BRENT: Wi-Fi requires an app, Bluetooth does not. So Wi-Fi is going to be more complicated, although usually it's not that bad. ROSIE: But more finicky. CHRISTINE: And if your network goes down, you can't use it. BRENT: Yeah. ROSIE: I'm curious, what is the most common mistake you see people making with their audio equipment, in general? BRENT: They don't pay attention to where they put the speakers. There's two things you got to worry about with speakers. The first thing is the closer the speaker is to a wall or a desk or a floor, or especially in a corner, the more it's going to reinforce all of the sound, especially the bass. So when you push speakers up against the wall, there's going to be a lot more bass, and that might be good. It might be bad. Big speaker, if you go up against the wall, it's probably going to sound really boomy. With the little speaker, these little Bluetooth speakers, these little portables, they probably will sound better up against the wall. So you have that variable right there. So the more bass you want, move it closer to the wall. Also, with stereo, you need to have left and right to get it to work, and your head needs to be about the same distance from both speakers for it to work right. And I've seen a lot of people have stereos where they put the left speaker on top of the right speaker. Oh, ROSIE: Because it just looks so damned cool. BRENT: You really need to put the stereo speakers equidistant from your ears. And also a lot of people will put the stereo speakers, put one in the right place and they'll put one on a different wall, and that's going to sound not good. What we look for is what we call a center image. So if your head is the same distance between those two speakers, it's going to sound like there's a singer coming from between the speakers. We call that imaging. It's actually awesome once you hear it, but if you don't have your speakers placed right, you will not hear it. ROSIE: The bass and the treble knobs on, what am I meant to be doing with these? Because I noodle around with them based on the song and what I'm trying to get out of it, but I really don't think that, that is what I'm meant to be doing. BRENT: Okay. ROSIE: Help me. BRENT: Oh, boy. This is such a good, I mean, there's the classic example of you get in a rental car and you turn on the stereo and you find the bass and treble are both turned all the way up. That's a common mistake people make. Generally, you should start with the bass and treble controls centered, and that's usually going to be what we call flat response. In other words, you're not boosting anything, you're not cutting anything. It should sound the most natural. So I normally recommend that people just leave those centered all the time. However, if you have speakers that maybe don't have quite enough bass, you can boost the bass a little bit. If you boost the bass too much, it's probably going to distort, but you can boost the bass a little bit. Or maybe your speakers sound too boomy, you turn the bass down a little bit, or maybe they sound dull, as if someone's got a singing through a blanket. You can boost the treble a little bit. CHRISTINE: And that'll just make it sound almost sharper or something? BRENT: Something. Yeah, sharper. That's a good word. CAIRA: So my question is how do you turn the treble and the bass down on your neighbor's speakers when they're too loud? ROSIE: Is there any technology you're excited about? Any emerging stuff that you're intrigued by? BRENT: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. There's a new thing coming out called Oracast, and it's a subset of Bluetooth. So what Oracast lets you do is you can stream, normally with your phone, you can stream to one or maybe two Bluetooth speakers. With this, you can stream to an unlimited number as long as they're within range of what we call the host speaker. So you stream from your phone to the host speaker, then you can put 10, 50, 100. Theoretically, they can be of all different brands, so you don't have to match them, and also it works with headphones. CHRISTINE: So you could have, for my kids, for instance, I am always annoyed because they each have Bluetooth headphones and I want them to be able to listen to the same music. We have to connect a separate phone to each headphone, and that's annoying. CAIRA: So you want to pair their headphones. CHRISTINE: I'd love to be able to have them listen to the same songs on both of their headphones. BRENT: It's happening, and I have experimented with it some, but it's still going to be at a primitive stage for I think another year. But then more people will have it, and I think it's going to be in every hearing aid in another probably two years. All the wireless earbuds, it'll probably be in those in two years, three years. It's going to be in every Bluet ooth speaker in another probably two, three years. CHRISTINE: Okay, Brent. So sometimes we like to do a really quick paced lightning round at the end of our episodes to just get in those last questions. So I don't want you to overthink any of these, just say what comes to your mind. Indoor concert or outdoor music festival. BRENT: So hard, but I'm a jazz guy, so indoor. CHRISTINE: Subwoofer essential or overhyped? BRENT: Essential. If you are watching movies or you're into hip-hop, maybe heavy rock, EDM, stuff like that. CHRISTINE: Which sounds better. CD or vinyl? BRENT: Oh, you got to get me in so much trouble here. CD. I don't listen. I listen to vinyl sometimes because it's fun. But I listen to digital. I listen to MP3s a lot. CHRISTINE: Oh, I think this was a very controversial answer, but we'll take it. All right. The one speaker brand you wish more people knew about? BRENT: Micca, the one I talked about. I can't say they're all great, but that one that we have, oh God, it's so good. It's so cheap. CHRISTINE: Your desert island album? BRENT: The Yes album by the seventies progressive rock group, Yes. CAIRA: Before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question. What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved? BRENT: The Wirecutter top pick for screwdrivers. It is really fabulous. It has a whole bunch of bits built into it, so every weird screw that you might want to access, you can pull the bit out and it's really well-built, you can get a lot of torque and really get the screw in tight. And I'm building a new deck on my home right now, and this screwdriver is coming in very, very, very handy. ROSIE: Brent, thank you so much for joining us. This was really, really fun. BRENT: Well, thanks for having me on. CHRISTINE: Thanks, Brent. BRENT: It's been great. CHRISTINE: Speakers, Brent. So much information. CAIRA: He's so good. ROSIE: We love Brent. Wow. CHRISTINE: Wow. I feel like I was the one lagging in this conversation. ROSIE: No. CHRISTINE: You two were ahead with Brent and I was behind trying to pick up the pieces and figure out all the details because I'm not an audiophile. CAIRA: No, but you enjoy good music, good sound, and you got there. CHRISTINE: I do. I just want someone else to think about it for me. ROSIE: Well, I think Brent is that person. What did you take away? CHRISTINE: So I really love his tip about pairing Bluetooth speakers. That really blew my mind. So that was very cool, and I will continue to pair my Bluetooth speakers at home to create stereo sound, which now I understand what that means. CAIRA: That's so good. ROSIE: They go deep, I love that. For me, I am very grateful for the final explanation of the differences between connectivity via Bluetooth and via Wi-Fi, and why you might opt for a speaker system that could connect via Bluetooth, maybe over Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi, as we know, can be a little fiddly, and so Bluetooth, at least right now, is more reliable in that sense. So I loved that. I also loved that Brent had the final word on the song to listen to, to check whether your speakers are great. Tracy Chapman, Fast Car. CAIRA: Love it. ROSIE: That song truly can do anything. CAIRA: Yeah, I think my takeaway is that honestly, I got into stereo systems and speakers because of my dad. He really taught me what good sound can be, but I think that I relied a little bit too much on him to tell me what these things do. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to actually read the manuals for all of the devices that I have and see what I've been missing out on. CHRISTINE: Yeah, the whole world will open up probably. CAIRA: Yeah. ROSIE: Also good if you are looking to cure insomnia. CAIRA: Sure. Yeah. ROSIE: Well, if you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage, any of Brent's reporting, or if you want to check out the products we recommended today, check out our website or you can find a link in the show notes. That is it for us, Christine, Caira, my friends. See you next week. CHRISTINE: Bye. CAIRA: Bye. ROSIE: Peace. CHRISTINE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Episodes are mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher and general manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. Hosted by Caira Blackwell and Christine Cyr Clisset. Thanks for listening. BRENT: Nobody dances to a violin. I guess you could. Technically. I guess they did on the Titanic? In that movie? But that's all they had to work with. And look what happened to them.