In this episode, hosts Darren and Duncan talk about how tastes in music can change for the audiophile, especially as gear changes bring about a more revealing character in a system. We're all about upgrading in this hobby, but what can you do when system upgrades ruin half of your music library for you? As always, listener questions and music recommendations round out the show.

Amid all of the busy work related to the proper care and feeding of a hifi stereo system, sometimes the last thing to be considered a sonic troublemaker is the quality of the recording itself. Is that sonic characteristic in the system, or is it in the music? In this episode of The Hifi Podcast, the guys go back and forth about the importance of recording and production quality in the hifi hobby.

Sometimes, you just want to chuck that new turntable down the basement stairs and forget about it for a year. We've all been there... well, mostly. Nearly everyone getting into the hifi audio hobby has found, met and overcome some gear frustration along the way, but what do you do when a piece of equipment is reeeally bothering you? How do decide when to call it quits with it is the topic of this podcast, as hosts Darren and Duncan offer a checklist of ideas for things to try first.

Is there any noise that is acceptable in an amplifier? If given a choice between a noisy input, noisy output section or noisy power supply, which would result in the most pleasing sound? In this episode of The Hifi Podcast, the guys dive right back into the topic of component noise, this time focusing more closely on amplifying devices.

Speaker designer and expert Chris Brunhaver stops by again for a chat, which this time focuses on driver and cabinet technological advances and what makes up the state of the art in speaker manufacturing at the moment. Before that, the guys answer a couple of listener questions and later on share about a bluegrass supergroup with a new album out.

Listening for the sake of listening (and not necessarily to music) isn't a new thing, and although the notion of going through a "Stereophile test disc phase" in your listening habits may be silly to some, this episode of The HiFi podcast aims to offer a different perspective. Also in this episode are crossover upgrade questions and a seriously jaw-dropping album of the week.

In a change of pace from the usual audio topics, Darren and Duncan turn the focus onto themselves this week and explain how each became an audiophile in a retrospective episode of The Hifi Podcast. Two listener questions about Chromecast audio are tackled, and the week's album recommendation gets back to newly released, expertly-recorded jazz.

If you've ever wondered what role the input and output impedances of your gear has in the scheme of things, wonder no more. In this week's episode, Darren and Duncan take a deep dive to understand the relationship between the ins and outs of our components and the connections between them. Also, questions about recordings and speaker cabinet walls are answered, and the guys go way back with the album recommendation of the week.

In this episode, hosts Darren and Duncan talk about the fact that too much resolution in a hifi stereo system can be distracting, that preference dictates where that line lies for each audiophile, and that intentionally dialing up the euphonic side of your stereo can be a good way to better connect emotionally with your music. This week's album rec is insane, as always.

As you spend more time with this hobby, you might notice that most of things we do to improve our hifi systems are related to noise. Vibration isolation, microphonics reduction, EMI rejection, static charge avoidance, quantization filtering, intermodulated hiss rejection, crosstalk reduction, harmonics shaping and more come to mind. This episode of The Hifi Podcast is dedicated to the chief antagonist in the playback equation: noise in all its hideous forms.