Having a bank account with plenty of zeroes does not mean every listening room needs six figures of loudspeakers, amplification, and source components. Room size, system matching, and how you actually listen should still determine where the spending stops. But if the budget really is secondary, finding the best state-of-the-art audiophile gear of 2026 shows just how far manufacturers are willing to push performance when cost is no object.

That pursuit can take very different forms. Some listeners will spend heavily on reference headphones and headphone amplifiers, while others will build systems around statement loudspeakers, turntables, digital sources, DACs, and amplification designed to extract every last ounce of information from a recording. The best examples are not expensive simply for the sake of being expensive; they represent years, and sometimes decades, of engineering, refinement, and very deliberate choices about how music should sound in a serious listening space.

Our cost-no-object audiophile gift guide focuses on products that deserve to be heard before anyone dismisses their price tags as high-end audio lunacy. You may never buy any of them, but a proper demonstration can be instructive, occasionally humbling, and dangerous to both your expectations and your retirement account.

Bowers & Wilkins 801 D5

The 801 D5 reference tower loudspeakers are the latest and most advanced version of the iconic Bowers & Wilkins 801, which have been the preferred speaker of Abbey Road Studios since 1988, because of their precision and accuracy. Available now in Light or Dark Walnut, Black or White finishes.

$65,000/pair at Bowers & Wilkins

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MartinLogan Neolith

Combining massive physical scale with lightning-fast transient response, the MartinLogan Neolith stands near the absolute summit of modern loudspeaker design. Its balance of micro-detail resolution, electrostatic transparency, and effortless dynamic slam produces an expansive, three-dimensional soundstage that simply must be experienced to be believed.

$59,999/each at MartinLogan

Kaleidescape Connoisseur System

Escape beyond cinema with Kaleidescape Strato K and Terra Prime 120TB. Strato K is the world’s highest-fidelity movie player, providing access to Kaleidescape’s exclusive 4K Cinematic™ format. Terra Prime 120TB movie server stores up to 2,000 4K movies and unlocks the full Kaleidescape experience. Available from Kaleidescape dealers at $39,990 US MSRP.

Learn more at kaleidescape.com

Focal Scala Utopia Evo M

An exceptional 3-way floorstanding loudspeaker designed and manufactured in France. It unites innovative drive units, state-of-the-art audio technologies and an iconic, sculptural design, delivering sound reproduction with remarkable precision and expression for a truly unique musical experience. Engineered for high-end audio systems, it is conceived for the most dedicated high-fidelity enthusiasts.

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$50,000/pair at House of Stereo

Paradigm Persona 9H

Completely designed, engineered, and crafted in Canada, the flagship Persona 9H unleashes the full, untamed power of Paradigm engineering. This 6-driver, 3.5-way hybrid floorstander packs 1,400 watts RMS of DSP-controlled amplification to drive its active bass architecture. Encased in an intricately braced, vibration-canceling cabinet, it delivers surgical precision with effortless dynamics and total acoustic authority.

$19,999/each at Paradigm

MartinLogan Depth 215

The ultimate expression of MartinLogan bass, the Depth 215 delivers pure low-end dominance. Dual 15-inch Carbon Aerocore woofers in a force-canceling setup eliminate cabinet vibration, while a 64-bit Vojtko DSP engine ensures surgical accuracy. Bone-rattlingly deep and distortion-free, it anchors high-end two-channel setups and elite home theaters alike.

$6,999 at MartinLogan

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Marantz 10 Series

Unlock the pinnacle of music performances with the top-of-the-line Marantz 10 Series hi-fi components consisting of the Model 10 Integrated Amplifier, SACD 10 Disc Player, and LINK 10n Streaming Preamplifier.

Bartolotta T10 Bespoke

One-of-a-kind in-ear computers combine the craftsmanship of two artisans, Bear Clark and Phil Bartolotta. The charging case pendant features a soft-brushed 925 sterling silver metal frame with a 14k gold inlay border, while the buds deliver astonishing musical playback and functionality.

$22,012.50 at T10 Bespoke

Need more gift giving ideas?

Disclosure: The products listed above are approved by our Editors, but may be requested by our sponsors. When links to buy are provided, we’ll direct you to the lowest price at time of publication. In doing so, eCoustics may earn a small commission from the associated retailer if purchased.

AI and ml

The cost of memory makes this an expensive ML meal

Apple on Tuesday heralded the imminent refresh of its headless Mac kit with new versions of the Mac Studio and the Mac mini that you can pre-order now for shipping on September 22, 2026. The diminutive desktops promise a high level of local AI performance with memory prices to match. 

“[T]he new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, in a statement, citing the integration of Apple’s Neural Accelerators into processor GPUs and the utility of high-bandwidth unified memory to justify the assessment.

The Mac Studio became Apple’s high-performance standard bearer following the retirement of the Mac Pro in March.

With the “most powerful” slot taken, the Mac mini has been dubbed “our most versatile Mac,” as Srouji put it, highlighting the machine’s recently discovered role as “an always-on agentic device.” 

Earlier this year, the excitement around OpenClaw and open weight AI models led to a run on Mac mini hardware as AI aficionados found Apple’s compact desktop made a comfortable home for AI agents and local inference.

The Mac mini has unified memory – the CPU and GPU share the same RAM – making a Mac with ample unified memory (eg, 64 GB) well suited to GPU inference compared to a PC with 64 GB system RAM but only 16 GB GPU VRAM.

What’s more, Apple silicon hardware supports the company’s MLX machine learning framework, which provides respectable private inference performance on hardware that draws far less power than a desktop GPU workstation.

You have less power, but more money for memory. As outgoing CEO Tim Cook admitted in June, memory prices have been rising due to AI demand, and those costs are being passed on to customers.

The Mac Studio comes with two flavors of chip, M5 Max ($2,499) and M5 Ultra ($5,499).

The M5 Ultra, with up to 36 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU cores, is an inference beast, supporting up to 512 GB of high-bandwidth unified memory with 1.2 TB/s of unified memory bandwidth. 

That memory configuration isn’t available until October, but the existing 256 GB memory option for an extra $4,000 should give you a sense of how pricey a maxed-out Mac Studio will be ($18,299 for 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD).

The Mac mini can be had with an M6 chip ($899) or an M5 Pro chip ($1,699), but the base model has just 16 GB of shared memory and it costs a whopping $400 to step up to 32 GB. The M6 is the first Apple silicon to use a 2 nm process. It’s a 12-core processor, which Apple notes is “two more cores than before.” 

“Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency,” Sri Santhanam, VP of Apple’s silicon engineering group, said in a statement.

The M5 Pro offers more in the way of memory and memory bandwidth, making it a better choice for data-intensive development applications. The M6 supports up to 32 GB of memory and up to 170 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M5 Pro supports up to 64 GB of unified memory and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The Mac mini comes with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, two USB-C ports that support USB 3, and a headphone jack. Its rear gunport comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports for M6 and three Thunderbolt 5 ports for M5 Pro, not to mention HDMI and Ethernet (2.5 Gb or 10 Gb). Thunderbolt 5 allows for clustering, so multiple Mac minis can be connected together to run large AI models on-device.

The Mac Studio also does Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 5, with support for PCIe expansion chassis.

All of Apple’s incoming hardware comes with macOS 27, which is expected to debut in mid-September. ®

Apple’s iCloud Private Relay is back to private status, after an apparent fix in iOS 26.6.1 patched the vulnerability that would expose a person’s IP address even when the feature was enabled.

iCloud Private Relay is a paid feature available only to those with an iCloud Plus subscription. When it’s active, it routes web traffic through proxy servers to mask your physical location and web traffic. It’s specific to Apple’s Safari web browser and apps that use Apple’s WebKit framework, and is not the same as a VPN, which hides all internet traffic.

Earlier in August, developers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk noticed that Apple devices with iCloud Private Relay enabled could still leak their IP addresses in three circumstances. The developers set up a web page at leaks.psylo.app where you could check whether you’re vulnerable.

On Tuesday, Mysk posted on X that Apple’s iOS 26.2.1 release (and the 26.2.1 releases of Apple’s other operating systems) is where the fix appeared, even though it’s not noted in Apple’s security release notes. Now, if you go to that leaks page, it reports the masked IP address, not the actual address, of the device you’re running. You need to have iCloud Private Relay on in Settings > iCloud.

Mysk also noted in a reply on X that, “It’s near to impossible Apple would have addressed this issue so quickly had we reported it to Apple first. As expected, they only fixed it for Safari.”

An Apple representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Soon after its existence was revealed, the iCloud Private Relay vulnerability prompted a lawsuit by Clarkson Law Firm, the same outfit that negotiated a $250 million settlement with Apple over how the company advertised its Apple Intelligence features at launch. The firm has also recently sued smart ring maker Oura.

A Clarkson Law Firm representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jeff Carlson

Senior Writer

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Jeff Carlson writes about mobile technology at CNET, from cellular phone plans to devices and emerging technology.

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Current owners of the popular RPG will get the upgrade for free.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Unlock a world of knowledge with a Headway Premium subscription. This exclusive deal gives you unlimited access to Headway’s massive library of 1500+ book summaries, with 30-50 new ones added monthly. Cover any topic you can imagine, from personal development and business strategies to health and wellness. It’s usually on sale for $60 for new users only, but for a very limited time you can get it for $50.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

from the only-white-people-deemed-to-do-it-the-right-way dept

Many Trump supporters keep insisting that his immigration purges are justified because the people swept up in them came here “illegally,” so who cares if they get kicked out (or shipped off to some random war-torn country). When asked what people seeking asylum should do, the answer is often “do it the legal way.” That the US government has spent years making “the legal way” harder and harder — and, as we’re about to see, has now started punishing the people who actually took it — never seems to enter the conversation. But here we have a really clear example of people doing it “the legal way, as instructed by Trump himself” who are about to get kicked out of the US.

The AP is reporting that the administration is about to pull out on the order of 200,000 visas from those who came to the US legally under B1 or B2 visas, and then sought asylum, just as Trump said they should. This would be the largest mass revocation of visas in US history.

The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.

Unless challenged or revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders have sought asylum or are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.

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Go back to 2018, when the first Trump administration proclaimed that anyone crossing the southern border anywhere other than an official port of entry would be ineligible for asylum. The whole framing was that there was a legal way to seek asylum and an illegal way, and only the legal way was going to count. In remarks about this executive order, Trump said that those who wished to seek asylum would have to “lawfully present themselves at a port of entry,” at which point they could seek asylum.

Under this plan, the illegal aliens will no longer get a free pass into our country by lodging meritless claims in seeking asylum. Instead, migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry. So they’re going to have to lawfully present themselves at a port of entry.

A few months later, in his State of the Union, he claimed he wanted immigrants to enter the country legally (in large numbers!):

“I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally,” he declared…

Note that these are two separate demands: show up at a port of entry rather than sneaking across, and get into the country through legal channels in the first place. The people about to lose their visas satisfied both, and then some. They applied for a visa, got vetted and approved by the State Department, walked in through the front door, and filed an asylum claim through the official process. If there’s a more “legal way” available, nobody has described it.

That demand, that people come “legally” and then make their asylum claims at a port of entry (though the courts later deemed this “asylum only counts at port of entry” to be wildly against the law) still resulted in a ton of people getting legal visas to the US, and then seeking asylum when they entered.

It now appears that (unsurprisingly) the Trump administration was full of shit when they claimed they wanted asylum seekers to “come the legal way.”

There was nothing in what Trump said initially that said they had to get other types of visas to seek asylum. It just said “get here legally and then make your case.” Which is exactly what all of these people did, and Trump and Marco Rubio are about to pull their visas, even though they literally did things “the legal way” that Trump himself had encouraged.

While this won’t necessarily mean immediate deportations, it will likely mean that people with live, pending asylum claims lose their lawful status while those claims are still being adjudicated — which is precisely how you end up removable. And with bands of roving ICE thugs looking for anyone without legal status to deport, you know these people are likely to be added to the target list.

So once again, doing things “the legal way” turns out to protect you from exactly nothing. Follow the instructions the president himself gave you and on the visa the State Department itself issued you, file the paperwork the process demands, and the reward is having that visa pulled while your claim is still pending. What good is doing things “the legal way” when, with the stroke of a pen, Trump and Rubio will make that “legal way” illegal?

The New Colossus poem on the Statue of Liberty reads:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

To which the Trump administration responds: “get the fuck out of here.”

Filed Under: asylum, deportation, donald trump, immigration, marco rubio, trump administratin, visa revocation, visas

Metro Exodus spent much of its time proving this series could survive outside the Moscow Metro. Artyom was always a dreamer and hoped for a better world for the people of the Metro. And despite everything, hope seemed to prevail if you made the right choices in Exodus.

So why is Metro 2039 drawing me back in? It’s not just the name and the setting that’s worth its weight in gold, no. It’s the fact that it takes the bleak world of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro series and takes us deeper into darkness. 4A Games dropped a new Renegade gameplay trailer during Gamescom Opening Night Live, this time putting the new protagonist, The Stranger, in the spotlight once again.

We see him moving through the independent Sevastopolskaya station, where he explored the irradiated Moscow and fought mutants and humans alike. But the latest travel shows us brutality firsthand, reminding us that Artyom is gone. Thinking about the DNA the original Metro 2033 game shared with GSC Game World’s Stalker, this is exactly how I want my Metro.

The tunnels have learned a few tricks from Exodus

The big new location, Sevastopolskaya, was seen again in the new Renegade trailer. 4A describes it as an independent station being slowly destabilized from inside by propaganda and alcohol while Novoreich-backed Raiders put pressure on it from outside. The Stranger visits while chasing information connected to his mysterious target.

Aside from just looking pretty, the entire game feels more interactive, and by that extension, more immersive. Something small like the breaching tool that was used by the Stranger adds to new gameplay mechanics. Similarly, a new UV light can expose hidden mutants, repel flying Insectalis, and uncover codes used in environmental puzzles.

While I loved wandering through sprawling large environments in Exodus, Metro 2039 appears to be bringing that curiosity back into tighter spaces. The new Shatun pneumatic rifle looks appropriately Metro too. Its power depends on keeping the weapon pumped, giving you another mechanical thing to worry about while something horrible is trying to eat you.

Something strange is still lurking down there

Everything about the trailer that caught my eye was related to The Stranger. He wears Spartan armor, yet 4A describes him as a traumatized man focused almost entirely on his own mission rather than saving everyone suffering under Hunter’s Novoreich regime. One line summarizes him rather efficiently:

The Spartans were wolves in helmets. But I’m something worse.

Then comes the part that really has me curious. As Hunter’s propaganda repeats its call that the enemy must be destroyed, the voices of the Dark Ones join him. The trailer stops short of explaining what that means, leaving another supernatural thread hanging over The Stranger’s violent waking nightmares. Unlike before, the Dark Ones don’t look like they are just mysterious; they seem outright hostile.

I was already impressed by how much stranger and more eldritch its post-apocalyptic setting had become. This trailer makes the gameplay side equally promising. Metro 2039 launches in February 2027 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Steam, Epic Games Store, and Xbox on PC. An exact date hasn’t been announced.