Buying guides and reviews
Buying Guides
The best monocular for hiking is the Vortex Solo 10×25. It weighs 5.6 ounces, disappears into a shirt pocket, and its nitrogen-purged, o-ring-sealed body shrugs off rain. Most hike…
Buying Guides
Rangefinder binoculars combine three things in one optic: glass clear enough to identify an antler tine at first light, a laser that measures distance to game rather than to a fenc…
Buying Guides
The fastest way to ruin a drawer is to buy the wrong dovetail bit. Not the wrong brand, not the wrong quality, but the wrong number: a 1/2 inch bit cutting 1/2 inch drawer sides le…
Buying Guides
A benchtop thickness planer is the one tool that turns a shop from a hobby corner into a place where you actually flatten rough lumber. It is also, for most home shops, the heavies…
Buying Guides
The single loudest complaint in every woodworking forum I read for this roundup was not about airflow, horsepower, or filter media. It was that the fitting arrived and it did not f…
Buying Guides
Short answer: the Oneida Air Systems Dust Deputy DIY is the best cyclone separator for a garage workshop because it has the deepest field history of anything in this roundup, works…
Buying Guides
A microphone boom arm is a spring-loaded desk arm that clamps to your desk edge, suspends your microphone on a short pivot, and lets you move it silently into position and hold it…
Buying Guides
A pop filter is a screen that sits between your mouth and your microphone capsule to soften the bursts of air pressure created by hard consonants like P, B and T. Those bursts are…
Buying Guides
The best headphones for podcast monitoring are the Audio-Technica ATH-M50x. They are closed-back, wired, low-impedance at 38 ohm, and they carry the largest review base of any head…
Buying Guides
Most people shopping for the best mixers for podcast recording start by reading spec sheets. That is the slowest possible way to pick one. Two questions decide almost everything: h…