Jean-Benoit Buisson

How I got here

This site began with a question that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with how music gear is sold: what else do I have to buy before this thing makes a sound? Every page I found while looking for an answer had the same shape — a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure I could check. None of them said which socket the headphones fit, whether the pedal was in the box, how many inputs record at the same time, or why a brand-new condenser microphone sits there in silence until somebody presses a button marked 48 V.

That silence is the whole subject. The equipment in this category almost never fails; it waits for a cable, a driver, a switch or a power supply that nobody mentioned. A guitar arrives playable but unset. A keyboard arrives without the adapter it runs on. An interface works perfectly and sounds late, because the driver it shipped with was never the one it needed. None of that is on a specification sheet, and all of it decides whether an instrument is still being played in eighteen months or is under a bed.

So this is the page I wanted and could not find. I read what manufacturers publish, I check every product reference market by market, I follow what things actually cost rather than what they are listed at, and I say plainly when a figure is not published at all. That last part matters more than it sounds: most of the disappointment here comes from a number nobody printed.

I keep notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which consumable fits which instrument, and the buying mistake each category invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I do not have a studio, and I do not pretend to. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, and tell you which figure the maker left out.

What this site covers

Everything listed here is taken from the catalogue of this site, and each entry links to its own page. When the catalogue changes, this list changes with it. It is a list of what is covered — not a list of what I own.

• Alesis Recital Play
• Casio CDP-S110
• Roland FP-10
• Yamaha ARIUS YDP-105
• KabelDirekt 6.3 mm Instrument Cable 3 m
• UGREEN XLR Cable 3 m

What I care about

Three things, and they shape every page here. The number that gets quoted is usually the wrong one — a keyboard sold on its voice count rather than on whether its keys are weighted, an amp sold on watts rather than on whether it has a headphone output worth using, an interface sold on sample rate rather than on how many inputs record at once. What is missing from the box decides more than what is in it — the power supply, the sustain pedal, the cable, the adapter, the setup a factory guitar has not had. And the thing that matters most is rarely on the specification sheet at all: whether the instrument can be played in the room and at the hour you actually have.

What I am not

I am not a teacher, a session player, a producer or a sound engineer. I hold no qualification in music, I have never worked in a studio, for an instrument maker or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on how well I play. Nothing on this site is a lesson, and nothing on it is advice about your hearing: where a manufacturer publishes a figure in decibels or an impedance in ohms, this site reports it and stops there. If you are looking for someone whose authority comes from a job title, this is not that site — what each judgement rests on is stated on the page it appears on, and you can read how this site reaches a verdict in full.

How I work

• Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a standard, or the weight of long-term owner reports.
• No price, product reference or specification is ever invented. Where a figure is missing, the field is left empty and the gap is stated on the page.
• Product references are verified against Amazon before publication, per market. Where a model is not sold in your country, you are sent to a local search rather than to a page that does not exist.
• Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is a €6 adapter, a different cable or an hour of setup rather than a new instrument, it says that instead.

Why this site exists

Because this equipment is sold on the wrong numbers. A keyboard is advertised on how many voices it holds rather than on whether its keys are weighted and whether the power supply is in the box. A guitar pack is sold on everything around the guitar. An amp is sold on watts, when what decides whether it gets played after nine in the evening is a headphone socket. And the parts that are treated as afterthoughts — the cable, the adapter, the strings, the stand — are usually the actual fix.

There is also a part of this that is not about buying anything. Most people who stop playing do not stop because the instrument was wrong; they stop because a chain of small obstacles nobody warned them about made playing an errand — a lead that hums, a pedal that sustains backwards, a latency that makes it impossible to play in time, a kit that cannot be used because of the floor below. Those obstacles are cheap to fix and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of exciting gear is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and date the correction on the page. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · Montrollet, France