Table of contents for April 2016 in Maximum PC

IT SEEMS AS THOUGH every company under the sun makes headphones now. Ever since the rise of Beats headphones— which carry a terrible reputation with people who care about audio quality— the industry has gone headphone-crazy. Companies that you’d think would never get into the audio market are making headphones. The same is true now of gaming headsets. There is an overwhelming number of gaming headsets to choose from. Some are garbage, while others are pretty decent. As you may have guessed, most are made with third-rate components on the cheap. Recently, gamers have begun using normal audio headphones for gaming, paired with a mic. For people like me who enjoy listening to their favorite tunes through headphones but also dabble with some gaming, I find that the best approach…

MICROSOFT RECENTLY ANNOUNCED that Windows 10 is now running on over 200 million devices. For those who think that figure is inflated by counting users who upgraded to Windows 10 and then rolled back to a previous version, that isn’t the case. In no uncertain terms, Microsoft says, “There are more than 200 million monthly active devices around the world running Windows 10,” with the key phrase being “monthly active.” One could argue that a monthly active count is a snapshot that could still be thrown off by downgrades that wouldn’t be factored in until the next month, but those would be offset by upgrades (at least partially). The point is, Windows 10 is gaining ground without any number-counting shenanigans. And to drive the point home, Microsoft says that engagement…

AMD is giving the bird to 16nm and going straight for a 14nm FinFET process with GlobalFoundaries. This is going to be quite a year for graphics geeks. It’s maybe 12 months later than we might have hoped, but the big die-shrink showdown is about to drop, and both the red and green sides of the great graphics divide are ready and waiting with new GPU technologies to help fire pixels down our eye tubes. AMD got everyone’s geek glands swelling with the announcement of its new Polaris architecture at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The reason it’s so exciting is that AMD has finally got the smaller production process it desperately needed to compete with the architectural efficiency gains that Nvidia’s Maxwell GPUs produced. Nvidia preempted…

TWO OTHER IMPORTANT factors to take note of when looking at headphones are impedance—also known by the figure Z, and measured in ohms—and the signal-to-noise ratio, measured in dB. By and large, impedance is the amount of electrical current necessary to operate your particular headphones. Portable music players, mobile phones, and devices functioning on chemical batteries tend to only operate headphones with an impedance of less than 32ohms. Although you can plug a pair of 300ohm headphones into one of these devices, the headphones themselves would sound incredibly quiet compared to the volume they are capable of producing. Generally speaking, higher impedance headphones are, more often than not, found in music studios and hooked up to a DJ’s turntables, because thanks to that higher impedance, they can use more sophisticated…

SOUND IS A LOT more complex, mysterious, and cooler than vision. There, it’s been said! One unassuming conical speaker can conjure up practically any sound, from a human voice to a 100-piece orchestra, and additional speakers can induce an auditory hologram of a 3D space. But the truly devious thing is that what actually happens when a speaker is operating is actually diabolically simple. INS AND OUTS OF SOUND The speaker vibrates, moving only forward and backward, compelled to do so by an electrical current applied to it. The voltage of the electrical signal travels above zero, pulling the speaker cone one way, and then back below zero, pushing it the other way. The exact pattern of those inout movements over time determines the sound that we hear. A pattern…

COMFORT IS SOMETHING Kingston truly understands—the Cloud IIs are incredibly soft on the old noggin. The closed back design helps isolate you from the rest of the world, and overall they’re very lightweight. Long gaming periods are a breeze. Under the Denon, the Cloud IIs were considerably bassier than our other headsets. The rumble when the bass kicked in was immense, yet it did this without affecting the mids at all. Depth in the overall soundscape was shallower than some of the more premium solutions, but still well rounded enough for everyday listening. In game, the Cloud IIs were crisp and punchy—the added bass signature ensured you felt the explosions in Call of Duty, and the roar of the engines as they fired into life in Project Cars. The Creative…

THE G933S REALLY are something else. They’re huge—gigantic, in fact. They are comfortable, certainly, but by god, are they big! We simply can’t stress that enough. On top of that, they are a little too flexible for our liking. Thanks to that rather skinny headband, and an overall plastic construction, the fear of accidentally snapping these is all too real. As far as sound quality goes, well this is a tricky one. Plugged in via a 3.5mm jack only, and ensuring the headset is switched off (turning the headset on enables an audio equalizer inside the drivers), brings us in line with exactly what we would expect a gaming headset with these kind of specs to sound like. With the Denon, the G933s were incredibly bass-heavy, more so than with…

THESE ARE, BY FAR, the most striking pair of headphones in this test. Depending on your taste, they’re either classy or just not for you. They garnered a lot of talk around the office as they’re quite large, and with that bright white color scheme, you certainly do grab a lot of attention. There’s very little adjustment available, bar shortening and lengthening—the cups themselves move very little. Because of this, we found them a bit uncomfortable, but as we don't all have large heads, it might be different for you. Under the Denon, the PRO400s produced a crisp, gorgeous soundscape, filled with an overwhelmingly beautiful bass tone. There’s an urgency of warmth to the tracks as you listen to them. All in all, they’re incredibly well balanced, although we’d have…

SENNHEISER’S HD700S are a stunningly crafted, premium pair of open-backed headphones. The build quality is solid, the flexibility limited, but with enough leeway to fit them snugly around your ears. The open-air design adds a fantastic listening experience, giving your ears plenty of room to breathe, and giving music a clarity you usually only get from 2.1 speaker setups. With the Denon, the soundscape was exceptional, missing little of anything in the mids or treble. The bass was quite prominent but not in a bad way, avoiding rumble for the sake of tone, something more premium headphones seem to lean toward. It wasn’t as warm as some other audiophile headphones—possibly due to a small loss in the lower treble/bass—but for metal, rock, or indie, these cans resonated well. Overall, the…

Intel’s new sixth-gen Core processors represent a departure for the big blue chip-making machine in more ways than one. First of all, it decided to deliver both a tick and a tock in the space of a couple of months. It also figured that it would rather get the desktop chips out the factory door first, then follow them up later with a whole slew of mobile processors, rather than the other way around. Last summer saw Intel’s Broadwell desktop parts finally arrive—with more of a whimper than a bang, it has to be said—only to be followed shortly after by the debut silicon of its brand-new Skylake architecture, again on the desktop. Broadwell was the die-shrink tick, with Skylake being the processor designed to really make use of all…

If you read the music or film industry trade press, piracy is still rampant. “Why else would no one be buying music anymore?” they ask, as they thumb open Spotify on their phone. However, what of the pirate sites themselves? How easy is it to get a pirated game these days? Really rather easy. The big obstacles to piracy aren’t getting the product or getting past copy protection; most big PC games are cracked and uploaded pretty quickly still, and a quick Google normally throws up a few thousand hits. No, the obstacles are often technical; you have to jump through many hoops to install the title, which might leave your computer open to worms or viruses. Often, there’s a virus in a pirated file, just as a bonus—botnets don’t…

A professional photographer once told us that the best Lightroom tip was to maximize the screen area your photos take up (Shift-Tab), and use keyboard shortcuts to move around the app. And it’s true, it is a faster way to work. So hitting “G” takes you to the library grid view, “D” opens the selected photo in Develop, “R” takes you to Develop with a crop box already in place, “F” makes the selected photo fullscreen, and “L” dims the interface if it’s getting distracting. There’s more: F5 through F8 show and hide the various panels, and Ctrl-Alt-Numbers 1-7 take you to the modules. Ctrl-Alt-Up Arrow takes you back to the previous module, and Shift-F11 puts your secondary monitor into full-screen mode.…

IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT that you're the manager of a fine restaurant known as your PC, and for the sake of analogies, your storage subsystem is the kitchen area. If you're using a hard drive, it's like having an overworked short-order cook running the show, and to make matters worse, he has arthritis. You could add a second cook to help out (RAID 0), but he also has arthritis, and the diners are getting restless. Moving to an SSD is like upgrading from your arthritic cook to a world-class chef, who also happens to be hopped up on speed. What's amazing is that orders are prepared in record time, in a smaller kitchen, all while never dropping any food or dishes. Everyone is happy, and the new chef is easily…

WE HAD A LOT OF GOOD things to say about the 600C when we reviewed it last issue. It was a chassis that addressed a lot of concerns we’d started to see in some of Corsair’s more traditional Obsidian lineup. And it managed this without necessarily losing any of that sleek elegance Corsair cases are known for. So what does the 400C bring to the table that the 600C couldn’t? Does it extend beyond the simple fact of it being the normal, not-inverted version? Well, yes actually, and in a lot of ways, it makes it somewhat more appealing. Immediately out of the box you’ll notice this chassis is considerably smaller than its older brother. In fact, it’s quite noticeable—losing three inches in length, one inch in height, and two…

SINCE THE OCULUS RIFT was Kickstarted back in 2012, we’ve been eagerly awaiting the first consumer release (CV1). As we go to print, the final hardware is complete, pre-ordering is available with a starting ship date of March 28, and we now know the official retail price. Get ready for a kick in the gut, as the formerly “$300–$400” Rift will officially set you back $600. That’s 50 percent over budget, and the resulting nerd rage on the Internet is hardly a surprise. I get that, but I also wonder how many of these people actually tried the earlier DK1 and DK2 variants. They were finicky, uncomfortable, made of cheap plastic, and sported headache-inducing 720p and later 1080p 60Hz displays. When you consider the upgraded 2160x1200, 90Hz display, better head-tracking,…

Where’s theEVGA Love? Review Scores Boot Order EVGA FTW! I’m a long-time subscriber to Maximum PC. I enjoy reading the reviews and finding out about the new stuff that’s coming out. I’ve noticed over recent years, though, that there’s been no EVGA love. Back in the day, when I got serious about building powerful machines, EVGA was the go-to company for all your needs. I can’t remember the last time I read a review of one of their video cards or motherboards. It seems the Best of the Best parts are between MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus. Yet the Dream Machines 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010 (2010 was an EVGA mobo)—that’s as far back as I looked—all housed EVGA cards. Even the builds in the back of the magazine…

Bob Malloy: I still use my Creative Extigy. It’s 15 years old and still works fine. Michael Tuzzolino: Onboard. With 5.1 Logitech speakers. Harold Love: Sound Blaster ZX here. Works well, been happy with it and my AKG K240 MkII headphones. I would like a Schiit Audio setup. Darren Lee: Give a try on the Magni 2 and Modi 2 combo. You won’t regret it. Bryan A Flood: I use a PCIe card, as onboard audio just eats up CPU cycles needlessly and the audio gets distorted. Ed Silow: Schiit Modi 2/Magni 2 stack driving Beyerdynamic DT880 Pro headphones and a pair of Mackie MR5mk3 studio monitors. Nick Holt: Creative ZxR but have upgraded to a Fostex DAC/amp for my high-end headphones. Michael Green Xonar: STX soundcard, but I wouldn’t…

Approximate Price: $770 WE MADE A SWAP of mobos, opting for Gigabyte’s H170. It didn’t cost much more but to offset the price we dipped down to a Core i5-6400—nearly the same chip as the i5-6500, but with lower clocks and no trusted computing module. As we’re running Ubuntu, we don’t care as much about trusted computing. As for clock speeds, the CPU still gets a turbo of up to 3.3GHz. We held off jumping up to a Z170 board. Some Z170 boards allow overclocking non-K Skylake CPUs by altering the base clock, instead of multiplier and voltage, but you lose Intel’s integrated graphics, and the CPU can't regulate its power. That means we’d need water cooling or a big air cooler, which adds to the cost. We also replaced…

ATTENTION, GAMERS AND STREAMERS: Go update your Skype installation. The reason why is because the latest build finally hides IP addresses by default. “Starting with this update to Skype and moving forward, your IP address will be kept hidden from Skype users. This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address,” the Skype team announced in a blog post. Microsoft is targeting gamers with this update. Why? Prior to this, it wasn’t that difficult for a sore loser on the Internet to discover a person’s IP address based on their Skype ID, and initiate a DDoS attack. There are several sites and services called “resolvers” that offer to do the dirty work, so even nonprogrammers could obtain a Skype user’s IP address…

In an OS where people get really passionate about their desktops, it takes cojones to push change on users. Ubuntu, in my mind, is one of the most important distributions in the GNU/Linux world. (I say this as an avid Arch user, by the way.) Ubuntu has always prided itself as user-friendly, with a simple and intuitive desktop environment called Unity. I remember when I first installed Ubuntu (version 9.04), and felt at home with the familiar GNOME 2 desktop. When Unity came out with 11.04, it shook up my world. I despised the change, and the dock on the left side of the screen. Love it or hate it, Unity has become one of the main faces of the Linux desktop, right there with GNOME, KDE, and now MATE.…

IF YOU’VE BEEN READING Maximum PC for any length of time, you’ll know that in every supertest we ever work on, we always let you know how we tested the gear. Usually this just involves a little annotation below our benchmarks table, listing what hardware we used and what tests we ran everything through. However, we’ve already established that audio is an entirely different beast. We could look at base specifications for each headset but, in all honesty, that really doesn’t tell you much, and the true nature of audio lies in the listener experience— how the sound feels. That said, we wanted to ensure we had a fair and balanced test bed for this roundup, so we decided on the following. Firstly, it’s analog only— we wanted to ensure…

When pressed to put a number on it, the consensus between manufacturers and associations tends to define highresolution audio as a signal sampled at 96kHz, with a bit depth of 24 per sample. Sony’s Hi-Res Audio standard is starting to proliferate, but even this avoids committing to a strict figure of 24/96. This is equivalent to the standards at work in professional recording and production studios. Of course, without a rigorously laid-down standard, it’s possible for lower-resolution files to be “disguised” in higher-res containers— equivalent to using a high-end camera to take a photograph of a Polaroid picture. Uncompressed raw files, such as WAV, FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, and DSD, are capable of containing audio at such high resolutions, with the only drawback being the impact on file sizes. One second…

LET’S START WITH THE GOOD. The Sound BlasterX H5 is one of the comfiest gaming headsets we’ve ever had the pleasure of using. The reassuring satisfaction you get as it fits gracefully around your lugs is second only to Audio-Technica’s newest AG1X. It’s not heavy, nor bulky. It just sits right. If only we could stop here. Right out of the gate, the H5s are incredibly muddy. There’s an unbelievable degree of emptiness in the mids and treble. Although the bass is prominent, the overall sound structure is very limited, especially without a DAC. Unfortunately, even with the Denon’s fantastic audio tomfoolery, it’s still not enough to pull the H5s into auditory good graces. Although they are smoother on this particular DAC than the X7, they just couldn’t compete in…

AUDIO-TECHNICA’S AG1XS are by far the comfiest headphones we’ve ever tried. There’s very little maneuverability, but in all honesty, you don’t need it. The two pads located at the top rest on your head gently and adjust to the fit and shape of your cranium, ensuring the least pressure is placed on top of your skull, and in turn reducing the overall weight involved. On top of that, despite being a closed back design, the AG1Xs have an wonderfully airy feeling to them. AT’s DADS system ensures that there’s a thick layer of air surrounding the driver, and it’s noticeable. All in all, they sounded impressive. Under the Denon, they were very bassheavy, thanks to their gaming heritage and design. Impressively, it didn’t overpower the treble, and thanks to that…

IT’S HARD TO ARGUE against the clarity of planar magnetic drivers, although this newfound technology is admittedly pricey. Short of electrostatic, it provides some of the best audio reproduction on the planet. Oppo has managed to capitalize on this by reducing the size and overall weight of the technology into something far more accessible and stylish for the likes of us. Concerning sound, we need to discuss something. Straight out of the box, the PM-3s are like a good pair of boots—they need wearing in. You won’t get the full soundscape unless you run these things for at least 12 hours. The diaphragm inside moves in a similar fashion to the piston in a combustion engine, and without that work-in time, you’re not going to get the same depth (trust…

FROM THE GET-GO the DT-1770 Pros scream premium at you. The construction is sublime, the build materials ravishing, and just taking a look at the specs sheet is enough to make your insides quiver. Leather, memory foam, steel—it’s all there. With the Denon, the 1770 Pros are damn near perfect. Listening to any instrumental music is akin to having the musicians in the room with you. That frequency response, coupled with Beyerdynamic’s intuitive tesla-dynamic drivers, provides an absolutely pitch-perfect soundscape. There’s no compromise on bass, treble, mids, nothing. If anything, the treble is a little firmer than the rest, no doubt to compensate for the phenomenal bass these babies punch out, but there’s still no sibilance, and it doesn’t unbalance the rest of the audio either. Speaking of the bass,…

The CUPS printing system ships with a number of nifty little command-line utilities. In fact, you can set up and configure all aspects of your printer from the CLI. Let’s run through some of the most useful commands that will help you manage the printer better. We’ve already seen the “lp” command, which queues a file for printing on the default printer. The default printer is specified in the “PRINTER” variable. You can specify it with the command “export PRINTER=printer-name” where “printer-name” is the name of the printer you specify in Step 2 of the walkthrough over the page. If you have multiple printers, use the “-d” option to specify the printer you wish to print to. For example, “lp -d HP-printer file.txt” prints the file on the HP printer,…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM LOOKING FORWARD TO GAMING… LAST YEAR, we built a PC based on the recommended minimum specs for the Oculus Rift. Now that the Rift is ready for the public, we wanted to revisit the idea of what you’d need for a great virtual reality experience. It turns out, we ended up building a rock-solid gaming rig that would be great for playing any game, not just running Oculus VR. We also wanted to keep this build on the small side. For many people, there’s a big argument for going full-ATX. Air flow is one big consideration, because Mini-ITX form factors can often be starved of cool air. Expandability is the other concern, but not everyone has either the want or need…

ADATA HD720 1TB Nearly everything I do these days involves storing data in the cloud. There’s an important word at the start of that sentence, though: “nearly” is there for a reason. I’m loathe to trust everything to the cloud, and there are plenty of things that make more sense to store locally. An obvious one is video. If you’re editing lots of home videos, you only really want to access them locally, at least until they’re finished. Adata recently sent through its HD720 for consideration, and it’s made me rethink how I move around data in these days of always-on connections. Part of the reason is speed—hitting 110MB/s when copying across chunky video files is great, and there’s a healthy 1TB of space, so plenty of room for my…

FORMER MOZILLA CEO and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich has resurfaced in the news with the launch of a new company called Brave Software. What’s the new startup focused on? An open-source web browser called Brave. The browser, version 0.7, launched to early adopters and testers on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. According to Eich’s blog, the browser blocks ad-click confirmation signals, impression-tracking signals, and signaling/analytics scripts. On a web page, Brave will insert a few new “clean” ads into standardsized spaces that are found by a cloud robot. He also said that the browser will target ads that are based on “browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary.” The use of re-identifiable cookies and persistent user IDs will not be permitted. “The browser sees everything you do, including actions…

1 OCULUS RIFT We got to try on the final retail version of the Rift and it’s the sharpest one yet. 2 HTC VIVE Dev kit two adds a front-facing camera, improved optics, and more ergonomic controllers. 3 DEEPCOOL’S LIQUID-COOLED PSU DeepCool is working on a liquid-cooled power supply because… well, why not? 4 ECS H110SU-02 ECS is working on a new mini STX form factor from Intel that’s roughly 5x5 inches in size. 5 MSI VORTEX MSI’s trashcan-shaped PC might remind us of the Mac Pro, but it houses two GeForce GTX 980 GPUs in SLI. 16 ORIGIN PC CHRONOS We love small, powerful gaming systems, and it doesn’t get much smaller and more powerful than Origin’s Chronos. 7 ORIGIN OMNI The Omni is a gaming all-in-one that can…

WHAT ACTUALLY POWERS these marvelous sound wave pushers? It all comes down to three types of driver. Located in each headphone cup, they all work off the same basic principle. Each uses electricity and a diaphragm to compress and decompress the air. Done fast enough, they create a vibrating pressure wave, which your ear drums pick up. DYNAMIC DRIVERS By far the most common headphone driver, dynamic drivers operate by utilizing a coil of ultrathin wire. In short, the electrically charged part containing the necessary data to create the sound is sent through the wrapped coil, which then creates a magnetic field. This in turn reacts with a magnet placed near the center of the driver. This then forces the coil, which is attached to the center of a diaphragm,…

Maximum PC: What was it that made you decide to enter the gaming peripheral market? Kosumo Miyauchi: Some of our audiophile-grade headphones, such as the ATH-A900X, were popular among gamers but, of course, these models didn’t feature a microphone, so we started to design and manufacture dedicated gaming headsets in 2013. This allowed gamers to enjoy the high-quality audio performance of our consumer models but with the in-game communication element. MPC: What kind of special considerations do you make when it comes to designing a high-fidelity gaming headset? What do you think appeals most to gamers? KM: We combine our rich heritage of designing consumer headphones, studio monitor headphones, and professional microphones for musicians. Also, we offer the option of open-back and closed-back models, so gamers can choose which design…

AT THIS PRICE, the VOID Stereo is bound to come with some caveats, although we didn’t expect quite the degree of plastic and soft fabric that besieged us. For the price, it is understandable. In fact, if it weren’t for Kingston offering up the HyperX Cloud IIs, featuring an aluminum and leather design for $10 more, we wouldn’t even question it. Under the Denon DA-300USB, the drivers sounded quite flat, muddiness shone through under heavy bass, and the treble and high mids suffered from a lack of depth. They were OK, average at best. Instrumental music suffered the most, feeling deflated, with less bite, and empty, as though each song had been recorded while the microphone was muffled by a pillow. It was a similar story with orchestral score—there just…

OUT OF THE BOX, the Game One is impeccably comfortable. It’s a small design, but not enough to compromise on comfort. Overall, it looks flash, and although constructed primarily from sand-blasted plastic, the Game One feels sturdy and secure. The open-backed design makes it airy, and helps to alleviate some of that sweatiness often associated with closed designs. With help from the Denon, the Game Ones are surprisingly well rounded. The sound signature is really sharp—reassuringly accurate, in fact. There’s absolutely zero mid smothering, and the treble remains sound and true. Bass is definitely there, but it’s reassuring, as opposed to vibrating your head off. One problem we can spot is there does seem to be a cut-off on the treble; some of the more audiophile offerings actually provide far…

ATH-M50X: WITHOUT DOUBT, the cornerstone of reference audio. If you ask any audiophile out there what headphones you should buy if you’re looking to get into the finer delicacies of aural life, they’re sure to point you this way. In our experience, we found the M50Xs to be incredibly light and a little bit plasticky—it’s only once you start listening to them that you truly begin to understand where exactly that money’s gone, and it’s straight into the drivers. With the Denon DA-300USB, we found the M50Xs were quite the bassy number; the overall sound signature was pleasant and warm. Those dynamic drivers provided enough punch without compromising too heavily on the mids. Although the higher treble frequencies were a little cut-off in comparison to some of the other audiophile…

IF THERE’S ONE THING Shure knows, it’s audio. The SRH1540s are a stunning piece of engineering. Out of the box, they have an incredible lightness, which is surprising given their size and shape. The feel and build quality is stunning. On top of that, the airy design helps alleviate sweaty ears, and provides (in our opinion) a far better soundscape than more closed-off designs. Plugged into the Denon DA-300USB, the SRH1540s took our breath away. The bass had a real heavy feel to it. Certainly a lot grander than some other headphones— even the gaming ones—although it wasn’t enough to overpower the treble and mids to any great degree. The soundscape is deep and crisp in the songs that can afford it. Rock, metal, and synthetic music suffers very little.…

Oppo has downsized planar magnetic drivers, and fitted them in a small-form, stylish pair of headphones. PICKING A WINNER here is tricky—there’s a lot of great headphones in this roundup, many of them ideal for specific audiences. If we’re only talking about audio and build quality, the Beyerdynamic DT 1770 Pro will always win hands down. If we’re talking best value for money, however, then Audio-Technica’s ATH-M50X steals that spot. Best gaming headset? Definitely the Audio-Technica ATH-AG1X. Best value for money gaming headset? Kingston’s HyperX Cloud II. The list goes on and on, but unfortunately we have to settle on one definitive headset. One product to take the place as the best allrounder. And ultimately, it falls to Oppo to take that mantle upon its broad shoulders. The Oppo PM-3s…

In addition to adding printers, the CUPS web interface provides access to various other useful settings. You can administer most of the printing tasks from the “Administration” tab, which houses settings under various categories. Under the “Server” section, for instance, you can find options to tweak the configuration of the server, as well as view various types of access and error logs. Using the “Manage Printers” button under “Printers,” you can control the settings for individual printers. Every printer’s page has options under two pull-down menus labeled “Maintenance” and “Administration” [Image E]. From under the “Maintenance” menu, you can print a test page, a self-test page, clean print heads, and manage print jobs. To customize the behavior of the printer, use the “Administration” menu to tweak its default options, set…

I’M ALWAYS on the lookout for good earbuds, mostly because I tend to lose them. I also have small ear canals, which makes it difficult to find a pair that fits well. At this point, I generally prefer wireless earphones so that I don’t have to deal with detangling cables all the time. That’s why I was particularly excited to test the Luxa2 Lavi O Wireless Earbuds from Thermaltake, which sounded as though they might satisfy my needs (no pun intended). The Lavi O earphones use 8mm drivers over Bluetooth 4.0, and they sound... OK. Generally speaking, audio quality is lost over Bluetooth. That’s not to say they sound bad, but it’s not as crystal clear as I would like. The wireless signal ranges from 10 feet outdoors to 30…