Legal notice

Who runs this site

The Audio Stuff is an independent audio-gear review publication, owned and run by Jakub Charkiewicz and registered in Poland. It has been publishing since 2023. This record is the site's imprint - the one place every identity detail lives in full, rendered from the same single source as the footer, the contact page, and the machine-readable Organization record search engines read.

For anything editorial - review requests, corrections, or press - the contact page lists every channel.

Ownership and funding

The Audio Stuff is wholly owned by its founder, Jakub Charkiewicz, who is also the registrant of the domain. There is no parent company, no outside investor, and no shareholder - nobody upstream of a verdict.

The Audio Stuff carries no advertising, no affiliate links, and no sponsored placements. Nothing on the site is for sale, no link here earns a commission, and every page is free to read with no accounts and no paywall. Section 06 states the wall between money and verdicts; the ethics page states it again in plain text. Review units are loans or purchases, never income - section 05 covers where they come from.

If any of this ever changes - a new owner, a new revenue source - this section changes first, with a dated entry in section 17.

Hosting

This site is a set of static files served through Cloudflare's global network. The hosting and domain provider is Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. What Cloudflare processes to deliver the pages is described in the privacy policy.

Editorial independence

Reviews are independent. Brands have no say over verdicts, pre-publication review of drafts is never granted, and no score is ever for sale. A negative review still ships, and there is no advertiser to lose: the site sells no advertising and no placement, so a brand has nothing it can withdraw to retract a verdict.

Every review is signed by a named writer, listened to over weeks on a published reference chain, and scored against a published reference list - so a verdict can be checked against the method, not just taken on trust. The full method - the room, the chain in every category and the protocol - is on how we test.

Where review units come from

Both ways gear arrives, it is always disclosed. Most flagship and reference-tier pieces are loaned by manufacturers or distributors, and a loaned unit is flagged in the review header, beside the byline. Mid-tier and budget pieces are usually purchased outright, often used.

A loan is not payment: the review still gets written, the piece still earns the score it deserves, and the unit goes back when the loan window closes. Accepting a loaner never commits us to a positive verdict or a publishing date.

No advertising or affiliate links

There is none. The Audio Stuff carries no display advertising, no affiliate links, and no sponsored placements. Nothing on this site can be bought, no outbound link earns a commission, and no retailer sees a piece before you do.

So a brand cannot pay to influence a verdict, cannot buy placement in a guide, and has nothing to pull in order to retract a review. There is no sponsored content on this site - if that word ever appears next to a piece, the piece is not ours.

Corrections and updates

Wrong is wrong, even when it's ours. If a review misstates a spec, a price, or anything else, report it - the contact page has a short walkthrough. Substantive fixes land on the affected review with the date the change shipped.

Reviews and guides are also checked again on a rolling schedule. A check that changes the text moves the piece's Updated date; one that finds it still accurate is recorded as Checked, without faking a new Updated date. Every review shows when it was Published and, where they apply, when it was last Updated and Checked - what each of those dates means.

Content and copyright

All reviews, photos, and other content are © The Audio Stuff, unless credited otherwise. The photography is first-party: the gear pictured in a review is the unit that was actually on the desk.

The ratings data is treated separately and deliberately: the record of what scored what, at what price, on what date, is published openly under CC BY 4.0 so it can be quoted, compared, and built on. The writing and the photography around it are not. The two lists below say which is which.

Fine without asking

• Quoting short passages, with attribution and a link back to the source page.
• Linking to any page on this site, including deep links.
• Reusing the ratings data - which unit was reviewed, what it scored, its verdict tier, its price at the time, the dates, and the review URL. That data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), so you may republish it, build on it, or use it commercially. The single condition is credit: name The Audio Stuff and link back, either to this site or to the individual review each row points at. The catalogue ships as a spreadsheet at /ratings.csv and as JSON at /ratings.json for exactly this.
• Reusing our photography, with credit to The Audio Stuff and a link back to the review the photo comes from. Every product shot here is ours, taken of the actual unit under test, so there is no third party to clear it with. The link back is the only condition.
• Personal, classroom, or research use of the free tools and glossary.

Ask first

• Republishing a full piece, or enough of one to substitute for reading it.
• Using a photo or a quote from the review text in advertising, on packaging, or on a product page. A score or verdict on its own is not on this list any more: it is part of the openly-licensed data above, so a manufacturer may cite "9.0/10, The Audio Stuff" with a link and no permission. What that never buys is influence - a published verdict cannot be changed by anyone quoting it, and reusing the prose or the photography around it, in a way that implies we endorse a product, is still the thing to ask about.

Asking is one email: contact@theaudiostuff.com. Brand and product names remain their owners' trademarks; they appear here to identify the gear under review, nothing more.

Terms of use

Everything on this site is free to read and use for personal, informational purposes. There are no accounts, no paywalls, and no user uploads - nothing to sign, nothing to agree to beyond this notice. The copyright terms in section 08 cover quoting and republishing.

Machines are welcome too, on the same honesty terms: the sitemaps, the RSS and JSON feeds, and the machine-readable catalogue exist precisely so software can read the site without hammering it. Cite what you take, with attribution and a link to the source review, and don't use the site in ways that disrupt it for others.

The free tools

The free browser tools are provided as-is, for guidance. Their results are estimates computed from the numbers you enter - not professional, medical, or hearing-health advice. A calculator cannot see your room, your gear, or your ears.

Where a tool touches hearing safety, treat its output as the cautious starting point, not permission: when in doubt, turn it down. Double-check anything that matters - a purchase, a cable run, a listening level - before acting on it.

Reviews are judgments, not guarantees

Every verdict is the named writer's own judgment, formed over the listening window and chain described in the review and scored against the published reference list. It is honest opinion backed by method - not a promise that the gear will suit your ears, your room, or your system.

Prices and specifications are recorded as they stood when the review shipped, and the market moves. Confirm the current price, warranty, and spec with the seller before buying. Spotted something that's wrong or out of date? Report it - the fix lands on the affected review with the date it shipped.

No warranties, within the law

The site and everything on it are provided as-is and as-available, without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law allows. We work to keep every page accurate - the corrections process in section 07 exists for exactly that - but we cannot promise a page is free of errors at the moment you read it.

To the extent permitted by law, The Audio Stuff is not liable for losses that come from relying on the site's content or tools. The buying decision, the room, and the volume knob are yours. Nothing in this notice limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and nothing in it takes away rights the law grants you as a consumer.

Links out

Reviews link out to manufacturers, standards bodies, and sources. A link is a reference, not an endorsement - and never a guarantee about the target site's content, prices, stock, or conduct. Those sites are run by others, under their own terms and privacy practices.

No outbound link here is an affiliate link and none earns a commission, as section 06 states. If an outbound link rots or starts pointing somewhere it shouldn't, tell us and it gets fixed.

Governing law and severability

This site is operated from Poland, and this notice is governed by Polish law. If you use the site as a consumer, that choice does not take away protections granted to you by mandatory law where you live.

If one clause of this notice turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands. And it shouldn't come to clauses: if anything here reads unfair or wrong to you, email us and we'll sort it in the open.

Security reports

Found a security issue on the site? Report it privately to contact@theaudiostuff.com before publishing anything - reports go straight to the owner. The machine-readable version of this policy lives at /.well-known/security.txt, the standard location security researchers check first. There is no paid bounty program.

In scope: theaudiostuff.com and every file it serves, including the data files and feeds linked from the reviews hub. Out of scope: the services the site relies on but does not run - Cloudflare's network, the embedded YouTube player, and our social profiles - which are best reported to those providers directly.

A useful report names the page or file, what an attacker could do, and the steps that reproduce it. Please test only against your own session, and do not access, change, or delete anyone else's data.

Your data

We keep data collection to a minimum: no accounts, no first-party analytics, no ad profiling. The privacy policy states exactly what stays on your device, what our host processes, every provider that ever touches data, and your rights - each in its own numbered section.

Changes to this notice

This notice changes only when the facts change - never to quietly move a goalpost. Substantive changes are dated here; the date at the top of the document always matches the newest entry.

Oct 3, 2026

Security reporting: stated what is in and out of scope and what a report should include.

Jul 18, 2026

Rewrote and expanded the notice into this numbered document: added the ownership and funding, review-unit sourcing, corrections, liability, outbound-links, governing-law, and security-reporting sections, and this change log. Earlier versions stated the same imprint, terms, disclaimer, and advertising terms in shorter form.