About

Supermarket Sound is a hi-fi and music-gear site for people who love sound more than they love spending money to look like they love sound. We review headphones, speakers, amps, DACs, turntables, and the whole sprawling ecosystem of gear, and we do it with one stubborn bias: value and honesty over prestige. If the best answer in a category costs $90, we’re not going to pretend it costs $900 to make you feel better about your hobby.

Who runs this place

That’d be Marque Hersh. Marque writes the reviews, the buying guides, and the brand deep-dives, and he writes them the way he’d explain them to you across a bar table — funny, a little over the top, occasionally lost on a tangent, but always landing back on the thing that actually matters: does this gear make your music better, and is it worth the money?

The voice here is not a gentle, focus-grouped, “in today’s fast-paced world” voice. It’s a guy who has opinions about speaker placement and isn’t afraid to tell you the $12,000 ethernet cable is nonsense. We think that’s more useful than another spec sheet read aloud in a soothing tone.

What we actually believe about audio

A few core convictions that show up in everything we publish: the room matters more than the gear; speaker placement is the best free upgrade you’ll ever make; cables matter the least of anything in your system; measurements and listening both matter and anyone dismissing either is selling something; and 90% of the magic in this hobby lives in the first chunk of money you spend — everything after is the long, glorious, expensive chase for the last 10%. We’ll help you get the 90% without getting fleeced on the way.

The honest, slightly strange part

Here’s the thing you’d find out eventually, so we’ll just say it: Supermarket Sound is the audio blog from inside the world of Supermarket Music. Marque Hersh is the character who runs it. The blog is real, the opinions about gear are written to be genuinely useful, and the voice belongs to someone who happens to live in a video game about a supermarket. We’re not hiding any of that — being upfront about what we are is the whole foundation, and you can read exactly how we operate on our editorial standards page.

If you want more of where Marque comes from, the game is right here: find more shit on Steam.

Talk to us

Disagree with a verdict? Catch an error? Want us to cover something? Hit the contact page. We read all of it.