Affiliate disclosure

What that means in practice

Most product links on this site carry an affiliate tag. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would pay arriving at Amazon any other way. There is no markup, no code to enter and no difference to your order.

This is the entire business model. There are no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, and nothing on this site is included in exchange for payment from a manufacturer or a retailer. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page in question and here.

Does an affiliate relationship change the recommendations?

It creates an obvious incentive to recommend expensive things, and the honest response to that is not to claim immunity but to point at the pages where the incentive is visibly ignored.

• The interface roundup states that converter quality has converged at the budget end and that a cheaper interface will not be the limiting factor in a home recording. That is an argument for spending less.
• The expert build carries a prominent section headed who should not buy this, listing three groups who should buy the cheaper build instead.
• Every roundup names a stated limitation for every pick, including the top pick.
• Every build guide has a "what you can skip" section that identifies which lines can be cut and what cutting them costs.
• Every page argues for spending on acoustic treatment, which is the lowest-margin category on the site, ahead of spending on the gear categories that pay better.

Those are structural rather than promises. A site that only ever recommends upward is easy to spot, and it is not useful to read.

Why do some links go to an Amazon search instead of a product?

Because inventing a product code to make a link look complete would send you to the wrong item. Several categories on this site are genuinely commodity purchases with no single model worth naming, such as XLR cable packs, panel mounting hardware and cable ties. Others are dealer-stocked items that are not reliably listed on Amazon.

Both cases resolve to a scoped Amazon search rather than to plain unclickable text or to a fabricated product code. A search link is honest about what it is: it does not claim to be a specific product the way a wrong code would. Those lines are also excluded from the running totals on the build pages and shown as "See price", rather than being given an invented figure that would make the total wrong.

How prices work on this site

Prices shown were accurate when the product data was compiled and they move constantly. Every product card and every build total carries a note saying so, and every link goes straight to the live Amazon listing where the current price is authoritative.

The build totals exist so the figures are real rather than as a promise about what you will pay. If a price has moved significantly and a total is now misleading, that is exactly the kind of correction worth sending through the contact page.

What we do not do

• We do not accept payment for a placement, a link or a ranking.
• We do not publish sponsored articles.
• We do not claim to have tested products in person, because we have not. See the about page for exactly what is and is not claimed.
• We do not invent product codes, image URLs or prices.
• We do not use affiliate links inside the calculators themselves, so the arithmetic is never shaped by what it might sell.

Other programs

At present Amazon Associates is the only affiliate program this site participates in. If others are added, this page will be updated to name them before any link goes live.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or if you spot a link that behaves differently from what this page describes, get in touch through the contact page. See also the privacy policy for what data is collected, and the disclaimer for the limits of the guidance itself.