Mike is a freelance writer and has written for publications including Popular Science, Men's Journal, DigitalTrends, Laptop Magazine, CNet, PC Magazine, Imaging-Resource.com, and CrunchGear.com. He's also a working trumpet player in NYC.
Now you can surf the Web, watch YouTube videos, and get over-the-air downloads on your iPod. Other portable media players out there do similar things, but are they catching on? Not even close, at least in the US. But a few from the likes of Microsoft, Archos, and SanDisk offer up some interesting tricks that are just screaming for inclusion in the iPod touch.
When an iPod speaker costs $600, it had better be taken very seriously by its designers. Luckily, the new Zeppelin has high-end British speaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) as its loving parent. It looks like it flew right off the cover of Led Zep I, except that it’s not in flames. This 2.1-channel iPod speaker/dock sings with all the power of an opera diva — and just in time for the newest line of iPods.
Shure’s headphones have been a popular upgrade for those crappy earbuds that came with your music player. But now that the E series has become the company’s professional line, the consumer-focused SE line has been lacking a counterpart to the $99 E2c — until now. The SE110 rounds out the bottom end of the price spectrum, and it holds up pretty well against the competition in the sub-$100 in-ear headphone category. But it has a few tricks up its sleeve that push it over the top, unless you’re the type of listener who absolutely needs pummeling bass.
I recently had the opportunity to try out a prototype of the upcoming flagship earphones from Ultimate Ears, the outrageously pricey UE-11 Pro’s. For $1150, you get four drivers — including a subwoofer — in each custom-molded plastic earpiece, complete with custom artwork (see mine above). What you also get is a trip to the audiologist to get molds made of the insides of your ear canals, which is a pretty bizarre and… er… violating experience. Here’s a first-hand account of the UE custom experience, plus a look at how other companies do it.
Advanced Sound Devices is putting out one of the most hilarious speakers we’ve ever seen — a vintage-looking miniature wood and plastic jukebox with an iPod dock built-in. (It looks like some sort of freakish shrine to the GodPod/JesusPhone.) The Retro Tune Mini Jukebox can wake you up to music from your iPod or iPhone, CD player, or FM radio, and you can trip out to the rotating light column. The three speakers (two mains and a sub) pump out 40 watts worth of 2.1-channel audio. It measures 12″W x 9.5″D x 18″H and comes with a remote control. No word on pricing or availability yet, but it may finally be time to replace your old Wurlitzer with something for the digital age. Or not.
Product page [via I4U News]
Toshiba has continually improved its gigabeat line of MP3 players since the release of its F series, but apparently last year’s S series was the peak. The latest in the line is the gigabeat U, a tiny flash-based player with Toshiba’s signature crossbar controls. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have its big brother’s sweet Windows Mobile interface, making it feel pretty much like the rest of the also-ran flash players. For some reason, Toshiba is playing up the line-in MP3 recording feature, but we’re more impressed with the fact that you get a decent-sounding 2GB music player for under 100 bucks.
Big Sam is letting loose a new portable media player and a new MP3 player, both of which pack Bluetooth 2.0 (sans adapters), FM tuners, voice recorders, and video playback.
The Yepp YP-P2 will have a 3-inch touchscreen LCD (480 x 272) that supports gestures but not multitouch) and 4 or 8GB of flash memory, and it’ll come in three classy colors: black, burgundy, or white. It’ll support up to 3 simultaneous Bluetooth headsets, so you can crowd around the tiny screen with a couple friends. You can watch MPEG-4 and WMV9 videos, but sadly you won’t be getting content from online video services like CinemaNow. It’s less than half an inch thick, and the battery will supposedly last 35 hours for audio and 5 hours for video (presumably without Bluetooth on).
The Yepp YP-T10 is a 4GB flash-based music player with a 2-inch screen, but whoa — Midnight Black, Mystic Purple, and White Cloud? (Did they really mean to name one of the colors after a toilet paper brand?) It can handle up to two Bluetooth headsets, so you and a buddy can look like total dorks together while listening to the same ABBA tune.
In November, Samsung will issue a firmware upgrade that will enable some pretty cool cell phone connectivity — you’ll be able to use either device as a surrogate handset! Pricing hasn’t been set for either player, but they’ll both drop in late September.
Griffin’s latest iPod speaker, the Amplifi, is about as simple as they come, and the price tag won’t leave you wishing you hadn’t just bought that $4 Starbuck’s cafe mocha. The sound is a lot better than you’d expect for a $150 speaker and can fill a 15 by 15 foot living room with little problem. The included infrared remote doesn’t give you total control over your iPod, and the speaker lacks any tone controls or video outputs, but the Amplifi’s no-frills (but still elegant) design keeps the price down and the quality up.
The Sony Bravia DAV-IS10 is the stealth bomber of home theater systems. You won’t even know it’s there, thanks to five tiny micro-satellite speakers, each of which is about the size of a baby’s fist. The desktop PC-size subwoofer sits in the corner of a room and pumps out some pretty intense bottom end, while the digital amp/DVD player does some fancy digital processing to pump out 450W of impressively clear audio and HDMI goodness. The whole thing kind of melts into your living room, which means no complaints from your S.O. Plenty of cool connectivity features (some of which are optional) make this a painless way to get into 5.1-channel surround sound.
Last week I got a 16GB Creative Zen V Plus, the first flash-based MP3 player to move past the 8GB mark (aside from players with microSD card slots). And we’ll be seeing a 16GB iPod nano before the holidays. Aside from simply holding more songs, more flash means those tiny players can hold bigger and better-sounding digital files, which is right on time for the glut of DRM-free 256Kbps digital downloads from online sources like Wal-Mart and iTunes — and now Universal and Google’s brainchild gBox — not to mention the increasing popularity of lossless compression formats.
Signs are pointing to mainstream listeners’ demand for better sound, so why are music player makers still cheaping out on critical sound quality helpers like headphone jacks and lossless compression codecs? A few companies were on the right track in the past — Apple even once proved that better audio quality doesn’t cut into profit margins much. What gives?
Copy protection is leaking out of the digital music industry like water from a cracked snow-globe. The latest developments continue to point toward a DRM-free future in which you’ll buy music from different online stores for use anywhere, much like buying CDs from different physical shops like Virgin or Sam Goody and having them work fine in any player or computer. But if digital music is inching toward total compatibility and accessibility, which could actually help even out the lopsided MP3 player market, why are companies like Microsoft, Creative, and Samsung sabotaging their own swipes at the Apple pie with utterly useless restrictions?
Yeah, never mind the missing second “n” in Millenia, because Paradigm’s forte is speakers, not spelling. The Millenia 20 Trio ($999) is an odd beast that combines left, right, and center-channel speakers into a single bar-shaped cabinet. Trying to fool your ears into thinking you’ve got separate speakers instead of a one-piece job is usually an exercise in futility, but the Trio is wide enough that it can actually do a pretty bang-up job in small rooms. It helps a lot if your home theater receiver has a decent virtual surround feature, but even if not, paired with a subwoofer the Trio is great for movies in tight (and ultra-hip) spaces.
While I’m not thrilled that Apple chose to make the iPhone’s headphone jack inaccessible to most high-end headphones, adapters are popping up left and right. The best one I’ve seen so far is the MPA-3c from Shure. For $40, you get a 32-inch cable with an integrated microphone that turns any set of headphones into a cell-phone headset. You also get a little bit of control over the iPhone without having to remove it from your pocket, which will save you from having to deal with the iPhone-envious jerk sitting next to you when you want to send/end a call or pause your music.
Full review after the jump.
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Radio gives you two important things: It keeps you from getting in a musical rut, and you don’t have to make any decisions about what to listen to next. Now that customizable Internet radio services like Last.fm and Slacker are all the rage, the time has never been better for Apple to let iPod users get a piece of the action. I smell an iPod + Slacker partnership now that Apple got GooTube to hop on the iPhone train….
Making a set of noise-canceling headphones that sound good and cancel noise well is no easy task. Able Planet’s Clear Harmony kills plenty of racket and pumps out some sweet-sounding audio, which is why it mystifies me that they’d do a less-than-stellar job on the fit and comfort, especially when they’re playing in Bose’s $350 sandbox. Still, these are worth a listen, even if they don’t blow away the competition.
Next year, portable wireless audio is finally going to stop sucking. With the advent of the next generation of Bluetooth and improvements in miniaturization techniques, not to mention ever-increasing efficiency in power consumption, we’re going to see some pretty hot ear candy in ‘08. Finally, Bluetooth audio will relinquish its crown as the world’s most annoying sound to this cartoon bird.
(Turn down your volume a bit before clicking that link above.)
Apple’s first foray into Bluetooth headsets has hit the market, making barely a plink in the ocean of iPhone news so far. I unboxed and tested the discreet little black stick-bud: It still makes me look like a douchebag (all Bluetooth headsets do), but it works well and comes with some pretty cool accessories. It’s a significant investment, but if you already dropped $600 plus service fees for an iPhone, chances are you won’t blink at the $129 for the headset. You can’t use it to listen to music, but at you can walk around looking like some wingnut who’s talking to yourself, and it’s the best iPhone-specific headset going so far.
This week: Computers, set-top boxes (like AppleTV), and AV
receivers are battling to be your household hub, streaming music and
movies back and forth across your pad until you become sterile and
glow in the dark. All this gear is versatile, but it’s hard to know
which one to pick — especially when hefty sums of money are involved.
Sonos and now Denon seem to have the most promising solutions, but
life is passing their equipment by while gadgets like the iPhone and
Archos’s 605 WiFi threaten to swoop in and take all.
Amid a slew of new releases yesterday at the Hyatt in Jersey City, Denon introduced a WiFi iPod dock, the ASD-3W. It looks like a hockey puck with a dock and an antenna, but it’s much more: It actually lets you network most AV components like receivers, TVs, and some speakers, whether they’re from Denon or not. It lets you stream music, photos, and that precious but beleaguered Internet radio to those components from anywhere on your network — your PC, NAS, or an iPod that’s sitting in the dock on top.
Best of all, it gives you a TV-screen interface and remote to work with, so you can see what’s going where, and you get metadata and album art on songs that are playing off your iPod. Not bad for $229.99 (available in September), though if you don’t need the WiFi, you can pick up the non-wireless ASD-3N for $179.99 (available in August). Both models have Ethernet ports, RCA outputs, and S-Video outputs on the back.
Wicked Lasers has been making high-powered handheld lasers in China since 2003, and I finally got my pyromaniac responsible hands on one. While playing with the Wicked Fusion for several days, I tried to burn plenty of things (yes, including myself… real tattoos are expensive, y’know!), but I had the most fun pointing out stars and buildings. Okay, that’s not true: I spent most of the time just looking at the beam as it illuminated the dust floating around my apartment. It’s almost like having a tiny lightsaber.
Here’s an account of my first handheld laser experience — thankfully, I’m not writing this from a jail cell.
I was riding my bike the other day, when I got a call from Apple. I pulled over to the curb, and by the time the light on the corner changed, an iPhone was on its way to my apartment. I hadn’t even requested one, yet 36 hours later, it arrived.
Sure enough, within an hour I was compulsively checking email and surfing the Web on it, like a kid picking at a mosquito bite.
I did pretty normal stuff with it: checked out the features, loaded it up with music and vids, and found a few things to gripe about. But some people out there are interested in doing more than just the basics with the iPhone.
Griffin’s new Journi portable iPod speaker is hands-down the hippest-looking iPod speaker I’ve seen yet: It’s about the size of a woman’s handbag, and it comes cradled in its built-in black leather fold-around case/stand, but it’s just 1.5 inches thick and just over 2 pounds. The sound isn’t much better than you’d expect from such a slim speaker — good for small offices, a den, or even an intimate picnic. Nice touches like a battery meter and a slot for storing the remote make this a good fit for the Prada set (or wannabe’s).
Full review after the jump.
When I initially saw the DLO HomeDock Music Remote ($130), I had high expectations based on the company’s earlier success with iPod docks. This one comes with a fancy remote that lets you browse and control your iPod on a tiny LED screen. The effect is kind of like carrying around a smaller and less functional version of your iPod to control the real thing, which charges and plays music through your stereo via the dock.
I like the concept of the display remote, and I really dig a couple of its features, but it could use some improvements to make the overall experience smoother and more consistent. The Music Remote is a decent lower-cost alternative to DLO’s bigger and meaner HomeDock Deluxe, as long as you don’t mind a few browsing limitations.
Full review after the jump.
Satellite radio is in the toilet, and the government and the recording industry are trying to squeeze Internet radio for more dough — unsuccessfully for now, according to today’s news. Meanwhile, social networking sites like Imeem and Last.fm (and MySpace, of course) are continuing to blow everyone away in the digital music scene, thanks in no small part to their focus on community as well as music discovery.
It’s crystal clear that the Internet holds the future of radio. But there’s no reason social networking sites, Web radio, and music subscription services shouldn’t all be part of the killer app for music discovery, but mobility is still a major limiting factor. Now that we’re in the iPhone era, the hardware exists for removing mobility as an obstacle.
The second-generation iriver Clix is an impressive little device, but iriver followed in SanDisk’s footsteps and used its partnership with Rhapsody to create a pretty slick little end-to-end solution called the Clix Rhapsody. That means the Clix now comes with Rhapsody DNA firmware and works with the Windows-only Rhapsody software, which lets you transfer Rhapsody Channels and subscription tracks to the Clix. Best of all, if you’ve already got a second-gen Clix, you can convert it to a Clix Rhapsody just by downloading new firmware for nothin’.
My initial impression is that this will be a good thing for fans of the Clix and an easy way to discover lots of new music. Although I ran into a few snags early on in my testing, that was just a pre-launch glitch that was taken care of last week.
