If you’re in the market for new speakers for home use, consider waiting to buy until next month, when Klipsch rolls out 10 overhauled speakers from its iconic, affordable Reference line. If you live in the Europe or the U.K., you can get them now, but the U.S. launch is in May.
Klipsch, which features the slogan “Pissing off the neighbors since 1946” on its website, overhauled the series for use in hi-fi, home theater and Dolby Atmos systems.
“Omnia” means “prepared for all things” in Latin. The 40-year-old Italian audio brand Sonus Faber tries to live up to that with its new Omnia all-in-one wireless streaming speaker. It joins the fray in a fast-growing market for compact but premium systems.
The Omnia has built-in support for practically all streaming sources and you can hook up almost any audio-related hardware to it.
Did I mention it costs two grand? Well, there are reasons for that price point.
Every year Samsung subsidiary JBL rolls out a tempting raft of updated or new audio products at CES, but you can’t get them right away. CES 2022, held in Las Vegas earlier this month, was no different. The company showed its new JBL PartyBox Encore and a slew of other Bluetooth speakers, earbuds and headphones. We’ll round them up below. Some are coming in spring and others in summer.
Kanto has rolled out a pair of high-quality speaker stands it said can help clarify your sound system’s audio, isolate vibration and even organize some of your cable clutter. You can get the Kanto SX Series Floor Speaker Stands in two sizes: 22 inches high and 26 inches high.
You may be used to simply recording audio on your mobile device for those endless cat-video voiceovers of yours. But if you want clearer, more-focused audio for your content creation, a small microphone like Sennheiser’s new XS Lavmic will usually do a better job.
Call it a “nice pile of Schiit.” Or a “Schiit stack.” That’s what admiring commenters said about computer science student and Redditor the-deluxe’s M1 MacBook Pro-centered setup.
“You fulla Schiit,” one audiophile enthused.
Why? Well, people who are into Schiit audio components are really into them. Game recognize game, after all.
We noticed business and technology author and noted Mac guy Ben Thompson volunteered a pic of his setup on Twitter when tech and politics writer Casey Newton posted a shot of an immaculate setup, wondering if he has “remotely what it takes to put something like this together.”
Well, Taiwan-based Thompson certainly has what it takes to put together a great setup — even if it’s more lived in and not quite as photo-ready as the one Newton posted.
Jody Whitesides is a television and film composer so naturally his setup is audio-focused. Even with all the high-tech audio gear, it is hard to out-stage his epic 34-inch ultra-wide monitor.
He rocks both the Apple Magic Trackpad and a Logitech mouse. He has both because some tasks are easier to edit using a mouse and others with a trackpad, so it gives him the best of both worlds. The keyboard — a Komplete Kontrol Controller — gives him an additional 88 keys right above his Apple Magic Keyboard.
To handle all of his audio, Whitesides uses a PreSonas monitoring station to easily switch audio outputs. And the Apollo 8 Recording Interface gives him the power to handle all of this gear at once.
For the actual audio itself, he has a pair of KRK V4 Series Speakers to accompany a pair of Genelec 8020D Studio Speakers.
Driving all this is a 2013 “trashcan” Mac Pro, out of shot.
Unlike streaming music, which often keeps playing when you switch away from the app or webpage, YouTube playback stops as soon as you leave mobile Safari. This means that using YouTube as a music player is out of the question. Or is it? Can you make YouTube play just the audio, even when you’re not showing the video? You can, and it’s really, really simple.
BlackHole is a free, open-source tool to route audio anywhere on your Mac. You know how the audio from YouTube in Safari comes out the speakers or headphones of your Mac, and that’s about it? Well, with BlackHole, you can intercept that audio. Then you can record it, redirect it to another app or do basically anything you like.
The iConnectAudio4+ isn’t a new product. It’s been around for a few years. And this isn’t really a review. This article will be more of a PSA, telling you about a unique input device can change how you use your iPad for audio.
The feature that sets the iConnectAudio4+ apart from other USB audio interfaces is that it can connect to two computers at once, and send audio to both. It can even route audio — digitally — between your Mac and your iPad.
Neil Young believes there’s a big problem with making music on a MacBook Pro. In a recent interview, the acclaimed singer-songwriter slammed the “Fisher-Price” audio quality you get with Apple’s newest notebooks.
Young also revealed that Steve Jobs knew about his concerns, but felt that MacBook audio was good enough for consumers.
If you and a friend both have AirPods or Beats headphones, you can share audio coming from a single iPhone or iPad. This is great for listening to the same music track or podcast, or — most useful I reckon — watching a movie together. Apple makes it really easy for you to share your audio stream with someone else. In fact, you could say it’s easier than doing it the old way, because A) there are no wires to get tangled and B) there’s no splitter adapter to lose.
If you own a 2018 iPad Pro, you probably also bought Apple’s USB-C-to-3.5mm headphone jack adapter, just so you can plug headphones into your $1,000-plus computer. But what if you want to do something totally crazy like, I don’t know, listen to music and charge the iPad at the same time? Or, given that this a pro machine, maybe you want to hook up a MIDI piano keyboard, or other gear, and use headphones at the same time?
Tough luck, right? No! If you have any old USB-C hub or dock, you can plug Apple’s cheap little dongle into the hub itself. Check it out.
Audient’s Evo is an excellent-looking new iOS-friendly USB audio interface. Like all other “sound cards,” the Evo lets you hook up speakers, headphones, and connect microphones, guitars, and so on. It then connects to a computer or iDevice via USB, so you can route all that audio in and out of your apps.
But the Evo brings a few clever extras. One is the Smartgain feature, which automatically sets your input levels. The other is something called loopback, which lets you record your iPhone’s own output. This is handy on the Mac and Windows, but essential on iOS, and very welcome.
The 2018 iPad Pro is an incredible machine. It’s powerful. It has a screen so good that it’s hard to look at anything else after seeing it. Face ID was made for the iPad, and is way more suited to a tablet than a phone. And the physical design is beautiful. It’s thin, the bezels are small enough not to notice, and the iPad Pro’s USB-C port is far more useful than I imagined.
And yet this is the worst iPad I have ever used. It has been buggy. It can’t do basic tasks with any consistency. Audio drops out. And until I updated to iOS 13, the screen would freeze a few times a day.
Problem: You have a kick-ass stereo, or a pair of excellent studio monitor speakers, and you want to hook up your iPhone to listen to some music. Only you don’t want to dig out the headphone dongle and plug in a cable.
Solution: The Kali Audio Bluetooth Module. It hooks up to your speakers via cable, adding a Bluetooth receiver that lets you get the music out of your iPhone or iPad. It seems simple, and it is. But it’s also super-duper handy.
Apple is gearing up to launch HomePod in Japan — more than two years after the device got its first unveiling.
Smart speaker shoppers will be able to pick one up in the coming weeks for 32,800 yen (approx. $301). HomePod will then be available in a total of 11 countries.
There’s one big thing I wish for when I kneel next to my bed at night, cross my fingers and think of iOS 13: better audio. Not better quality audio. That’s already great. I just want better control, and better features.
And this isn’t just specialized podcasting or music-making stuff. There are problems everywhere. You know how when you’re listening to music, and you open up the camera app, and your music stops playing? That kind of problem. Which is number one one on my list by the way. Check out the rest:
Epic Games has promised huge audio improvements for Fortnite Battle Royale.
The changes, which are especially focused on enemy player awareness, will be made in the version 9.10 update. It is expected to roll out to all platforms later this week.
Did you know that you can record the music playing on your iPhone, to your Mac, straight up the USB cable? Just hook your Mac up to your iPhone (or iPad), using the Lighting cable that came in the box, and you can record anything. You could record songs from Beats One radio in Apple Music, for example.
It’s just like taping off the radio when you were a kid — or maybe when your dad was a kid — only better quality.
Your favorite shows and movies on Netflix are about to start sounding a lot better.
Netflix came out with a new update today that takes the streaming service’s audio quality to a new level. Sound is supposed to be “more crisp and more intense” so that it gets you more immersed in the story.
The quick answer is “Yes, of course you should.” The more complex answer is “But only if you need it.” Your iPhone has an equalizer built in, although it’s not exactly easy to find. Annoyingly-hidden-yet-essential interface elements aside, there’s usually not much point in tweaking the EQ of your Apple Music library unless you have a problem in your setup.
Did you know that you can send the audio from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via the Lightning cable? That audio stays in pristine digital ones and zeros, and can be recorded (or otherwise used) anywhere you can edit audio on your Mac.
For musicians, this turns your iPad and all its music apps into a plugin for your Mac. And for anyone else, it could just be a neat way to route audio into your Mac’s speakers. The feature is called iDAM, and it’s built into your Apple devices. Oh, and it works with MIDI too.
Convert an MP3 (or any other music file) to some other music file format.
Pretty much anything else.
… then you should grab TwistedWave this second. It’s an essential app for working with audio on the iPhone and iPad. And it’s also really, really quick and easy to use.