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.
