audio - page 5

Today’s Cult of Mac Deal sounds great…literally!

The AFS1 Portable Bluetootk Speaker offers great sound – wherever and whenever you want it. You can easily sync this powerful little speaker to your tablet, phone, computer, or bluetooth compatible music player to enjoy stereo quality tunes anywhere. And for only $39 you’re gettinga deal that sounds great on a whole other level!

This is the original Parrot Asteroid Classic car stereo head-unit ($349), and it made quite a splash when it launched last year. The single-DIN, 4×55 watt receiver boasts a formidable array of features: Bluetooth connectivity, powerfully accurate voice recognition for both calls and music, a GPS receiver, a bright, 3.2-inch LED screen and a quiver of apps that run off its customized, upgradeable, early-vintage Android 1.5 OS (all of which require a data connection via a dongle).

Though this model was originally called the the Asteroid (no Classic), the Classic nomen was added to lessen confusion as three new models were announced a few months ago. However, the Asteroid Classic still very much in play; in fact, as this review goes live, the Classic is the only member of the Asteroid family currently available, as its new siblings haven’t shipped yet.

With its Android-based OS, you’d be forgiven if you thought the Asteroid Classic was more friendly to Android phones than the iPhone. In fact, the opposite is true, as I’ll explain later. And while it suffers from something that can probably be described as teething trouble, it’s still a lust-worthy system.

Podcasts can be great fun, but they tend to have long segments of audio that you may or may not want to listen to. Which is fine, if you could sip through it easily. And, let’s face it, you might not be fully paying attention to them when they’re on, so you might miss things. Things you want to back up to hear, for example.

Well, guess what? You can do both with iOS 6, in the Podcast app.

WavTap is a teeny tiny little audio recorder for recording whatever audio is playing through your Mac.

The latest Cult of Mac Deals offer is natural fit for your audio needs – on more ways than one.

The Clarity Series CW31 In-Ear Wooden Heaphones are truly the “natural” way to listen. These eco-friendly headphones feature rich, natural sound with housing to match. The best of premium technology and long-lasting natural elements…and they can be yours for just $24 for a limited time.

How often do you want to know what sounds look like? I’m guessing not very often, unless you’re a musician. But if you do want to know what sounds look like, and you want to know it in the most stylish and good-looking way possible on iOS, you can’t go far wrong with an app called Soundbeam. It’s just beautiful.

When it comes to Bluetooth speakers, there’s one company’s product against which all others are measured: Jawbone’s iconic Jambox.

There’s a reason for that. Jawbone entered a pretty much empty market segment with a new product that they polished to hell. The Jambox doesn’t sound like sonic nirvana, but it sounds pretty good, and the rest of the details — from the way it feels in the hand, to the way it’s boxed, to the Nintendo-like bleeps and bloops it makes when you pair it or skip a track — are just polished to hell.

Just like with Apple products, though, that polish comes at a premium: the MSRP of the Jambox is $199.99, which is a lot of money for most people. Enter the CUBEDGE EDGE.sound, a new Bluetooth speaker that attempts to do everything that the Jambox does for an MSRP of $50 less.

Snapping a screenshot on your Apple device is dead easy: home-plus-sleep-button for iOS, and Command-Shift-4 (or others) for the Mac. But what about snapping a sound-shot, i.e. grabbing a snippet of your system audio?

Well, you could fire up Quicktime and start dickering around with that. Or you could install WavTap and then hit Command-Control-Space.

This is the SuperTooth Disco 2. It’s the sequel to one of my favorite Bluetooth speakers ever, the SuperTooth, only smaller, a little quieter, and a lot more stereo-er. It also has a quirky little flower-vase style which will probably grow on you, especially if you have small tables.

Apple has been named in a California lawsuit filed by EPL Holdings for allegedly infringing a patent that covers audio and video playback at varying speeds. The filing reports that EPL met with Apple back 2002 to discuss  licensing over the patents it had developed. But the Cupertino company is alleged to have used the technology anyway without reaching a licensing deal.

The Tiki, from Blue Mic ($59), is a compact USB microphone designed to give you great audio for Skype calls and voice notes in rooms with even moderate ambient noise. And while Blue is known for creating mics that sound as good as they look, the Tiki’s beauty is only skin deep.

The other day, I was goofing around with one of the slick new features of OS X Mountain Lion, AirPlay streaming from my Macbook Air to my Apple TV. I played some videos to my LCD TV right from the laptop, and then sent Diablo III up there as well. All worked well.

Then I wanted to get back to some writing, so I figured I’d send some music from iTunes over to my Apple TV, using the same AirPlay menubar icon that I’d sent the video over with. While I could hear the music from my TV, the Apple TV also displayed my computer screen. I didn’t want that, so I stopped AirPlay screen streaming, and clicked the button in the lower right corner of iTunes, and chose my Apple TV as an external speaker, like I’ve been able to for a while.

Turns out, there’s an easier way to do this, and one that doesn’t rely on iTunes.

Replug is a gadget that could – if it had existed a few years ago – would have saved me a fortune; literally hundreds of dollars. It is a simple and excellent idea: a magsafe connector for your headphones, only without the magnets.

If you have been desperately seeking a Bluetooth speaker which looks like a video projector, or a small, mains-powered electric fan heater, then your search is over! Behold: the Croon, the wireless/wired
speaker of your twisted dreams.

I use my iPhone camera to keep track of a lot of things. When I’m in the bookstore, I take photos of books I want to buy, or show friends. I take pics of meals to track what and how much I eat, and I take photos of my kids and pets as often as possible.

I don’t take video that often, though it has been known to happen. However, I can really see the utility in having some sort of audio recording capability along with my photo taking – sort of a quasi-video thing – and Phonogram does just that.

Let me count the ways that I have killed so many successive sets of earbuds, whether from Apple or otherwise. Rain, sweat (ears), sweat (general, dripping), wet ear canals from insufficient after-shower toweling. More rain.

You get the idea.

If only I’d had a pair of Klipsch’s new rugged S4i earbuds, which are rubberized against both the elements and also my deadly perspiration.

The earbuds are also fully iReady, with a mic for calls and a three button remote for play/pause/answer and volume control. The specs say that the sensitivity (a good measure of how loud they are) is 110dB and the frequency response goes from 10Hz to 19kHz – a respectable range for a ‘bud.

But the toughness is the thing, and these multicolored cans can put up with most exercise and outdoor activity.

I doubt they can resist my single most common way to break a pair of headphones though – the Tug. The Tug can be achieved in many ways, but has one common element: you forget about a dangling cord and catch it fatally on an immovable object, or your own body. I have ended the life of a pair of Porta Pros by standing from a crouch and catching the cable on a knee. And I butchered a pair of retro Panasonic over-the-ear headphones when the cable snagged on a post in the street.

I should probably be more careful.

The S4is will be available soon.

Source: Klipsch

Thanks: Ashley!

When we review speaker docks here at Cult of Mac, one of the most common things we’ll ding them for in our ratings is lack of Bluetooth streaming support. Especially for the more expensive speaker docks, it just seems like a no brainer: why not just slap in a Bluetooth chip for a couple bucks and infinitely expand the usefulness of your product?

We assume that we will continue to be disappointed by Bluetooth-less speaker docks for years to come, but maybe this brilliant KickStarter project can help mitigate that disappointment. Called the Pear (get it?), it’s a tiny little Bluetooth dongle that plugs into your speaker dock’s 30 Pin Dock Connector and gives A2DP streaming Bluetooth audio support to any device!

There’s not much more to it, which is why this is such a great idea: imagine being able to upgrade that dusty old speaker dock going unused on your nightstand or in your kitchen with just a $40 add-on. Unfortunately, it’s a Kickstarter project right now, but with more than $29,000 dollars towards its $40,000 goal already attained with almost two months left to go, this looks like one idea that’s going to soon become a reality.

Source: Kickstarter

Via: Engadget

You iPhone’s headphone jack is just fine for listening to your MP3s with the crappy Apple-supplied earbuds, but what if you want something a little, shall we say, less terrible? You could of course spring for a high-end headphone amp with its own DAC (Digital Analog Converter), and pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Or you could dig $11 out from under the couch cushions and buy CableJive’s LineOut Pro.

I suppose that product meeting for the V-Moda Vamp went something like this:

Designer: Here it is! The Vamp case. It’s a metal case for the iPhone.

Boss: What the hell is wrong with you? That thing is huge. It’s an embarrassment to the good name of V-Moda. My god. With a box that size you could fit in literally anything. ANYTHING!

(Light bulb goes off over designer’s head)

The Lady has been trying to get me to go swimming. Up and down. In a pool. Like an animal. I said that I would do only if there were a way to make it less boring, like, say, someone offered to send a waterproof iPhone case and headphones for me to review.

Well, it looks like I might beef up my weak typist’s arms and firm up my beer belly this summer, as ECOXGEAR (a company who’s name contains the word "cox") has launched the ECOXPRO which works with the waterproof ECOXBUDS.

Imagine a JawBone JamBox, complete with its cute combination packaging/display case. Now imagine that it has been shrunken down into a two-inch cube. Further, try to picture a box that has had the Bluetooth radio extracted and replaced by a high-end DAC (digital analog converter) and a quality headphone amp. Now, keep this picture on your head as you reach around and pat yourself on the back and hear the theme from Rocky in your head.

Congratulations — you have successfully imagined the NuForce Cube, whilst simultaneously engaging all three of your main sensory systems.

We already know that between hundreds of different Android builds and handsets, Google’s smartphone OS is hopelessly fragmented, and requires immense expense and time on the part of developers to get even a simple app working reliably.

But the problem with Android — and why it’s such a bitch to develop for — goes deeper than just too many handsets and OS builds to support. Even developing a simple music app for Android is a nightmare due to Android fragmentation, because Google couldn’t even get volume control on Android right out of the box.

Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil started out as a way to stream any non-iTunes audio to your AirPort Express mini-router, back when AirPlay was still called AirTunes. Then it was expanded with a free iOS app which would let you stream music from AirFoil on the Mac to AirFoil on your iPod or iPhone, handy for hooking up to a stereo.

Now we have AirFoil Speakers Touch 3 for iOS, and it adds in proper AirPlay support, letting you send music from pretty much any iDevice you own.

iHome’s new iW2 ($200) is an AirPlay-enabled speaker that allows you to send audio from any iOS (4.2 and up) device right to it with the click of a button. It has finally untethered me from my white-wired earbuds, and transformed my living room into a place of musical bliss.

For the price, the Sony RDP-X500iP is a hell of a lot of sound. In fact, it’s the best-sounding iPhone, iPod or iPad dock we’ve seen in its price range, and it even manages to match the audio quality of some speaker docks that cost $100-$200 more. If you’re looking to buy one, though, you should be aware of a couple of niggles before you drop your dough.