Audio company SVS rolled out new wares at CES 2022 — Prime Wireless Pro Speakers and an accompanying SoundBase multi-room amplifier. Both have added support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 streaming over previous Prime Wireless models’ capabilities, among other new features.
iOS 11.4 looks like it’s on track for a public release sometime around WWDC 2018.
Apple just released a big batch of betas for developers this morning, including the fifth build of iOS 11.4 which brings a number of new features and improvements to the iPhone and iPad.
One of the best features for Apple’s new HomePod appears to be facing some big delays.
AirPlay 2.0 promises to give HomePod users the ability to stream the same song to different devices in different rooms from a single iPhone. But with the release of iOS 11.3 beta 3 this morning, Apple has decided to pull the feature from testing.
Apple will issue software updates for HomePod with important bug fixes, performance improvements, and (hopefully) new features. Here’s how you will update yours.
Summer’s drawing to a close. But the deals rolling into the Cult of Mac Store are showing no signs of slowing. This week, we’ve got a guide cryptocurrency investing for beginners started in, and a digital marketing masterclass. Additionally, we’ve got a stereo pair of portable Bluetooth speakers, and a powerful but slim backup battery. Everything is massively discounted, some by more than 90 percent. Read on for more details:
Now that we’re in the era of the portable Bluetooth speaker, it’s hard to justify spending money on a stereo that just sits on a shelf at home.
That perception is exactly what this tiny stereo system from German audio giant Thonet and Vander aims to fight, though. The Rätsel brings old-school stereo sensibility to the modern age, with an absolutely room-filling sound in a tiny, tiny package. Why not have something that sounds this great right there on your shelf?
Bem’s upcoming Wireless Speaker Duo is great in all kinds of ways. First, it looks like an old-timey radio, complete with rounded edges and simple bent-metal handle. Second, it has proper playback control buttons on the top. And third, it contains two speakers which can be popped out and separated to make a stereo pair, before being returned to the base for charging.
Ultimate Ears, owned by Logitech, makes my favorite portable speaker ever: the UE Boom. The cylindrical powerhouse of a speaker is rugged, stylish, and easy to use.
Imagine my utter joy when I received Ultimate Ears’ latest entry into the portable speaker market, the UE MiniBoom, and found them to be even tinier and equally rugged and easy to use. Oh, and they sound fantastic, too.
I’m always surprised how much bigger and louder stereo speakers make music sound. It might be the fact that the 3-D space it creates fools our stupid brains into thinking that the music is surrounding us, but the difference is huge. Try it: take a device that’s hooked up to actual separate stereo speakers and flip between stereo and mono with your source.
And so I expect the Earshots Stereo Speakers to sound a lot bigger than their 34mm diameter would suggest.
It’s unlikely that the Jawbone Jambox will be shoved off its throne anytime soon; not necessarily because it’s the best-sounding portable Bluetooth speaker out there, but because it was here first, and it made a huge splash (in part because, yes, it sounds pretty good).
But I were to bet on a challenger, I might put my money on the smart new UE Boom. Not only is it ruggedized against drops and splashes, but it’s armed with two very unusual tricks.
It turns out that the iPad Mini is the first Apple mobile device to ship with stereo speakers. Although Apple’s product page only mentions a “built-in speaker,” the two grilles on the new iPad’s bottom edge do in fact contain separate stereo speakers.
After nearly a decade, my iTunes library weighs in at almost ninety-four gigabytes. A lot of serious music nerds would sneeze derisively at that, but it still represents over 13,000 songs that would take me, from start to finish, a full 48 days to listen to back to back.
I’d be lying if I said most of these had been acquired legally. Most of these albums were acquired on Bittorrent in my twenties. Many more were ripped from CDs lent to me by friends and family, or slurped up from Usenet to satisfy my obscure yet surface-thin musical fixations. Some were purchased through iTunes or other sources online, but truthfully, if you stripped everything out of my iTunes library that I’d acquired legally, I’d probably have a digital music library that could fit on a first generation iPod.
Over the course of the last two years, though, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown a conscience. These days, all of the music I listen to is listened to legally. But iTunes not only has no part in it. In fact, for the past two years, my iTunes library has just been collecting dust: a graveyard to the music piracy of my youth.
I’m ashamed of it. I want to try to explain things. Both why I started pirating music, why I stopped, and how, in fits and starts, being a music pirate helped transform me into someone who cared enough about music to buy it.
The ChargeCard is an iPhone charging that’s designed to live in your wallet, purse, or pocket. Shaped like a credit card and measuring just 2.54mm thick, this is the thinnest iPhone charging cable you can buy, and you can pull it out whenever you find a free USB port to charge your device. What’s more, you can finally say goodbye to carrying messy cables.
If you want to watch a movie on your Apple TV, but you want the sound to play through a stereo or home theater system, rather than through your TV, the only way to do that right now is to install a bunch of messy cables that connect one device to the other — and they need to be relatively close together.
In iOS 6 beta 3, however, you can send audio from the Apple TV to an AirPlay-enabled speaker system at the other end of the room wirelessly.
Pssst! You there, the one just about to buy that Airport Express for your AirPlay setup. Don’t waste your $99 on that plastic wall-wart. Come over here and I’ll sell you this nice white plastic AirPlay brick instead. How much? Well, seeing as it’s you, just $199, although it normally goes for $275.
Oh, by the way. It’s called the playGo AP1. You’re welcome.
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.
One of the best accessories you can purchase for your new iPhone is a little device that allows you to control your television and other audio/visual gear from your smartphone. It means you don’t have to search around for that lost remote, get up to change the channel, or keep replacing the batteries in all the remotes already littering your home.
The VooMote Zapper combines a universal remote control with a well designed app that allows you to control all of your equipment in every room using nothing but your iOS device. And it’s available now at Apple retail stores nationwide.
Decent in-dash stereo systems aren’t just expensive, they make you a target for a break-in… and why even bother with one when your iPhone can do everything a stereo dash can do, and a lot more besides?
Exactly, say the makers of Devium Dash, a new project up on Kickstarter. Instead of some expensive in-dash system that doesn’t do as much as your iDevice, why don’t you just slap your iPhone into the dash when you start driving instead?
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — “We feel like Airplay is going to be the next media,” Product Manager Gavin Reeg said during Klipsch’s 30 minute press event. Then it was VP of Product Development Mark Casavant’s turn (pictured above), and he made it very clear: their future is in Apple’s Airplay.
Pioneer has just launched its own versions of an AirPlay-equipped system, and they’re characteristically bigger and badder than the rest of the crowd.
Now here’s something else you don’t see every day: musician and entrepreneur Jean Michel Jarre has introduced the AeroDream One, an 11 foot tall technological marvel that combines an all-purpose iDevice dock and a 10,000W stereo system for the ultimate in colossal home entertainment.
With Sonos announcing only yesterday that Airplay support was coming to the Sonos range, as well as updating their iPhone and iPad apps – we thought it was about time we took the Sonos for a spin.
Let me start this by saying the Sonos multi-room system is the best solution available for getting multiple sources of music playing throughout your home – period. It’s not necessarily the cheapest, but it is without doubt the most complete solution you will find – and we love it!
