In 1992 Duke beat Kentucky in the NCAA championship by making a basket in the last second of the game. And you can relive that incredible moment—and hours more—today because the NCAA has put 75 years worth of March Madness highlights on YouTube. More »
Streaming music specialist Sonos has been hinting at home theater expansion for years now, but it’s taken until today for the fruits of that ambition to arrive: the Sonos PLAYBAR, aiming for a spot under your TV. Promising the traditional Sonos ease of setup and use, but with a dual-personality catering both for TV and movie audio, and for music, the PLAYBAR hooks up as another zone in your home entertainment network and packs nine speakers as well as playing nicely with other PLAY models. We caught up with Sonos to find out why the PLAYBAR was special.
The company’s reluctance to extend itself beyond musical speakers has been down to a fear of losing focus: the audience is still dedicated music lovers, Sonos says, but concedes that many in that audience also love films. Meanwhile, while display technology has advanced hugely, skinny flat-panel TV sets have squeezed speakers into something of an afterthought, thus opening the door to hardware like the PLAYBAR.
All-in-one speakers aren’t new, of course, but PLAYBAR does some things differently. That starts with setup: there’s wireless onboard, for the easiest way of connecting, but you also get a pair of ethernet ports on the back for wired networks (and for passing the connection through, say, to your smart TV, or being the first node hard-wired to your router for an overall Sonos installation). Otherwise there’s just power and an optical digital input – no HDMI, since Sonos expects the TV to remain the “brains” in charge of switching and managing media – along with the usual three physical buttons for mute and volume up/down which are on one end of the bar.
When you first set up, the PLAYBAR can learn the volume buttons on your favorite remote (whether that be for your TV, your Blu-ray player, or your set-top box). Out of the box there’s presets for the popular brands/models – most users will just have to press the volume-up key for the PLAYBAR to recognize it – but there’s also a nine-key-press learning mode for new sets. Cleverly, Sonos collects up those programming settings and updates them across all PLAYBAR units, meaning the next user with the same remote won’t have to go through the teaching process. On the back of the soundbar there’s a broad IR repeater strip, just in case placing the PLAYBAR in front of your TV blocks its IR receiver, and there are two IR windows on the Sonos itself, catering for table or wall mounting.
Back when the PLAYBAR was first spotted sneaking through the FCC, there was speculation as to what its dual wireless chipsets might be used for. As the company explained to us, it’s all down to latency – or the avoidance of it – in surround sound mode. The PLAYBAR has one regular WiFi chip to hook up to the network as per all Sonos speakers, but also has a second, ultra-low-latency chip which is used to maintain up to three perfectly-synchronized channels in a surround setup, feeding two PLAY:3 rear speakers and a SUB subwoofer.
As for the speakers inside the PLAYBAR itself, there are six mid-woofers and three tweeters, the latter spread across the outer edges and one in the middle. At normal volumes, the woofers are synchronized, but they can automatically shift out of phase if required – complete with some clever DSP – to avoid distortion when you crank up the audio. Sonos has also equipped the PLAYBAR with completely different settings for music and movies (in fact they automatically change depending on physical orientation, too).
Most importantly, in either mode, it sounds great. Music has a surprising degree of precision, with vocals coming through clearly in the center while the rest of the soundstage has a spread that belies the placing of the speakers. Movies, meanwhile, go even further: the virtual surround you get with the PLAYBAR alone is impressively effective, and the bass has some decent thump to it (given the limitations of the 36 x 5.5 x 3.4 inch footprint and the speakers Sonos has been able to fit), but group it up with a couple of PLAY:3 rear channels and the SUB, and it’s both incredibly loud and precise.
Sonos PLAYBAR overvew video:
Control, as you’d expect, is via Sonos’ existing PC, Mac, iOS, and Android apps: the PLAYBAR shows up as a regular zone, which means you can group it up for party music. However, there’s a little extra consideration for the TV focus there too; if you try to add the PLAYBAR to a group, it’ll double-check to make entirely sure you want to do that, and if you start playback on your TV, the soundbar will automatically switch to whatever is coming through its optical input. You can, though, manually change the audio while leaving the screen on, handy if you want to show a photo slideshow with music from, say Spotify.
The Sonos PLAYBAR will go on sale on March 5, priced at $699 in the US, £599 in the UK, and €699 in Europe.
Sonos PLAYBAR hands-on: Your TV audio gets clever is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Dell’s UltraSharp displays still have a certain cachet among sticklers for quality, most of all at the high end — so today’s release of three advanced models might as well be a bonanza. The 24-inch U2413, 27-inch U2713H and 30-inch U3014 (above) once more center on PremierColor and the visual accuracy to match. Even the two smaller displays have a 12-bit processor that helps their LCDs reach 99 percent of the Adobe RGB color space and all of the sRGB space, or enough of the spectrum to eliminate most rude surprises with photo work. What else is new? Dell hasn’t divulged full details of the screens themselves, but there’s now a single-display arm and a dual-display stand to get just the right placement. Like what you see — or rather, what you will see? The U2413 and U2713H should be available now for $599 and $999 alongside the $149 arm and $169 stand, while the range-topping U3014 is due “soon” for $1,499.
Update: We reached out to Dell for more details, and the updates are substantial — all three displays bump up to a 2-million-to-1 dynamic contrast ratio, an increase in Adobe RGB color gamut coverage (up from 96 percent), a more adjustable height and support for DisplayPort daisy chaining. The two larger screens also add Mini DisplayPort.
Filed under: Displays, Peripherals, Dell
Source: Dell
Lab rats have a new companion, but it’s not friendly. Researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, have developed a robotic rat called WR-3 whose job is to induce stress and depression in lab animals, creating models of psychological conditions on which new drugs can be tested. More »
Vertu, the formerly-owned-by-Nokia maker of eye-wateringly expensive, leather-clad, gem-encrusted, handmade-in-the-U.K. ‘luxury’ smartphones, has launched an Android-powered device: the Vertu Ti.
After leaving the Nokia fold, back in October, it was rumoured that Vertu planned to do what many a Nokia fan still wishes that company would do: ditch Symbian and adopt Android. Today Vertu unveiled its first Android-powered phone, along with a new slogan: “Handmade in England. Powered by Android”.
The Vertu Ti runs Android 4.0, skinned with a dedicated Vertu UI. The handset costs from a whopping €7,900 — approaching $11,000 — for which you also get a 3.7 inch “virtually scratchproof sapphire crystal screen”; a grade 5 titanium strong-but-lightweight casing; a dual-core 1.7 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM; an 8 megapixel rear camera with 1080p video capture plus a 1.3 megapixel front-facing lens; 64GB of internal memory; and ‘Bang & Olufsen tuned’ sound. What you don’t get: 4G.
Speaking to the BBC, Vertu CEO Perry Oosting explained why the company decided to adopt Android, rather than follow Nokia’s lead and opt for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. “You need to be part of an ecosystem,” he said. ”Your device will have to integrate with other devices. I think the Windows phone will have success but it is still a relatively small market share. At the moment it doesn’t have the global reach of Android — which is about 60 per cent of the market.”
Oosting didn’t mention Android’s openness to being customised but Microsoft’s refusal to allow mobile makers to skin Windows Phone with their own UIs may well rule out any luxury brand tie-ins, since Windows Phone currently offers limited scope for branding — beyond being able to display a branded homescreen Live Tile.
Despite (finally) reaching the conclusion that ecosystems are king, Vertu still obviously sells to a very exclusive club of buyers — with huge amounts of cash to spend on a phone. There are just 326,000 Vertu smartphone owners globally after 10 years in the industry, according to the BBC. China is said to be Vertu’s biggest market.
Western Digital has outed its latest home media streamer, the WD TV Play, a compact set-top box that packs in Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and more, but also unlocks content on the home network. Seventy bucks gets you DLNA support in addition to the more typical web-based streaming options, meaning if you have a NAS or other shared drive somewhere on your network, stuffed full of music, photos, and video, you can funnel them over to your TV too.
On the web side, there’s support for YouTube, Netflix, Hulu Plus, SlingPlayer, VUDU, Pandora, and Spotify content, in addition to Facebook access. It’s navigable both via the bundled remote – which has pre-programmed shortcut buttons to popular services – and by the free iOS and Android remote apps, a single installation of which can control multiple WD TV Play boxes on the network.
Up to 1080p Full HD output is supported, and there’s both WiFi b/g/n and wired ethernet for getting online. Ports include HDMI and an optical digital audio output, plus an analog A/V output which, with the supplied composite cable, can get older TVs up and running.
You can even load in your favorite RSS feeds, and have those on-screen so that you can keep up to date with news. The WD TV Play is on sale from today, priced at $69.99.
WD TV Play wants you to forget your Apple TV, please is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
JVC Kenwood is releasing a stylish sound system, the RV-S1-S, with a unique tube-like design. It produces powerful deep bass sounds and avoids unnecessary vibrations, utilizing 4 high-powered speakers (including 2 woofer outputs).
The built-in iPhone/iPod dock is also very interesting. You can close the cover, so it will protect the device during outdoor activity. When using iPhone 5, you need to connect it to the USB Port.
Music saved with USB memory or SD card (MP3/WMA) is playable. …
Good news for anyone who’s stared in envy as NASA sends rover after rover to explore and study Mars. You no longer need countless millions and a team of rocket scientists to perform your own experiments on the red planet. For just $25 ThinkGeek will sell you your very own shard of our celestial neighbor. More »
Is Apple working on the iWatch? This has been a question that many pundits have asked for years now, and again today, the New York Times reports that this may indeed be the case.
Feel that? If you’re an audio purist, the sensation of your wallet tingling is probably a familiar experience. This time, you have Meridian to thank, which is aiming to help you get the most from your nice headphones. The company just debuted the Explorer: a portable, USB-powered DAC and headphone amplifier that’s priced at $299. Like all external DACs, the unit promises better sound quality than typical onboard solutions can deliver, and as a high-end touch, the Explorer offers asynchronous USB audio for greater timing precision and reduced jitter. Alongside the 3.5mm amplified headphone output, you’ll also find another 3.5mm jack that supports both analog and mini Toslink connections. Each Explorer is built in the UK and measures approximately 4.0 x 1.25 x 0.7 inches. Perhaps most importantly, though, its design doesn’t reek of something that was cobbled together in the garage.
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Source: Meridian Audio
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