Hasta La Gadget!

The Razer Ferox speakers are – being from Razer – aimed at laptop-toting gamers. But the portable, battery-powered speakers would be good for anyone whose notebook’s built-in speakers aren’t up to the job.

The pod-like boxes actually open up when powered-on, shoving the 30mm speaker-cones out of the top and making room for a bass-resonance chamber, which Razer has chosen over real subwoofers. You’ll also have to contend with a glowing blue light shining out from a ring around the base of the speakers.

While having two battery-powered (12-hours, rechargeable) units means you can get better stereo separation than a single two-speaker box, you don’t gain any real independence. The input is via 3.5mm jack only, so you’re going to have to run a cable after all. Bluetooth would make these truly portable.

The price is reasonable enough, however. The Feroxes come in at $60 for the pair, leaving enough cash for pizza and Mountain Dew at your next LAN party.

Razer Ferox product page [Razer. Thanks, Marina!]

See Also:

• Razer Nostromo Gaming Keypad Is Not For the Office
• Razer Shrieks, Whirls Commemorative Boomslang Mouse Around Head …
• Ears-On With the SuperTooth Disco Bluetooth Boombox
• SuperTooth, a Block-Rocking Portable Bluetooth Speaker
• CES 2011: Jawbone Jambox Wireless Speaker – Video – Wired
• Jawbone Creates a Wireless Speaker With Serious Boom
• CES 2011: Jawbone Jambox Wireless Speaker – Video – Wired

The egg-shaped chair was one of the coolest innovations to come out of the late 60s and early 70s — right up there with the Camaro, hot pants and the first five Black Sabbath albums.

Now that same “room within a room” stoner vibe has been updated for the Blu-ray set. The Sound Egg is a retro-cool egg chair fitted with a full surround sound system — complete with a subwoofer behind the seat — and coated on the inside with sound-isolating foam. Climb in, crank it up, and you’ve got your own personal capsule for watching movies, playing games or just plain spacing-out.

These chairs start at around $1,500, and you’ll pay extra for custom colors and for the optional mechanical arm mount for an LCD screen.

We first got a peek at these things about a year ago, but we had a chance to actually try one out at CES in Las Vegas. The sound inside is fantastic: clear, immediate and loud. Best of all, the foam does a great job of isolating the noise. When you’re inside, the outside world is effectively silenced. And since the sound system is considerably quieter on the outside than it is inside, it’s well-suited for any Dave Matthews fans or Call of Duty devotees you’re forced to share a living space with.

See also:

• Sound Egg Chair: A Cocoon for Your Crib
• Smart HD Speakers Bring the ‘Sweet Spot’ to You, Wherever You Are
• MIT Creates ‘Surround Vision’ for TVs
• Optimize Your Surround Sound System

LAS VEGAS — Orb, maker of the little $100 set-top box that brings web content to your TV, will now do the same for your Blu-ray player in the form of a Blu-ray disc, called Orb BR.

Pop the disc into your PlayStation 3 or other Blu-ray player, fire up the companion smartphone app and you’re good to go. You can now stream Netflix, Hulu, Comedy Central, and Amazon video, amongst others, and watch it on your big-screen TV. With server software installed on your computer, you can also send content from there.

In fact, in some ways this magic disc is actually better than the actual Orb set-top box. The hardware only supports standard-def video. This $20 disc, on the other hand, will do 720p and 1080p.

Orb BR will be available late February.

See Also:

• Orb Brings Hulu and Network TV Streaming to Your Living Room …
• Review: Orb Audio Home Theater System Brings Well Rounded Sound …

Aperion’s Intimus 4T wireless surround sound speakers, available in February, will use Summit Wireless’ auto-calibration system.

LAS VEGAS — Home theater nerds will advise you to spend hours calibrating your surround sound speakers, adjusting delay times and tweaking volume levels to place the system’s “sweet spot” in perfect alignment with the well-worn ass groove in your sofa.

Now, you can advise them to suck it. We’ve just seen a demo of a wireless HD audio system for home theaters here at CES that takes only minutes to set up, sounds awesome, and doesn’t give a damn where you’re sitting.

You unpack the speakers and just plop them down in your room wherever they fit the best. Then you sit on the couch and press a button on the remote. The system locates all of the speakers and assigns the proper channel to each one: right-front, center, left-rear and so on. It also calibrates all of the speakers, adjusting the volume and delay of each one individually.

This auto-optimization places the sweet spot of your home theater in the exact position where you’re sitting when you press the button. Calibration takes only one second, literally — the remote sends out an ultra high-frequency ping, each speaker answers, and the system calculates the distance based on the delay. Get up and move to another seat, press the button again, and the sweet spot jumps to your new location.

Best of all, the system sounds downright amazing. It’s fully uncompressed HD audio (24-bit/48 kHz, with 96 kHz capability), so there are no nasty compression artifacts gunking up the sound.

The technology was developed by Summit Wireless. The company is currently licensing it to speaker and TV manufacturers, with the first products coming to market next month. Summit’s system use the U-NII wireless band, so the audio data is streamed outside the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies used by most consumer wireless devices, keeping interference to a minimum. It also uses its own error correction and timing technology. Summit Wireless says it has latency down to between 2 milliseconds and 5 milliseconds — low enough for games, and lower than what’s required for movies, since most humans don’t start to notice lip-syncing problems until around 9 or 10 milliseconds. I certainly didn’t notice any syncing issues during the demo.

The lucky company to ship the first Summit-equipped wireless speakers is Aperion, which has both 5.1 and 7.1 versions of its Intimus 4T home theater systems arriving in February. These are the speakers I heard today. They are active units (each speaker has its own on-board amp) and the system includes the remote control and the wireless base station that connects to your TV with an HDMI cable.

Aperion’s speakers sound killer, but they are big and expensive. The 5.1 system is $2,500 and the 7.1 system is $3,000. However, Summit is also working with other companies to develop a sub-$1,000 surround system and a soundbar system. Summit also says it’s “in talks” with several TV manufacturers to produce Summit-compatible TVs, which be ready by 2012.

See also:

• Altec-Lansing Speakers Will Toss Your Tunes 100 Yards
• LED Lightbulb Speakers for Wireless Music in Every Room
• The Real Original Remote Control: Zenith Space Command
• Accessory Streams Video Wirelessly to Any HDMI TV

We might still say we’re “taping” a TV show, but unless you’re my parents, who still watch old Star Trek: TNG episodes on VHS, then you will have thrown out your VCR years ago. But what if you want to record something, and you don’t have a TiVo?

Then you buy one of Panasonic’s Viera G3-series TVs, which lets you record direct to an SD card. The first set is the 42-inch TH-L42G3, and it will rip hi-def TV-shows to SD, SDHC or SDXC cards at up to 1920×1080 resolution at 24Mbps. A 64GB card will hold five hours’ worth of video.

Should $200 for a 64GB card be a little steep, there’s also a USB port so you can hook up a regular hard-drive — a less portable but probably more practical solution.

Otherwise, the TV sports all the usual modern niceties: two HDMI ports, Ethernet, an IPS, LED-backlit display for a wide viewing angle, and Panasonic’s own Viera-link, which lets you hook up compatible cameras to view slideshows and video directly.

The G3 TVs will ship to Japan February 18th 2011.

Oh, and if you are my parents, the Christmas parcel arrived, thanks. There had better be some chocolate in there, is all I’m saying.

Viera G3-series press release [Panasonic via Akihabara News]

See Also:

• JVC Kills VCR Dead