Hasta La Gadget!

Soundmatters made a few (sine) waves last year with the introduction of its awfully cute foxL Bluetooth speaker, but for those preoccupied with other matters, there’s nothing wrong with snagging v2 in order to catch up. The pocket-sized (5.6- x 2.2- x 1.4-inches) speaker sports new BT circuitry that allows for 3x better reception than the prior version, and it also automatically pairs and searches for Bluetooth devices. Users can now answer and terminate a call from the speaker itself, and as expected, you’ll also get a bit more volume out of this one compared to the original. The rechargeable battery will keep the jams spinning for five hours on a full charge, and if the international charging prongs weren’t enough, there’s also the option to regenerate over USB. It’s set to ship later this month to jet-setting music junkies for $199, while a wired (read: non-BT) variant will go for $30 less.

Soundmatters’ foxL v2 portable Bluetooth speaker rocks the suburbs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BassJump is a subwoofer that turns your MacBook into a pair of satellite speakers. Instead of silencing the MacBook’s surprisingly good built-in speakers when you hook it up, like a regular external speaker, it augments them with what they lack the most: bass.

After installing a preference pane on the host Mac, you plug in the BassJump to a spare USB port (good luck there). The software controls the crossover frequency (the frequency at which the sound is split and sent to either the sub or the satellites) and lets you choose an EQ preset such as “rock” or “pop”. You can also control the volume of the bass independently to choose how big a kick you get.

At $80, the aluminum-bodied BassJump costs the same as many full 2.1 speaker setups. The advantage, we suppose, is that the BassJump means fewer boxes and cables on your desk.

Bassjump product page [TwelveSouth]

Bassjump press release [TwelveSouth]

Note to PC speaker makers: don’t force me to use yet another USB port when I have a perfectly good headphone socket on my notebook. I know that some audio-outs (and their preceding circuitry) are junk, but if I’m paying $500 for a pair of your computer speakers, it’s likely I have a fairly decent computer to hook them up to.

Ok, rant over, and apart from sucking up a USB port to feed the music directly into their own digital/analog converter, the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin MM-1 looks to be a rather sweet speaker. The Zeppelins are actually a pair of shrunken hi-fi speakers instead of the more common sub-and-satellite setup, which means you get “the full spectrum of frequencies”. B&W (now you recognize the brand, right?) has also tweaked the circuitry to turn these into near-field monitor speakers, which means they sound better close-up like studio monitors, instead of from a distance like most hi-fi speakers.

B&W has also incorporated its “Nautilus tweeter”, which is not an underwater Twitter poster but a cone-shaped tube behind the tweeter taken from its iconic shell-shaped speaker of the same name. This, according to B&W, “dampens resonance and produces purer high frequency sounds.”

We’re not sure that the average listener could tell the difference, seeing as we pump compressed MP3s out of our computers, but if nothing else they’ll look good on your desktop. And they even have a 3.5mm input jack, for whiners like me. Due February 2010.

Zeppelin product page [B&W]

Yamaha seems to be pushing its newly unveiled yAired technology pretty hard, with the second system to sport it unveiled just weeks after the first. The $399.95 MCR-140 is far from being the most stylish mini stereo we’ve seen — in fact, it’s probably one of the ugliest — but it is available in a rainbow’s worth of hues (or just ten), and it does talk to iPods and subwoofers sans cabling. Aside from that, you’ll also get an old fashioned CD player, a front-panel USB socket, an iPod dock on the top, FM radio tuner and mini jack inputs for other sources. The box itself packs a pair of 4-inch drivers and ships with a bundled remote, and if you’re not so interested in cutting cords, a yAired-less MCR-040 is available for $120 less.

Continue reading Yamaha’s yAired-equipped MCR-140 micro stereo wirelessly talks to iPods and subwoofers

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio

Yamaha’s yAired-equipped MCR-140 micro stereo wirelessly talks to iPods and subwoofers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Think of a soundbar rolled into a circular, battery-powered body and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what we’re looking at here. The product’s name — EOps i24R3Portable Wireless Waterproof Digital Speaker Platform — should tidy up any further queries you may have. Michael Young’s latest design for EOps, whose appearance only hints at its i24R3 heritage, is a fully sealed noisemaker that can communicate via wireless USB or Bluetooth, depending on the model. You should pick your poison with care as there are no options for wired hook-ups. With a Li-Pol battery pack and an array of flat panel speakers and passive radiators inside, this could well be the ultimate in portable weatherproof speaker design, but even if it isn’t, we’d still consider mounting it on a wall and worshipping it as our Sun God.

[Via Design Spotter]

Filed under: Home Entertainment

EOps i24R3Portable speaker is mad, bad, and waterproof originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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