Tag: Sound

I don’t know what’s in the water this week, but I seem to have a serious music theme going on here. Do you like to play piano? Got an iPhone? Well, if you happen to have jailbroken yours, you can now turn it into a musical instrument.

One of the most popular computers from the 1980s, the Commodore 64, is having a minor renaissance as an electronic musical instrument. The C64’s audio chip is famous for producing an array of warm, familiar 8-bit beats and blips.

This old-fashioned looking alarm clock has a digital secret beneath its cover. It lets you take a custom audio clip and use it as your wake-up sound. Just hook the battery-operated clock up to your PC via a USB cable, install the included software, and copy sounds directly to the clock to customize your alarm to your own preferences.

Alienware is showing off their latest high-end server, designed for use in home theaters and media rooms. The system contains everything you need for controlling your digital media in one slick aluminum box. The Alienware HD Media Server (HDMS) comes in a dramatic brushed aluminum, rack-mountable enclosure, and provides a powerful HTPC under the hood.

This slick-looking device clips onto your car’s visor, giving you seamless hands-free calling for your mobile phone. Bluetrek’s SurfaceSound Compact uses NXT flat-panel speaker technology to provide plenty of volume and clear calling quality using a Bluetooth connection to your phone.

The Nintendo DS Lite might be the most successful portable gaming console ever, but it won’t win any awards for pumping out lots of volume. This add-on snaps around your trusty DS Lite and gives it a serious boost in the audio department.

You’ve gotta love these speakers that look like giant iPod earbuds. Unless your last name Bunyon or your first name is Green, these jumbo earphones will have to sit on your desktop instead of in your ears.

At first glance, you’d look at these pictures and think that these were some pretty cool lighting fixtures. You’d be right. But in addition to casting a warm glow, these illuminated orbs are actually speakers. Moonlight’s light globes conceal speakers which can handle from 120 to 200 watts of amplification — more than enough to pack some serious punch.

Taking a page out of The Pirates of the Carribean, these speakers look like something you might find lying around in Davy Jones’ Locker at the bottom of the sea. These skulls may look olde and crusty(e?),

This music sequencer takes the same basic interface concept as the ball bearing sequencer I recently showed you, and makes it deliciously chewable. Instead of shiny metal spheres, this sequencer uses a bunch of colorful candy-coated gumballs to make a beat you can dance to.

I don’t know what’s gotten into Belkin lately. All of a sudden, they’re cranking out devices that not only deliver on functionality, but that look really, really good. One of their latest releases is the Belkin Podcast Studio, which adds a complete audio recording studio to your iPod for under $100.

Whether you’re literally joined at the hip to your brother or sister, or you and your significant other are just inseparable, have I got an iPod dock for you. I guess that JVC has decided that the market for the multiple iPod household is growing enough to warrant the creation of this two-headed beast.

Being a fan of big, multi-speaker room-filling sound systems, I find it strange that I’m captivated by this miniature speaker. This tiny 1-inch cube speaker is so small that you can easily keep it in your pocket.

I was over on the mStation website recently, when I stumbled across this interesting new sound system buried under “coming soon”. It looks like the mStation TheaterBar will soon join the ranks of one-box home theater sound systems, designed to mesh beautifully with today’s flat-screen televisions.

At first glance, you wouldn’t think this hat-box shaped container would be a sound system, but it is. The cylindrical wooden box conceals compact stereo speakers perfect for your computer or media player. Volume and power controls are concealed beneath a set of flaps reminiscent of a ladybug’s wings, but they can be used in the closed position thanks to perforations in the wings.

Now I’ve seen some cheap speakers in my days, but even the chintziest ones I’ve seen were at least made out of plastic. Not these. These ones are fabricated from thick paper stock. Xenics Music Cube M speakers offer up some truly low-fidelity sound thanks to their flimsy cardboard construction.