Tag: Subwoofer

I love bass in my games, TV shows, and movies on my smartphone and my computer. I hate the giant subwoofer enclosures though, since they always seem to take up a bunch of space. A company called soundmatters has a new subwoofer called the foxLO that will be displayed at CES 2012 for the first time.

The Bassjump 2 from Twelve South is a portable subwoofer that’s USB-powered, allowing you to tote it around almost anywhere. It’s designed to turn your MacBook into a digital boombox, improving the obviously the small, integrated speakers in Apple’s laptops.

A few years back, I wrote about an unusual concept backpack which had a sound system built into it. I’m not sure if that pack ever made it to market, but leave it to the ingenuity of one of the artists of Etsy to come up with a real one you can buy.

This was probably your parents’ worst nightmare. Thanks to Back to the Future, we all love gigantic speakers. Well, this subwoofer is pretty huge and it’s been made into a chair. Do you think it will be loud enough for you?

Klaus Diebel has always been a modder. He started out modding bicycles, then surfboards, then furniture, and now coffee-making computers. We featured his 3-in-1 iMac mod last year, and since then ol’ Klaus has diversified, happily hacking away at old Apple computers and giving new life to their cases.

While there a million ways to take your audio with you, most of them involve rather meek, tinny sound, thanks to the physical limitations of most earbuds and small speaker tech. The guys at digiZoid hope to overcome that problem with their newly-announced zo personal subwoofer system.

This reworked iMac is defnitely the most over-the top Mac mods I’ve seen in a while. In addition to sporting a Mac Mini under the hood, the iMac CS has a coffee maker and a subwoofer inside it too. Modder Klaus Diebel of Kiwidee built this whimsical all-in-one computer using the shell of an old iMac, and loaded up with a full Mac Mini, a JBL Spot sound system, and a WMF1 single-cup coffee maker, punched through the face of the computer.

While plenty of flat screen televisions have decent built-in sound, you really need to add on a separate speaker system if you want some real stereo separation and bass thump. The new Q-TV2 speaker system provides a unique way to improve your TV’s sound without cluttering your room with extra boxes and wires. Created by Q Acoustics, the Q-TV2 straps onto the back of your flat-panel television, providing true 2.1

This egg-shaped chair may look like a serious throwback to the 1970s, but it’s actually a brand new home entertainment plaything designed to be integrated with modern media rooms. The Sound Egg chair is a completely self-contained 5.1

Finally, there’s a Weighted Companion Cube mod that actually has enough heft to earn its name. This custom-built subwoofer bears a striking resemblance to that little cube that you had to euthanize the last time you played Portal. Modder d_stilgar spent the last several months painstakingly recreating the details of the Companion Cube, carefully mounting a heavy duty subwoofer and amplifier into the cabinet. And when the lights go down, the subwoofer glows in the dark, thanks to some cleverly integrated pink EL lighting. D_stilgar says he’s working on a pair of matching Portal-inspired speakers, but won’t reveal what they look like yet.

Ok, they only cost more than a “low-end” Ferrari, say an F430 — but at $180,000 for the system, these monstrous speakers certainly aren’t for the frugal. MBL’s 101 X-treme speaker system cranks out sound using a set of four custom built towers.

Building out that ultimate home theater, but can’t deal with wires running all over the place? Sure, there are plenty of virtual surround systems which consolidate the front, rear and center satellite channels. But all of those really require a subwoofer if you want any meaningful low-end. Now Infinity and JBL (both part of the Harman International family) have announced subwoofers that can be placed anywhere in your room without running any speaker wires.

I can definitely say I’ve never seen a subwoofer that looks quite like this one. Elemental Designs $2500 Dodecasub offers up ten individual ten-inch subwoofers in a single, geometrically striking package. The enormous multi-element subwoofer looks like a giant twelve-sided die to me.

Is it just me, or have alien life forms abducted the workers in speaker factories lately? In recent days, I’ve come across some otherworldly radial speakers, dramatic communication towers, and even some that look like the aliens themselves.

If you’re in the market for some dramatic looking speakers, and can’t afford the $50k radial loudspeakers I told you about yesterday, you might want to check out these ones from Britz. They may not be the biggest or most powerful speakers out there, but they sure look purty.

I’ve written about some out of this world speaker designs in my time, but never anything quite like these speakers from Germany’s MBL. Their 101 E Radialstrahler Reference speakers offer a striking sculptural design that makes them look more like something you’d see at a power plant than something that would crank out world-class audio.