Stretching the term “portable” somewhat, Edifier have produced a zero compromise 2.1 portable audio solution that includes a discrete subwoofer and two satellites in a nifty little carry case.
It’s all really rather pretty, with the 9w subwoofer made from brushed aluminium and two tasteful satellite speakers in a spherical design with metal weave speaker grills.
The speakers take 12v of DC, meaning they’re not feeble USB powered nonsense and use a standard 2.3mm stereo line in so you can use them with pretty much any audio source.
Whilst perusing a Sony store looking for an all-in-one computer suitable for wall mounting an enthusiastic attendant gave me a demonstration of the Sony Rolly.
And it is hard not to be enthusiastic about the Rolly. It’s an interesting concept, a dancing Mp3 player, that moves fluidly and accurately in time with the music emitting from the two little speakers on each end. It has two expressive flaps that cover and protect these speakers and allow it to make a little bit more of a show of its song and dance.
I’ve been playing with the Tangent Quattro MK2 for the past few days and absolutely love it. It’s small, packs a serious sonic punch for its size and has classic good looks to boot.
The one thing I don’t love is the FM Radio. It’s just a little bit too old school for me, and DAB would have been a much preferred inclusion. Aside from this the only thing I would change in this little beauty is the dials and buttons. Machined aluminium puh-lease! No self respecting audiophile product should be caught with plastic volume and tuning dials, no matter how good they might feel.
Looks and traditional radio aside, let us get to what the Tangent Quattro MK2 is really about: Internet Radio.
Alas, I’ve been so addicted to actually playing with it, and so busy traveling down for the Microsoft Christmas Showcase that I didn’t have time to crank out a review to coincide with its release, rest assured a review is on its way for this fantastic iPhone synth- if you’re in a fit of indecision about whether or not to purchase it that must be resolved immediately then take my advice and do so!
I can say, with absolute certainty, that if you have any interest in sound design or synthesized music then this is an absolutely essential iPhone purchase that will blow you away with its sheer power. The idea of turning your iPhone into a pocket-sized synthesizer with this much power seems like a pipe dream, Noise.io has not only gone and done it but set the bar so absurdly high for competition it’ll likely be unchallenged for months, if not forever.
The concept of an iPhone Synthesizer is pretty brave, the memory management issues in the iPhone’s firmware are a pain to deal with and cause every single application to experience periodic crashes. You’ll be using Noise.io so often that you will, unfortunately, experience crashes and perceive them as being more frequent. Rest assured, though, that Noise.io is freakin’ stable and rebooting your iPhone before (and after, if you want other Apps to run without crashing) using it is a good idea.
From my first tentative try of the disappointing and absurd Band for iPhone, to immediately googling “iPhone Syntheszier” it’s been about two months with quite significant delays to the release of Noise.io. But those delays have more than paid off with some of the functionality they took the extra time to include, the step sequencer for example, being instrumental to my love of the app. What we have now is an absolutely genuine iPhone Synthesizer that looked so good on paper that people claimed it was vapor-ware. The reality of Noise.io is, however, beating all but the wildest of expectations and the only serious complaints I’ve seen thus far are lack of WAV export and crashes due to the iPhones rather unfortunate take on memory management and Noise.io’s heavy use of the iPhone’s resources. Perhaps a firmware 3.0 will make things better, only time will tell.
I will continue to tinker with Noise.io and create patch banks, but I’m sure there are sound designers out there who will massively eclipse my skills and come out with some awesome content for Noise.io that will go down a storm with the less tech-savvy owners and with those who just want to use Noise.io as a live performance tool.
I realize now that I must be reaching dangerous levels of geekiness; I find myself mentally adding the word “pwnage”, complete with the deliberate typographical error and associated change in enunciation, every time I see the brand name PURE. I really wish I was joking.
Now I have got that out into the open I would like to introduce the PURE i-10 iPod Dock which took me all of approximately half an hour to form a positive opinion of.
There are few products you can pick up and immediately form enough of an opinion of to warrant bashing out a review the same day. Keyboards are a good example, particularly because one can simultaneously use them and write about them. The PURE i-10 iPod Dock is another example. The moment I removed it from its packaging this very morning, witnessed its minimalist form with a gentle nod to the iPhone/ipod Touch design aesthetic and felt its quality reassuring weight I knew it was going to be a good, solid product and further testing proved that I was not far wrong.
Borrowing heavily from the design of Sennheisers award winning PXC350 “cloak of silence” noise canceling headphones the PC350 Gaming Headset removes the noise canceling, adds a microphone and positions itself as a high-end gaming product designed to help you keep your in-game noise to yourself.
With a curious new take on styling that I firmly believe should be confined to the floors of Roman bath houses the Creative Zen Mozaic has upon its face a mozaic of buttons and colour toned squares that looks more than a little perculiar.
At last I’m back in touch with my old friends Saitek, albeit through yet another new point of contact who have made available the Saitek 3D 210 speakers for my perusal.
The Neverlate boasts an alarming (sorry!) 21 individually customisable alarms each of which can be assigned to a different radio station. That’s 7 daily alarms for you, 7 for your partner and, presumably, 7 additional ones to finally wake you up after you’ve ignored the other two each morning. I think this more than justifies the name “Neverlate” and possibly even “Nevergetanysleepeveragain”.
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