Tag: stereo

Philips NP2900 – MP3 streaming with sound engineering

Phillips-NP2900.jpg

Part of me thinks that Philips is too scared to give its products proper names in case we’re disappointed with what they produce. It’s a bit of a shame really because the quite dry sounding Philips NP2900 is actually a very nice piece of kit.

What we’re looking at is an apparently well designed, well engineered £249 machine that’ll work over Wi-Fi to play streamed MP3s from your hard drive and all billions of internet radio stations too.

Better still, the NP, er, what was that number again, comes with a new Philips technology they call LivingSound which aims to expand the stereo sweet spot of the system with a series of precisely angled drivers within the four speakers and specially levelled internal amps. The plan is to broaden the soundscape as much as possible.

Naturally, it also comes with Philips FullSound tech too which aims to unruin the ruin caused by MP3 file compression at the slight expense of having to guess what the music is supposed to sound like. Perhaps not a technology for the purist but then nor are MP3s.

Available from May ’09 (this month)

Phillips

Philips Ariaz and Opus GoGear Review:

Daniel Sung Home audio

Homeless man designs revolutionary speakers

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A homeless bloke called Kevin Nelson who lives in California has managed to find a way of getting two distinct stereo sound channels out of a single cabinet. He’s calling it “Crossover Imaging”, because it involves wiring the crossover in a very special way. Each speaker delivers both a left and a right channel.

He’s been working on it since 1989, but despite winning out in comparisons with Polk, KEF, and Klipsch, and a low low price of less than $1,000, he’s only sold 35 pairs. That might be why he’s homeless, I suppose. His company – Zealth Audio Loudspeakers – is currently looking for investors to start full-scale production.

Cnet (via Crunchgear)

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Duncan Geere Home audio

Shiny Review: Intempo Digital BTS-01 Stereo Bluetooth Wireless Speaker

intempo_bts01_0108.jpg Intempo Digital has gained a reputation for producing solidly built, mid-priced gadgets that pack popular technology into a simple, user-friendly exterior. I can see anyone’s parents or technophobe friends being attracted by the smooth, almost retro simplicity of this Bluetooth speaker.

It’s not compact or ultra-exciting in its design, but it won’t look out of place in any living room, bedroom or kitchen. More importantly it’s easy to use and produces reasonable small-scale sound quality. We used it mainly with a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone and found that once the phone had picked up the device it was a matter of something like four button presses to get the music going (and obviously that will depend on the device you’re streaming)…

Katherine Hannaford Home audio, Reviews