If you’re less than chuffed with the distinctly average sound of the bundled iPhone headphones, or you’re fed up being a mugger-attracting, walking advert for Apple products with those ‘iconic’ white headphones, then a headphone upgrade is always a good call.
There’s all sorts of snazzy docks available for iPod/iPhones, but music-mad users looking to squeeze the last drops of sonic goodness out of their MP3 collections should perhaps take a peek at Arcam’s irDock.
Replacing their earlier rDock, Arcam’s shiny new high-end audiophile dock sports a die-cast aluminium anti-vibration enclosure with a damped rubber base offering RF shielding, and comes with a bundled remote for full loafing-on-the-sofa control.
If you’re fed up straining to hear the weedy ‘bssch bssch’ of your laptop’s feeble built in speakers, then Logitech’s new Laptop Speaker Z205 could add some much needed oomph.
If you’re looking to upgrade the deeply average earphones that came bundled with your iPod, iPhone or MP3 player, Sennheiser’s natty CX550 MkII noise-isolating earphones could represent a tempting investment.
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For some unlucky users (including us), there’s been recurring problems with the sound vanishing from Windows and Windows 7 machines when they’re woken up from hibernation.
All our computers run 64 bit versions of Windows, but we understand that users on 32-bit Windows have suffered the same annoying glitch.
Fabulously daft- yet somehow compellingly clever – are these bizarre eye-controlled earphones which have been shown off at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
We cant say we’ve ever felt aggrieved by the lack of eye controlled earphones out in the market, but Japanese communication giant NTT Docomo reckon they could be reaching into an untapped market of potential eye twitchers.
There’s no end of weird and wonderful looking powered speakers available for hooking up to iPods, MP3 players and computers, but we were only interested in one thing for Chez Wirefresh: the best possible sound.
Seeing as we listen to music in our office all day long – either blasting out Spotify/Media Monkey through our PC, or playing tunes from iPhones or our Pure DMX-60 DAB/CD player – our budget stretched to around £250.
Some of the head honchos behind the the development of the original trusty MP3 new music file have unveiled details of an upgraded music format, called MusicDNA.
Created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach – who worked on the first MP3 player back in 1993 – the new MusicDNA format can pack in extra information, including lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, and the data can be continually be updated.
Korean media player whizzes iriver have released details of their Smart HD touchscreen PMP, which looks rather a dandy affair to our eyes.
The Smart HD – previously seen lurking under the codename “K1″ - is a slick looking PMP packing a ton of features including a FM tuner/recorder, voice recorder and a 3.5″ touchscreen (480 x 320 resolution, 16M colours) interface.
Boy, do audiophiles have to suffer for their obsession.
Buying a half decent hi-fi, cracking open a beer and blasting out a bit of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ – digitally remastered, natch – is never enough for these guys (and it is almost always guys into this kind of stuff).
Guitarists who find tuning their instrument a bigger challenge than scaling the Eiger in a suit made of fish may find salvation in TC Electronic’s revolutionary new Polytune – claimed to be the world’s first polyphonic tuner.
The stomp-box sized “tuning miracle” invites guitarists to strum all the strings on their guitar or bass at once, with a 100-strong LED display matrix immediately flagging up which strings are out of tune.
Musicians on the move have long been partial to lobbing portable recording equipment into the Transit van, ready to lay down any ideas when inspiration strikes.
Back in the day, Tascam Portastudios were all the rage, offering 4 track recording and sound ‘bouncing’ down to a lowly cassette tape, but digital technology has seen the size of recorders shrink, and sound quality improve immeasurably.
SanDisk scored a huge hit with their Clip range of budget MP3 players, and their updated Clip+ wisely doesn’t fiddle with the winning formula and continues to offer a compelling alternative to the more-expensive iPod Shuffle.
Available in three capacities, the new Sansa Clip+ adds a microSD slot to the available built-in memory (2GB – 8GB), letting users cheaply increase the capacity by up to a 16GB.
We’ve lost count of the weird and wonderful iPod docks we’ve seen released, and the new Luna 5 Encore iPod dock is certainly curiouser than most.
Blue Microphones have updated their ‘Mikey’ bolt on microphone for iPods and iPhones, and it should prove a handy tool for sound recordists, interviewers, musicians and shifty bootleggers.
The first version arrived in 2008, and the new and improved version boasts “improved circuitry for superior recording and enhanced new features,” plus a pair of custom-tuned Blue capsules with settings for recording high-volume concerts.
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