Belkin's RockStar channels jams to five others
Sure, we've seen star-shaped hubs before, and headphone splitters are a dime a dozen, but Belkin is out to make sure your entire posse can get a listen to your favorite tune whenever they please. The six-port RockStar audio hub touts a single input-only socket alongside five other ports that can be toggled between input and output, essentially allowing certain DAPs to funnel different songs to different individuals. Of course, we can't really understand why you'd need to be all up in each others' grilles while taking a listen, but we suppose the kids these days have their reasons. Expect it to land this March for around $20.





















Yepp, and the battery lenght will be reduced 5 times.
so if a batteries lifetime is 5 hours mp3 playing it will be 1 hour...
it would be a battery inside the "thing"
I really doubt the battery would be cut by any significant amount. What are you talking about?!
Umm, it probably wouldn't affect battery life at all.
Since you're outputting the same amount regardless of whether you're using this device or not.
The only exception to this case would be if you had to max out your volume to ensure that everybody had adequate volume levels.
I fail to see how this will effect battery life. Regardless the port will always use the same amount of electricity. If you suck water through a straw harder, you get more water. Same does not work for this. Earphones do not SUCK electricity! LOL That port is OUTPUT. Whatever it pushes is whatever it pushes. It will not effect electricity draw.
It wont do anything to the battery life of the player but without any additional amplification it will kill (or should that be maim?) the volume on all 5 headphones.
You don't get something for nothing.
It's called Ohm's Law, people...Learn it...
i think he meant that it will kill battery life because you will need to set the volume on full blast to hear anything through 5 headphones.
Even the loudest DAPs probably couldn't go loud enough to hear it at an acceptable listening level through 5 headphones.
I've forgotten this one my self. Here it goes:
"Ohm's Phase Law states that the phase of a waveform has no effect on how the ear perceives it. The law was proposed by physicist Georg Ohm, who also proposed famous electrical law, which is similarly called Ohm's law." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_phase_law]
Ooooh, I can just hear the audophiles screaming...
Welcome to the social!
I do hope people "go social" with it. I want to laugh at the click group walking down the street all tied together thinking they look cool.
Awesome. So now if you all want to listen to the same thing you have to make sure all of your cans have the same impedance. Everybody will be rocking some 32 Ohm cans but one poor sap will have the 16 Ohm Apple Earbuds to go along with his bleeding eardrums. You could try for a volume control and an integrated amp to drive all those phones, Belkin.
Tom:
How do you know there aren't active components in this thing? There could at the very least be passive resistor networks to take care of any impedance mismatches. I would assume it MUST have some sort of active components to do what is described. It can be done passively but the losses could potentially be pretty bad....
I wonder what the RIAA will have to say about this.
Welcome to the Matrix.
The RIAA was my first thought, too... do all 5 users have a legally purchased copy of the CD?
Multiple headphones can be wired in two ways:
-wired in parallel: resistance drops as more headphones are plugged in, power usage increases, output amp in device can get overloaded.
-wired in series: resistance increases as more are plugged in, power usage decreases, volume to listeners decreases.
Wait 'til the RIAA sees this. The freeloaders must be stopped!
I've come to the sad realization that I don't have 5 friends to share my music with. :(
With devices like this, we are going to have an HDCP-like protection scheme that locks the music to the headphones you had in your ear the very moment you ripped, er.. purchased the music.
Hah, I'm sure that if you connect more than 2 headphones to ANY MP3 player or PMP the sound will become too soft to be useful, so this is a pointless product indeed. unless they add a headphone amplifier and powersource.
Couldn't agree more.
I bet RIAA lawyers have already sued those five kids on the picture.
Something like this would be useful for roadtrips with like 3 or 4 kids in the car...
On the other hand, I would rather get them all their own mp3 players. I can hear them arguing now...
"I wanna hear the crazy frog song!"
"No, I wanna hear the new Britney Spears!"
"DAD!! He keeps pressing pause!!!"
"My ear is bleeding..."
Sweet, I'll have to bring one of those to my next orgy.
Dammit, was gonna say the same. Ah well, there's always the good old box speakers.
of course you can now add five iBuzz 'accessories'...
The best I came up with was the electronic version of a circle jerk...
my question to belkin is
at what point do they recommend a group of friends to forgo the headphone hub and use a more conventional speaker for listening to music together?
i have a similar setup for watching movies in the van. it is 4 99c headphone splitters from wal-mart, all plugged in to each other. i get one input and 6 outputs.
Wouldn't it be better just to use say a SPEAKER?
"That's my port!"
"Shutup! I'm using that port!"
"Oh Hellll no! That one is mine!"
"Can't we all just get along?"
"Quiet you dummies, I can't hear the music!!!"
uhh .. what kind of friends do you have?
(just kidding)
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Ok!
As a college student, I can think of at least one thing this could be useful for - watching movies from your laptop. Laptop speakers are many a time not loud enough, and if you're watching a movie with your friends on a single laptop, this would come in handy.
Not sure about sharing tunes on an ipod though ...
Yeah, this is nearly useless. Show me one of those energizer AA battery based iPod charger dealies with a built-in speaker, and we've got a deal.
Misleading title. It should read:
"Belkin's RockStar channels jams to four others" (not five)
uh hello?? Isn't Zune the answer to this problem??
at a slightly higher investment ...
not if you haven't bought a PMP yet... or you plan on replacing your old one soon
This is the most anti-social device I've ever seen.
"Let's stand in a circle and watch each other listen to music!"
Is this really a problem that needs to be addressed? Has there really ever been a point in mankind's history where 6 people were standing around in a circle and they all had on headphones and they needed to listen to something together and it had to be in private so a speaker couldn't be used? This reminds me of those useless 7 person bikes. http://www.gadgetspage.com/wp-content/7PersonBike2.jpg
i'd rather have this on my computer, my speakers only have 3 inputs on them!
i'd rather have this on my computer, my speakers only have 3 inputs on them!
And the spokesperson for the RIAA says:
"Hey, wait a minute, sharing music is illegal!"
Lol, this idea is nice, if you guys were seating down or in a place where you really can't be too loud, what I can't wait to see is people acutally walk with this, a bunch of people tied up with such connection(s).
time to bust out the minidisc players and start dubbin again!
The RIAA shivers at viewing this story. I mean that many people listening to a song only bought once uhhh it gives me the willys
Can my girlfriend and her five friends each use their OhMiBods with this?
*grin*
Everything has a purpose, my friends.
Buy a Zune and you can send those songs to others
Dear Belkin,
There's already a technology in place to allow multiple people to listen to your audio device. It's called a "speaker" in common parlance.
Please look into it.
一台机器推动5个耳机没问题吧,而且一群人在一起听一个比较傻,还不如用音箱