EOps i24R3Portable speaker is mad, bad, and waterproof
[Via Design Spotter]
SurroundSound posts
"What is the best wireless surround sound speaker solution? I have a home theater where running wires is just not feasible. I have my own speakers, so I don't want a system that has speakers with integrated wireless. I've done a far amount of research and have only come across a few companies that even offer a reasonable solution: KEF, Kenwood and Rocketfish. Is there anything else out there? What do you recommend? Thank you!"We know from experience that Dan's not alone here. Have any of you folks already married to a surround system found a good way to hook those existing rears up without wires? How about a way to do it cheaply and without any audio delay? Drop some knowledge in comments below, cool?


You might not know this, but life as you once knew it is over. No, we're not talking about crises economic or environmental, the Red Menace, or the count down to the year 2012. Much larger than all of this, SRS Labs has announced its iWOW adapter for the iPod. This device is a hardware-based version of their "award winning" iWOW plug-in for iTunes, bringing the same "expansive sound stage" experience that you've been enjoying on your home computer to your iPod Classic, iPod 5G, or iPod nano 3G. Surely, one can't put a price tag on this sort of revolutionary, immersive audio technology, but if we did we're guessing it would be listing for $99 or so. What are you waiting for? The only real danger, as far as we can see it, is that the aural experience turns out to be so mind-blowing that you wind up as some sort of comatose vegetable. But you know what? It's probably worth the risk.

Earlier this month, ASUS introduced the "world's first HDMI 1.3a compliant audio / video enhancement combo card." Who knew numero dos was so close behind? Auzentech has just announced its very own HDMI 1.3-native PCIe audio combo card, which is built around Creative's X-Fi processor and enables PC users to easily output 7.1-channel audio with no downsampling. Essentially, the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater 7.1 "accepts video from either an internal or external connection, mixes it with digital audio, and outputs the combined video and lossless multichannel audio via a single HDMI 1.3 port." Yep, that means Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio codecs are fully supported. The only digs? For one, pricing remains a mystery, but the real kicker is the September release -- talk about a long wait.
With all these companies honing in on bringing HD capabilities to handsets, we were beginning to wonder when someone would step up and lend a hand on the audio front. Thankfully, both Dolby and SRS Labs have come forward at Mobile World Congress to announce separate enhancements to mobile audio, so we'll touch on the former first. Dolby Mobile, hailed as an "audio processing technology platform that brings rich, vibrant surround sound to music, movies, and television programs on mobile phones and portable media players," is available as we speak on the FOMA SH905i and FOMA SH905iTV in Japan, but will hopefully float out to other handsets in due time. As for SRS Labs, it's boasting its own SRS CS Headphone technology, which reportedly "takes stereo or surround encoded 2-channel audio and processes it using an ultra-low-power Circle Surround decoder to create 5.1 highly accurate channels." Granted, we're still wondering exactly how 5.1 channels make their way though stereo earbuds, but we'd be up for a listen, regardless.








