What they need to do, is figure out a way to create a network that will let you select your friends’ Sonos system to listen to whatever they’re listening to simultaneously. That… and make it affordable.

Sonos iPhone App is a post from: wax&wires

This is a pretty awesome idea. The Bulb-Sound-Speaker, designed by Castiglione Morelli, is, as you might guess from the name, a light bulb that’s actually a speaker. It’s powered in the same way bulbs are, via the screw-in bit there, and then there’s a Bluetooth transceiver and Altec Lansing speaker. You plug the other part of the unit into your iPod and there you have it, sound coming from your light fixture.

“Music became portable thanks to mp3 players and especially thanks to iPod. Outdoor we can listen music with headphones; we can use a mp3 player at home too but we need to connect it with a speaker and with electric power. For these reason all mp3 speakers are quite static. The Bulb-Sound-Speaker allows you to transform every lamp into a speaker.

You are free to move because everywhere you can find a lamp (a floor lamp, a desk lamp, a wall lamp) to connect it: you have just to unscrew the bulb lamp and swich on your Ipod: it will send music to the speaker and it will work as a remote control thanks to the Bluetooth transmitter. The bulb is made of transparent plastic. Inside it there are a transformer, the Bluetooth receiver and obviously the speaker. The project, developed with Tommaso Ceschi, haswon the honorable mention.”

Now, I can see how some might think this is really dumb. But nuh-uh, you’re dumb. I think it’s great, although if you planned your house or apartment out right, there shouldn’t be any places where the sound can’t reach if you want it to. But for that study or reading chair where you’d prefer just to have a little tinny music of your own, and don’t want to wear headphones in your own house (right on!), this is a cool little gadget.

Bulb-Sound-Speaker Puts Music In Your… Lamp is a post from: wax&wires

My senior project in college was to develop a binaural audio plug-in that would simulate surround sound through standard ear-bud stereo headphones (see: wavearts panorama to get the idea). The plug-in would use HRTFs to trick the brain into thinking that it was hearing sounds from all around the user’s head, even though they were all coming through two simple headphone speakers in the user’s ears. I thought the applications for such technology would be endless, from mobile gaming and movie watching to new frontiers is pop music (remember Pearl Jam’s Binaural). It turned out to be quite an endeavor, and we have yet to see binaural technology hit the main stream in the way that a lot of us anticipated.

At CES 2009, Psyko Audio Labs offered their contribution to mobile surround sound with a 5.1 channel surround sound gaming headset. Their’s does not use binaural tech, from what I understand, but actually places a 5.1 system into a pair of semi-open headphones. Rather than using HRTF processing to create delays between the two ears, Psyko actually places the speakers on top of the listener’s head, and then funnels the sound through small air tubes to create the correct pinna effect with tiny delays between the ears, small volume differences between the two ears, and frequency modifications generated by the outer ear. That’s the same thing done with binaural headphones, only Psyko is modeling it with a physical system rather than digitally with software. I might be reading into it, but I think the Psyko Audio Labs sales guy takes a dig at the binaural surround method when he talks about how “There’s no filtration, there’s no lag, there’s no latency.” with the Psyko Set. You can read more about the way they do it here.

I’d be very interested in checking a set of these out once they come out later this year.

Surround Sound Headset Rattles The Brain is a post from: wax&wires

Well now everything is starting to make sense. Cisco has been gradually increasing their brand recognition to the general public through a myriad of television ads over the past few years. You would have to surmise that there was some big play they were setting up that would pertain to the general populous. Now we know that Cisco has plans to reveal a new digital stereo at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (January 8-11, 2009). The stereo is said to be network ready, possessing the ability to move music around the house (much like AirTunes) in a way superior to current products on the market. The end goal is to make obsolete the need for tethering your devices to your computer. So imagine having a networked media player that would just access your media files through the net from wherever you were, making portable storage limitations a thing of the past. This is Cisco senior vice president Ned Hooper’s dream.

Cisco also has plans to release a version of its Telepresence video conferencing set up, which we’ve also seen plenty of on their commercials, to consumers. I don’t see dedicated telepresence systems taking off until they can do something that iChat AV can’t. So until they do 1080p, or incorporate hologram smellovision, I think most consumers will stick with computer chatting.

I am excited to see what Cisco brings to the table for the consumer market, and how that comptetion pushes other tech companies to raise the bar.

A Cisco Home Stereo? is a post from: wax&wires