Signals

Amazon's newest audio offering, the Echo Studio, packs five drivers and Dolby Atmos into a compact package and promises to deliver terrific sound quality and a truly immersive soundfield. I am trying to figure out whether I should love or hate this thing.

Some stories tell you about one thing. The good ones are entertaining and/or accurate. But the very best stories are multi-layered, fitting small pictures into big pictures, with one brilliantly informing the other to show deeper meanings. To demonstrate what I mean, I'd like to show you a YouTube video posted last week, and a figurative map drawn in1869.

I don't particularly like phones. I do not camp out in front of Apple stores. I use my phone as infrequently as possible, which isn't very often. I leave home without it. I am not a phone guy. Mainly, I disapprove of phones because they are anathema to high-quality audio and video playback.

The Taycan is Porsche's newest, almost-ready-to-debut car. It's all-electric, so the sound of its exhaust will be unlike that of any other contemporary Porsche. But it's not the exhaust that might be its most interesting sound. It might be its built-in Apple streaming.

I have a theory. Well, it’s not really a theory. It’s more of a hunch. Actually, it’s not even a hunch. Just a tingling. But sometimes my tinglings are surprisingly prescient. Here’s my tingle: Thanks to societal shifts, in the coming years there will be a huge resurgence — a boom — in the popularity of home theater.

You are asleep in your bed. You suffer cardiac arrest. Your smart speaker calls for help. It may save your life.

As everyone knows, an ear infection is nothing to joke about. And as every parent knows, the plight of a toddler with an ear infection can be downright scary and diagnosing it isn't easy. There may soon be an app for that.