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.
How many times has this happened to you? After a long day toiling in the salt mines. you are ready to finally get some shut-eye. You sink down into your Tempur-Pedic and then it starts up - boom, boom, boomity boom. Oh for Pete's sake. Your neighbor is playing his stereo again.
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.
You call them. They put you on hold. That's bad enough. Then they play the cheesy on-hold music. That makes it worse. But even that's not as bad as the actual sound quality of the music. Oh. My. Lord.
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.
You are a multi-billion-dollar audio corporation. Starting small, you grew big, then you bought out your competitors and got even bigger. You dominate entire segments of the audio market. Good work! But where do you go from here? How do you get even bigger? You create an entirely new audio category.
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.
For the first time, the engine is mounted amidships: 6.2-liter naturally aspirated V8, 495 horsepower, 470 lb-ft of torque, 0 to 60 mph in under 3 seconds, top speed of 194 mph with optional performance packages. It is the most powerful and quickest base-model Corvette ever. And it has the most powerful Bose sound system ever in a sports car.
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.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The most innovative developments in home theater won't happen in the home. They'll be in the car. Now, Tesla has announced another incremental step in that evolution: YouTube streaming to your dashboard.