Portable Player Reviews

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Brent Butterworth  |  Sep 26, 2012  | 

When I first saw the Soundmatters FoxL portable audio system, I knew I'd found something cool, but I didn't realize it would start a movement. The FoxL proved that a tiny, briefcase-toteable sound system could deliver satisfying sound. Since then, we've seen lots of products inspired by the FoxL, including the Jawbone Jambox, the Braven 650, and now the Monster ClarityHD Micro.

Michael Berk  |  Sep 20, 2012  | 

While we are big fans of the small companies who've stepped up in recent years to build ever-better headphone amps for use on the go, there are times we would prefer to carry a single device.

Does HTC have us covered?

Geoffrey Morrison  |  Sep 02, 2012  | 

"Wow, it actually floats." This is something I said. Out loud. Without question it's the first time I've ever uttered that sentence in the course of a product review.

The Eco Terra boombox from Grace Digital is one of those products that's amusing - and cool - just because it works at all. It's a waterproof iPod dock, so you can listen to your tunes above and below the water.

Aquatic testing: commence!

Michael Berk  |  Jun 14, 2012  | 

Bang & Olufsen's take on personal tech has never been ordinary, and the company's first iPad-specific dock is right in character. The BeoPlay A3 is a luxurious, minimal appliance, suitable for use "in the summerhouse, on the boat, or in the bedroom" - and maybe, just maybe, for the rest of us.

Leslie Shapiro  |  Apr 12, 2012  | 

We can bemoan the demise of audio quality all we want, but the truth is that good quality audio has always been at our fingertips. If our digital files have sounded bad, it's because we (and we're talking consumers and manufacturers) have been too stingy with our storage capacities. Wanting to cram as much music onto our devices as possible, regardless of how badly the signal had to be degraded to get it all in there, we ended up accepting things like 128 kbps MP3 files as passable. But our beloved iPods and iPhones have had the ability to store lossless and high bit-rate audio from the very beginning, as purists have known all along. You just need a way to get your high-quality files out of those little boxes.

Brent Butterworth  |  Apr 11, 2012  | 

Here's a product that had three strikes with me before I ever heard it. First there's the name, which seems more appropriate for a Frito-Lay product. Then there's the lineage: JBL's smaller, less-expensive docks never impressed me. Last, Maroon 5 appears in the ads. What, I ask rhetorically, would the creators of "Moves Like Jagger" know about sound quality?

Michael Berk  |  Feb 28, 2012  | 

When Sound+Vision looked at Klipsch's LightSpeakers in the summer of 2010, we'd hardly have guessed such devices were more than novelties. Looks like we were wrong.

Michael Berk  |  Dec 08, 2011  | 

Does the iPad have a role to play for audiophiles, or for the new breed of iDevice-inspired audio enthusiasts? It's hard to beat the touchscreen interface for music listening - it provides a tactile browsing experience that hands-down beats the UIs on most high-zoot audiophile servers. On the desktop there are plenty of audiophile file players that load audio into RAM for supposedly improved fidelity - but the iPad offers all-solid-state audio storage to begin with, freeing your bits from jitter-inducing hard-drive-access. But is iOS - and the circuitry within - up to snuff?

Geoffrey Morrison  |  Dec 05, 2011  | 

PORTABLE ENTERTAINMENT. It started with the Walkman and was revolutionized by the iPod. Now with tablets, audio, video, and more merge into one uber-device of computing awesomeness.

We have a narrow set of criteria for tablets here at Sound+Vision. That it surfs the web, does email, can video chat, and so on is cool, but we're not Office+Meetings magazine. We - like most people, it turns out - want tablet-as-entertainment.

And surprisingly, that makes the choice easier than you'd think.

Karl Tennant  |  Nov 07, 2011  | 

Look out, Amazon: Barnes & Noble went right at Jeff Bezos and co. today in a product unveiling meant to take the spotlight away from its Kindle Fire tablet this holiday season. The new Nook Tablet, an improved version of the current Nook Color (whose price drops to $199), competes directly with Amazon's color tablet. Both are set to debut next week.

Rob Sabin  |  Oct 02, 2011  | 
Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
Price: $600 At A Glance: Excellent tonality • Good imaging • Cumbersome WiFi setup

I've never been a big fan of paying for brand names for their own sake. Build quality? Yes. Performance? Absolutely. Aesthetics? Sure. Ease of use? Certainly. Each of those has value, and it often makes sense to pay more, even a lot more, for any one of them. But sometimes, in the course of shopping for whatever, you encounter an entry from a well-respected or even elite brand that at first glance seems so outlandishly priced you have stop and wonder: what am I really paying for here?

Suffice to say that was me when Bowers & Wilkins first suggested I take a little ride with the Zeppelin Air, the company's $600 iPod dock...

Brent Butterworth  |  Mar 08, 2011  | 

DVD, say your prayers. Blu-ray Disc, better get your affairs in order. Judging from the new A/V receivers Pioneer introduced on Monday at the W Hotel in San Francisco, one could easily conclude that the old "hard" media formats have pretty much played out.

Geoffrey Morrison  |  Feb 16, 2011  | 

If you're a Comcast subscriber and an iPad user, make sure you download the XFINITY TV app. While not the streaming app widely hoped for, it's at least partially there. The killer feature is that it lets Comcast subscribers stream TV to their iPad from anywhere there's a WiFi signal. No 3G streaming yet. Before you get too excited, there's some limitations.

Kim Wilson  |  Jan 19, 2011  | 

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
Price: $399

At A Glance: Single-box solution • Easy setup and operation • Perfect for smaller rooms, garage, and outdoors • Integrates with existing Sonos systems • Product now called Play:5

Sonos, a leader in low-cost, wholehouse audio, has made it possible to inexpensively stream audio from a computer to multiple A/V systems using one or more of its ZonePlayers. The $399 Sonos S5, the newest ZonePlayer, is completely self-contained. It incorporates its own power supply, amplification, and internal speakers, which allows audio streaming from a wide variety of sources without a dedicated sound system. It can serve as your main (or only) ZonePlayer or as an extension of an existing Sonos system.

Daniel Kumin  |  Oct 12, 2010  | 

Like some 40 million other people, I love my iPhone. It’s always with me, serving as everything from trail-finder to stock ticker to guitar tuner to, occasionally, mobile phone. While fumbling in the dark with the minimum three or four remote controls that my ever-shifting A/V system requires just to watch a movie, I’ve often wondered if there was “an app for that.”

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