Longtime Amazon customers may already be surprised to find CD purchases from years and years ago appearing in their Amazon Cloud Players. Their eyebrows are set to move even higher now that Amazon is extending the courtesy to LP purchases. Buy an AutoRip-eligible disc—analog or digital—from the online retailer, boot up the Cloud Player, and there it is. If your computer or tablet of choice lacks a disc drive, as increasingly many do, you’re also free to download a free 256-kbps AutoRipped copy. The feature is available to U.S. customers only, for titles displaying the AutoRip logo.
Amar G. Bose, the MIT-educated electrical engineer who founded Bose Corp. in 1964 and built it into a private multi-billion-dollar empire spanning home, personal, professional, and automotive audio products, died Friday July 12. He was 83.
On Monday, when I reviewed the NXG NX-BAS-500 subwoofer, I recallled a time 20+ years ago when the only companies that made really good subwoofers were M&K and Velodyne. The "K" in M&K stood for Kreisel-Ken Kreisel, to be specific.
New release (Columbia; tour dates) Photo by James Minchin
It’s instructive to remember that Emily Robison and Martie Maguire helped co-found the Dixie Chicks in 1989, a full 6 years before Natalie Maines was invited to join. Oh, and of course, Emily and Martie are sisters. Clearly, they have a bond that won’t break, and they use it to their musical advantage on Amelita, the engaging follow-up to their 2000 self-titled debut as Court Yard Hounds.
42 is so schmaltzy, clean-cut, clean-living, and well brought up that it makes sentimental 1940s-made baseball biopics with Jimmy Stewart (The Stratton Story) or Gary Cooper (The Pride of the Yankees) seem positively cynical and bawdy in comparison.
For the last several years, our annual January pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show has been all about someone else’s toys. Handheld smartphones and tablets, wearable technology (now, what is that about?), fashion earphones, smart appliances, electric car-charging stations, streaming pocket-sized speakers, you name it.
It’s been awfully quiet on the A/V front…until now.
Klipsch is of course known for making high-efficiency speakers with horn tweeters. Whether or not that concept pays off indoors, where high-powered amps are common, is a subject of debate among audiophiles. But it definitely pays off outdoors. There, you have no room gain to boost the bass, so you may need more volume.
When I was wandering through websites looking for speakers to review in this test, I found companies I'd never heard of. Most were selling generic outdoor speakers, but one - OSD Audio - offered something with an unprecedented mix of cool and creepy: an outdoor speaker styled to look like a life-size German Shepherd."Special purpose," indeed.
When we put together comparison tests, we often give manufacturers the parameters (i.e., outdoor speakers at $400/pair) and let them figure out what they want to send. For some reason, Niles chose to send the OS5.5, a speaker that costs just $259/pair.
Most outdoor speakers share pretty much the same design. But the OE5 One, like Speakercraft’s other Outdoor Elements speakers, has a feature found in only a few outdoor models: a ported enclosure. The port allows for deeper bass response than a sealed cabinetdoes.