Last week, Google released Chromecast, an HDMI dongle that promises to turn your “dumb” TV into a slightly smarter one. With a price tag of just $35, the device is sold out everywhere, and its bundled 3-month Netflix subscription has been halted, due to overwhelming demand. So what’s this little device causing all this ruckus?
As with most futuristic films, the earth portrayed in Elysium is overpopulated, crime-ridden, diseased, and has all the bucolic charm of a garbage dump. Awfully bleak. Unless you are a member of the elite, in which case you live in an orbiting, utopian, titular space station. You have access to miraculous health care and views to die for. When an oppressed Matt Damon is poisoned by radiation, he decides to crash the upper-crust party.
Sennheiser has long been a fixture in the professional audio and high-end audiophile market. I’ve used my Sennheiser HD 595 and HD 600 Open Dynamic headphones for many applications - in the studio for reference monitoring, for sound quality consulting, and for audio forensics. When Sennheiser announced the Momentum series, I was instantly curious about these affordable, fashionable, and (somewhat) portable headphones. Would they live up to the brand’s reputation?
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.
Here's an odd collaboration: Alison Krauss & Union Station, a group that's embraced bluegrass, one of the oldest forms of American music, and Super Audio CD, one of the newest and most advanced music formats.
Air travel is such a hassle these days. Seriously, who really enjoys flying anymore? Any way to make that experience just a bit more pleasant is a welcome relief.
When Stan Lee penned the first Thor comic book for what would become Marvel Comics, he probably couldn't have imagined that almost 50 years later, his Norse superhero (based on the mythological god of thunder) would hit the silver screen - in IMAX3D no less. The result is a big swinging hunk of modern movie myth-making.
It's been well over a year since Walmart purchased movie streaming giant VUDU, and until now, the corporate take-over was hardly noticeable. Nothing on VUDU's site mentioned Walmart, and nothing on Walmart's mentioned VUDU.
It's a tragic end to a lengthy love story: Ford Motors and the CD player are breaking up after years of happy matrimony. Ford just announced that, moving forward, they will not be installing CD players in the new Ford Focus, with the rest of their models following suit over the next few years.
One of the most anticipated of this summer's releases, Rise of the Planet of the Apes certainly rises to the hype, thanks to the help of some newfangled technical expertise and a lot of good old-fashioned attention to detail.