Active Room Speaker
Qualcomm has announced upgrades to some of its sound platform chips, with the S3 gen 3 and S5 gen 3. Here we look at the major changes made. The S3 is aimed at mid-tier audio devices. Looking at the specs for gen 2 and gen 3 the major upgrades on the previous generation include: 2 x compute power An additional Kalimba DSP (2 instead of 1) Improved DAC […]
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November 27, 2023, Harman announced the acquisition of Roon, a music software company most well-known for its Roon app. Roon Labs was founded in 2015, but its journey in music technology began much earlier, in 2004. The founders were involved in developing music software for companies like Sooloos, Meridian Audio, and HP before establishing Roon […]
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Beolab 8—the attractive new room speaker offering from Bang & Olufsen—is now being welcomed to homes. The news comes as Sonos also welcomes a predecessor to its battery-powered lineup, the Sonos Move 2. The Beolab 8 comes with a few standout features, for example beam-width control which adapts to listening profiles. Also UWB (ultra-wide band) […]
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Futuri, a US company based in Cleveland, Ohio, has developed an AI-driven radio technology called RadioGPT that can broadcast voice, music, local news stories, and even create social media posts. The company claims that all content created by RadioGPT can be localized to the area where it is broadcasted. RadioGPT can use AI-generated voices to host shows, create scripts, and even […]
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Sonos has announced its new line of speakers. The Sonos Era 300 and 100 are coming in March. One huge update from previous Sonos speakers is that you can now line-in, and use Bluetooth. The Sonos non-portable range has previously only worked through Wi-Fi. The announcement that the Sonos sound will be enabled to other […]
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The soundbar market does not enjoy the rapid growth it once did. Even though this has been a market showing superiority to home theatre in box systems—and even AVRs—the trend is a slowing in shipment growth. The use of wireless (sometimes battery powered) speakers incorporated into a multiroom setup may be a good trade off as this […]
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What seems to be the follow on from an announcement in July ’22, it has been publicised for the second time that Netflix will be adding AMBEO spatial audio—powered by Sennheiser—to some of its titles on the streaming platform. After recent price hikes, it’s good to see Netflix adding additional value to the service. Albeit interesting […]
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Infineon has announced it is building an ecosystem of partners to help drive its MERUS™ class D amplifier into new markets. This particular announcement focuses on a partnership with Eleven Engineering and the use of class D amplifiers in battery-powered speakers. With the touted 1/10 idle power possible with MERUS multilevel switching technology there are […]
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Amazon’s Worldwide Digital business unit apparently had a $3 billion operating loss in the first quarter of 2022. This is not all related to Alexa, this business unit also includes Prime Video (and more). This is backed up by reports in 2018 that stated Alexa and Echo lost around $5 billion in that year. For […]
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Netflix recently announced the availability of spatial audio to all devices, but this feature does not require a surround speaker system as it is through a two channel audio configuration. Since it is two channel audio based, the availability of spatial audio will be rather wider unlike Dolby ATMOS also available in some of the […]
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