Displaying items by tag: Audio

You know that place in your living room where the sound from the television or the music from your stereo is just right?  Where, if you’re anything like me, you find yourself leaning toward it, ever so slightly, during the good parts of a movie or standing in it when you’re playing good music.  That’s called the sweet spot.  No really, that’s a technical term.   The sweet spot is the place where the sound waves from whatever your audio setup includes come together like they’re supposed to.  It’s the spot where your 24-speaker 22.2 surround sound system does its job best, delivering the highs and lows in perfect balance.  I’ve been known to move my recliner to that spot in my living room when I was watching a movie alone.  The sweet spot in my house is a one-person affair. 

Don’t you just hate it when you hear a song on the radio or in a mall and you would like to listen to it later but you don’t know what it's called? Well Shazam is the most popular smartphone app that helps you with that, having approximately 250 million people that use it. But they have some decent competition in SoundHound. The SoundHound team decided to respond to Shazam’s bragging about the numbers and revealed that they have over 100 million users that have download their app. Even though Shazam is in the lead by more than 2 times, this is still a respectable number. Shazam is currently on around 30% of the devices, including both Android and iOS.

After they recently acquired Astro Gaming, Skullcandy is releasing three new gaming headsets. Earlier this year they presented their customizable Aviator headphones and now they pull another big, big release. With a rather impressive design they are bringing us the SLYR, PLYR 1 and PLYR 2 all with affordable prices. Astro Gaming highlighted that these were created from scratch, and they are not just tweaks of previous models. Prices will range from $80 to $180, and if they manage to meet the requirements of the gamers they could achieve nice numbers.

A rather long time ago (in computer years) when real audio first came out on the computer the market was pretty bare for not only sound cards, but also for anything to use to listen to them. I can vividly remember buying an expensive ISA Soundblaster card and not being able to find any decent speakers to use with it. There simply was not a lot of choice out there to reproduce your audio. Of course before that I can still remember only having 8-bit audio through the motherboard speaker so decent is relative there. Now the market is flood of products many are just plain terrible (bad design, bad quality and bad audio playback). There are a few companies that have been working to break the “good enough” trend in audio. Cooler Master is one of them as we have shown you with their CMStorm Sirus headset. Now Cooler Master has another gaming headset available. This one is called the Sonuz and features a pair of massive 53mm drivers to push the sound deep into your skull. Let’s listen to them shall we?

It looks like the world of the smart phone, tablet, and the digital “media” players are finally getting past the “good enough” trend that they were heading into. Well, at least where audio is concerned. One of the biggest issues that we have had with many phones and even top end media players is that while they spend money on the display to give richer visuals you are often left with audio that is very bland.

Every now and then in the midst of products that are intended to make your system more powerful or impress your friends we get to play with products that are fun. We found this in a pair of external speakers from a company called Accessory Power. The speakers are designed to look like the heads of animals (in a cute way) and can work with PCs, phones, tablets and pretty much anything with a 1/8-inch speaker jack. In addition to their function as a speaker set they are also intended to bring awareness to endangered species. We were lucky enough to receive two different models for our testing and enjoyment. So let’s take you along as we see if the Accessory Power Gogroove Speaker Pals Panda and Koala sets are worth your time and money.

After what seemed like a long time we are finally getting into the full performance section of our review. The Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe is a board that really has quite a bit going on which makes properly covering everything something of a chore. You can check out our design and feature coverage to see just how much there is packed into this board. Still we have tested out all of the pieces and parts and had the time to use the board in some of our testing with Ivy Bridge and the heat issues that have popped up. With that said let’s dive in right now and talk about the performance you can expect from Asus’ P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard.

We have had a couple of products from the House of Marley in the lab and in the whole have found them to be excellent offerings for the price that they go for. The Reggae themed headsets combine renewable materials with exceptional tuning and a great sound. So far we have taken a look at the Zion in ear and the Redemption Song on-ear headsets. Today we have another one of the On-ear style headsets in the lab. This time it is the Stir it Up (Harvest). These have the same price point as the Redemption Song $199.99 so let’s see if they have the same quality in terms of build and sound.

Audio is a part of the computing experience that is very often overlooked when people are building their system. We see this every day when someone is talking about putting together an HTPC (Home Theater PC), a gaming system or even a general usage system. They stick with the audio on the motherboard and call it good enough. Even when someone takes the time to pick out a good sound card, they often buy $20 speakers to play this sound through. Today we are going to take a look at a combination audio card and headset from Rosewill this is the RHM-6308. The RHM-6308 is listed as a Circumaural Gaming Headset; we are going to see if this $30 headset can live up to its name.

After being impressed with the House of Marley’s Redemption Song On-Ear headphones we have now spent some time with their Zion In-Ear head phones. These follow in the same style as the Redemption Song headphones and are made of recycled or renewable materials. They also follow in the trend of being tuned for high quality sound and are designed for use with Apple’s lineup of products (iPad, iPod, iPhone) but will work with just about any media player or smart phone (with a few exceptions). With a price tag of $99.99 we are hoping that these headphones give us the same level of performance that we saw with the Redemption Song. Follow the bouncing ball and sing along as we tell your just how well they perform.