Audiophiles make easy targets for mockery, the way they spend hundreds or thousands on speaker wire, when a blind listening test once famously revealed the humble coat hanger to be a suitable substitute (at least over short distances). Sometimes, an electron is just an electron. But not everything about the audiophile way is hooey. Speakers…
You might have played Patatap last week as it made its way around email, Facebook, Twitter, and other avenues. If you haven’t, you probably should. People like this “portable animation and sound kit” that lets you “create melodies charged with moving shapes” on a touchscreen web browser (phone or tablet) or on a computer. In terms…
Once a year, the South By Southwest music, tech, and film festival draws huge crowds of people from all over the world, sometimes contributing as much as a third of all of Austin’s revenue for the entire year. Last year (the most recent for which numbers are available), SXSW drew 155,000 people who “injected more…
Our ongoing investigation into how home audio is changing in 2014 has unearthed a surprising nugget of sonic wisdom, for those of us who are trying to take home audio just a little more seriously. Now that legitimate digital music services sound so good, fans no longer have to put up with dodgily-encoded MP3s from…
Hot on the heels of South by Southwest comes the Ibiza-loving, fist-pumping, superstar-DJed Winter Music Conference in Miami, with its mega-dance parties and electronic/hip hop trade show. In a way, it’s sort of like SXSW for EDM. Evolver.fm has obtained an exclusive list from Shazam of the EDM artists that were tagged the most at…
It’s 2014. Many of us already have connected speakers that we can control with apps, using a variety of wireless protocols, with Apple AirPlay and Sonos being particular crowd favorites, and many other promising wireless solutions on the horizon. Music has led the way through many major technological developments, from the iPod music player begetting…
When someone sends you a song through a music service or a social network it comes with a play button attached. Sometimes, you can play that song right there on Facebook or Twitter, or in your email client — but after that, poof! There goes the music, much of it sadly uncollected. Email is no…
Hard-won advances in battery technology, Bluetooth audio, Class-D amplifiers, and tough, rubberized design conspired to transform portable music by allowing people to carry around decent sound without relying on headphones or wired-up, still-battery-deficient speakers. The Jambox became the first breakout hit in this new category, design-wise, spawning many copycats, some of which are quite excellent devices as well. But…
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry released its annual global recorded music revenue report this week. Unlike the previous report, this one saw a decline in overall recorded music revenue by 3.9 percent, to $15 billion — mostly due to shrinking revenues in Japan that we totally saw coming. Over a billion of that…
First, it must be said: the “convenience fees” and other charges paid by concertgoers when they buy tickets are not the fault of any one company, as popular as that sentiment might be. Those fees are actually split between venues, bands, promoters, managers, parking companies, and who knows who else, in addition to, yes, certain…
Hong Kong-based Avantconcept’s AirBulb launched a Kickstarter campaign over the weekend to sell an efficient, Bluetooth-enabled lightbulb that also functions as a speaker. Plug up to two of them into any standard sockets in your home, and just like that, you’ll have the ability to control the light and sound on your new speaker lightbulbs…
Now that the dust has settled from SXSW, we’re poring over the best stuff from the trade show, points made at panels, and what we saw at the first ever SXSW Music Hackathon Championship. Expect more coverage there soon, but for now, what concerns us is the Auto-Canonizer, from the hackathon. One of the most intriguing…
