Sonoro's Saucy Swarovski-covered Stardust Radio Selling for $2,500
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Posts with tag audiophile
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Audio-Technica QuietPoint Active Noise-Canceling Headphone
Audio-Technica is known for making audiophile-approved products at reasonable prices. Now, noise-canceling headphones can run high, price-wise (like, $300), but Audio-Technica's ATH-ANC7 Noise Canceling Headphones can be had for as little as $120 . And the good news is your frequent-flier audio-buff, uncle (or whomever) will really appreciate the sound these babies can make (and the sound they can hide while, say, in a noisy airplane cabin).
These bad boys are even surprisingly compact, for over-the-ear cans. The cable detaches and the 'phones fold flat for easy storage in the included carrying case. Meanwhile, a=a single AAA battery will keep the active noise cancellation technology running for 40 hours.
Sensors detect and remove 85 percent background noise such as engine drones on a plane, background chatter at the office, or even the sound of hyper ctive children in your living room. You can even ditch the cable and use them to cancel out sound without plugging them into an iPod or portable DVD player.
From Audio-Technica
Meridian F80
This just-released home entertainment system is co-branded with Ferarri -- so you know it's not gonna be cheap -- but this baby is for the high-end music lover who probably already has an Italian sports car, anyway. The Meridian F80 is a one-box, tabletop 2.1 system -- two speakers in the front, a subwoofer in the back, and a whole lot of DSP in the middle. It features the same Meridian DSP technology found on the DSP8000 speakers costing $55,000 -- making its $2,999 price tag seem like a steal! (Sorta, but not really.) It's phenomenal for pristine music output in small spaces (like a penthouse studio in New York City), but can also connect to virtually any video display for some seriously high-end media enjoyment (including a Faroudja projector...which will cost you – actually, if you have to ask, you can't afford it).
From Meridian
PlayStation Is a $6,000 CD Player
A reader at Destructoid wrote in to tell the editors about his father's search for "the perfect sound." Among his father's very expensive audio toys was this PlayStation. He discovered that part of what makes that console so great for playing back audio is the inclusion of RCA jacks on the back. These days, game consoles use multi-format output jacks that send both audio and video over tiny wires and then split them out to your various connections. This original PlayStation had its audio outs coming directly from the sound processing board, a more direct connection (and a golden goal for audiophiles). What's more, the RCA jacks that Sony used in the original PlayStation are said to be of superior quality.
An article on 6moons suggests that serious 'philes would pay over $6,000 for a CD player of this quality. You may want to run to eBay and stock up before the rest of the world finds out. They're still a steal with plenty of listings going for less than $20.
From Destructoid
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Switched Splurge: High-End Vista PC
by Tom Samiljan, posted Apr 11th 2007 at 7:17PM
What is HD-quality music, you may ask? In this case, it's tunes sold by HD media store MusicGiants in Windows Media Lossless (WMA) format, which is about as close as you can get to the original digital recording and way better than anything you'd buy on iTunes (no more disappearing instruments and other audio nuances that get lost in a typical CD-to-MP3 conversion).
In addition to HD-audio and all the usual Windows Vista Media Center features, Niveus's Media Centers will play 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound audio, the highest-resolution HD video (1080p), upscale regular DVDs to HD-quality, play HD-DVDs, record up to four TV shows simultaneously, and take CableCARDs (which means you can get rid of your unsightly cable-box). These features and functions are all rarities in PCs, but the Niveus is also one of the first Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center systems to include Intel Viiv technology and Core 2 Duo processors, which help render such audio-and-video-phile output (not to mention help you compute).
One other big difference: Unlike standard Windows Vista PCs, the Niveus models automatically go right into user-friendly Windows Media Center after startup, so they're perfect for the PC-averse (despite all our mumbo-jumbo above). Just make sure you get an expert, or even a custom-installer, to set one up for you (not hard since these are available mostly at high-end, custom-install audiophile specialists like Harvey Electronics).
Now for the painful part: These babies start at $3,199, for the Rainier, but the high-end Denali (pictured) and Pro Series models start at $7,199.
