Sony Bravia Theater U vs The 8-YEAR-OLD LG Tone Studio - Neckband Speakers!

Playing with the Sony Bravia Theater U (a wireless neckband speaker) inspired a little trip down memory lane. Let's see how far this idea has evolved over eight years. If you want a premium portable speaker solution, Sony has a wild option to offer!

Sony Bravia Theater U on Amazon https://amzn.to/4cL7AIG

News Sound Bites - Mic Stands, Reverb, Theremin, and MORE!

Some cool stories that caught my eye this week.

Mary McKitrick takes a look at the M600 Universal Microphone Mount, and seems pretty positive on it.

What's that ringing in your ears? It could be reverb, and AudioTuts has an awesome post with FIFTEEN FREE REVERB PLUGINS! Go get your echo on!

So I wasn't so stoked about the Sirius/XM merger, but it looks like we might finally be getting dual format radios compatible with both Sirius AND XM.

So it's a speaker.
And it's round, so you can roll it around, so that's cool.
Does this make a speaker worth $21,000?

I've been constantly trying to find good places to host audio (right now I'm using Humyo). No one really seems that interested in it. Video? Sure bring it on, but free audio not so much. Apparently there have been complaints about the compression used on Youtube, so they'll be improving the audio quality of Youtube videos. Could this be the answer to free media hosting?

And speaking of Youtube, what do you MEAN you've NEVER heard the theme to Super Mario played on a theremin!?!?!

Well here you go:

You KNOW you're a Geek When... SmartPhone Edition!

I promise this will be loosely related to audio in some small way...

So you know you're a geek when you look at the back of your phone and think "I could do better".

If you haven't figured it out by now I'm a gadget fanatic, and my current weapon of choice is the PPC-6700 smartphone from Sprint. I've been a Windows Mobile fan since the iPaq 3650 (or I could just say "for a while now" I guess), and when it comes to versatility there's nothing better out there right now (in the USA of course, but that's another post).

Full QWERTY keyboard, slider touch screen, highspeed data, this phone gets a lot of things right for a data device. The one thing this phone fails at is ... well ... being a phone. One of the main problems with it is the main speaker on the back isn't very loud. I've tried boosting the volume of the ringtones and alerts, but if the phone is in my back pocket I still might miss a call or email. This also means that the speakerphone setting on this phone is near useless, and the only way I could talk on the phone was with an ear piece.

The problem though isn't that the speaker is under powered, it's that the speaker is covered ... by plastic ... and a vanity mirror ... to take pictures of yourself ... and I'm kinda funky looking ... so I tend not to do that ... very much ... [ahem]


But no longer!



An electric drill, some super fine sandpaper, the mesh from some busted headphones, and about 2 hours of labor (hey I went slow, I love this phone), and voilà, Better phone! Extreme Makeover style! ... OK not quite but still, I am an AUDIO engineer...


Here's the before:


And here's the after:



I know it IS sexy!
cellphones, sound, audio, some audio guy, speakers, mod, ppc-6700, ringtones, volums