AirPlay is the way digital music should be. If you have Wi-Fi, you have music. But you also have a tough choice. More and more speakers come equipped with AirPlay, ready out of the box to blast music wirelessly from your preferred Apple gizmo. In a test to find the best, four speakers sounded off — and the one that sounded sweetest was also among the cheapest.
The iPad’s built-in speakers aren’t exactly mindblowing, so if you find yourself using it mostly as a stand-in for your TV, Beoplay’s new A3 dock is a gorgeous solution to its sound woes — even if it costs more than the tablet itself.
Because they seemingly outnumber the stars in the sky, speaker docks for iOS devices are rarely worth a second glance. But Jarre’s new AeroPad Two dock manages to do the near-impossible with a beautiful design that almost makes it feel like docking your iPad will muck it up.
It will take a few years before the technology trickles down to home theatres, but at CinemaCon this year Dolby introduced a new surround sound system called Atmos that promises to create the illusion that sounds are coming from everywhere inside the theatre.
People love the Jambox, a cute, portable Bluetooth speaker that doesn’t cost too much money. It’s been so successful, in fact, that it’s unsurprising to see similar products crop up. Like these new Braven Bluetooth speakers, which manage to look quite similar to while costing a touch less, throwing in some handy new features in the bargain.
Sonos has offered iOS — and more recently Android — apps for its music systems for some time now. The rise in popularity of smartphones and inexpensive tablets has seen the company formally announce that it’s discontinuing its standalone controller, although locally we won’t see the discontinued controllers dropping in price.
It’s a rarer occurrence that spotting bigfoot riding the Loch Ness monster, but Grace Digital Audio has just announced a speaker dock designed specifically for the Kindle Fire. You read that right, the FireDock won’t even acknowledge the iPad’s existence.
