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Dreams DJ Speaker Is Really Just a Fake Turntable for Tiny People
Posted by Jesus Diaz at 3:15 AM on November 7, 2008
I long for the days of pops and hisses and scratches of turntables and analogue sound. Nah, I lied. I'm too lazy for vinyl, unless we are talking about vinyl bras. And while most of you probably haven't ever seen a long play, if you want to buy yet another piece of craptabolous plastic that says you once wanted to be a DJ and live in Ibiza raving all day, the Dreams DJ Speaker has to be yours. Because nothing says "I'm a Cool DJ" better than a tiny $US45.99 speaker shaped like a turntable, specially one with a built-in battery which can be recharged using the USB port. David Guetta will be proud. [Audio Cubes via Random Good Stuff]
DJs or other beat mashing fiends with more than two arms are being held back by today's traditional turntables, so it's a good thing Highwater Sound is around to create $US56,000 four arm Frankensteins like this thing. The table is built around a TW-Acoustic Raven AC and implements three motors. The arms were assembled from parts from Breuer Dynamic, Graham Engineering, Triplanar, and Ortofon, and the cartridges are the work of Dynavector, Ortofon, and Miyabi. We imagine that if you're a DJ, that last sentence caused the ol' heart rate to increase just a tad, among other things. [
Stanton's new DaScratch USB-MIDI Tool is unique because it relies completely on touch technology to mix and manipulate music. With the possibility for 5 touch sensitive sliders, 19 touch sensitive buttons, and one giant, touch friendly rotary control (read: the big record-like circle in the middle), it appears you can run the show with little more than a laptop and one (maybe two) of these.
We've seen turntables designed especially for digitising your crusty old vinyl for years, but ION's LP 2 Flash deck one-ups all that I've seen by recording straight to an SD card or USB thumb drive for quick transferring to a computer or recording straight to your PMP. And if you get tired of being so retro, it'll reverse the flow and play any MP3s you have on your cards or disks, outputting to your stereo via standard RCA jacks. It's a UK import for now, at a price of £130 (US$228).
Got a lot of money to spend and a fetish for obsolete technology? The Certus Turntable by Teres Audio will play whatever records you still own for the hefty price of between US$13,900 and US$25,500. For the annual wage of a migrant farmer, you get a "magnetic damped multi-phase synchronous drive system to directly drive a massive, heavily damped brass and hardwood platter"—supposedly some kind of technology that makes music sound amazing. Right. Call me a plebeian, but I think I'll stick with some lossless audio format and my iPod, thanks. [
This Montegiro Lusso turntable looks like it should be teamed with something Sixties and space-age from Pierre Cardin and worn atop the head. It consists of three height-adjustable cones made from alternate layers of acrylic and aluminium, and a larger, inverted cone, on top of which sits the platter. The turntable rocks a ten-inch Da Vinci Nobile carbon-fibre arm, MG1 titanium cartridge and it's powered by an ultra precise synchronous motor. A special version of the US$47,000 turntable has another cone, which supports a second, nine-inch SME 5009 tonearm. Sexy or excessy? Check the gallery below.
Even though our (pretend) DJ days were over back in college, we still have a fond spot in our hearts for Technics and their beautiful equipment. The Technics 1200s are legendary DJ gadgets after all, so when we saw that the company actually issued a series of shirts featuring Marvel characters behind the decks, our various body parts exploded. It's hard to tell which one is the best, but we're going to go with either Iron Man or Captain America, though the Captain Britain vs. Captain America one has its charms as well. If they weren't US$50 each, we'd stock up on one apiece. [
This gorgeous turntable is, believe it or not, handmade by hobbyist Mike Disher, who says he has a fascination for turntables and mechanical clock movements. Mounted on an acrylic plinth, his turntable uses just a VPI platter and Rega arm, whilst everything else is custom-made. He's also done his own interpretations of the Michell Syncro, and his first work, a take on a Rega P3, which he called the P3 Skeleton. Feast your eyes on Mike's work in the gallery below. [
Italian supercar manufacturer Pagani has gone into the luxury audio market and produced a carbon fiber-and-brushed aluminum stereo system whose bass speakers looks are reminiscent of the fat exhausts found on its Zonda supercar—at least, that's what the 350-watt speakers look like. Find out what else the Pagani sound system has got under the bonnet after the jump.
Either Sony's trying to tell us that vinyl will never die, or that vinyl is finally dead. After years of quietly selling regular old turntables, Sony is now offering what some niche brands already sell: a USB-connected turntable for converting records to MP3s. We don't have a lot of detail on the PS-LX300USB, except for the fact that it comes with Sound Forge Audio Studio and will cost US$150, placing it performance-wise somewhere between the $100 LX250 and $150 LX350 non-USB players. I don't know—it almost makes more sense for Sony to have gone whole hog like Teac, and built an all-in-one vinyl-to-CD machine.
