The next big thing

Music you can sit on

2009-09-27T11:37:00Z

On show this weekend at 100% Design London has been the latest and greatest in interior furniture and fittings, with everything from the hottest fireplaces to a concept fridge designed to save time and energy by teleporting the food from the farm or store to its cool storage!

Don't believe me on the last one? Here it is – part of a design competition run by Electrolux, it's been dreamed up by Thai design student Dulyawat Wongnawa, who says his inspiration came from Star Trek:

"In the movie, the main characters often get teleported from place to place. It made me eager to explore the possibilities of how this useful technology could be integrated into our daily lives once it becomes available.

"The exterior surface of the fridge will be coated with an ultra-thin layer of smart material, which features both an LCD display and a touch-screen interface for users to interact with. Users can adjust the temperatures for each compartment and order fresh produce to be teleported into the teleport compartment drawer via the smart material display."

What's all that got to do with hi-fi and music? Not much, but also on show at the exhibition were the designs of Korean-born, Milan-based designer Michi Jung, which combine furniture and audio.

His Music Chocolate (above) is a footstool with built-in amplification and speakers, to which an iPod or MP3 player can be connected. Upholstered in leather, the piece takes its name from the surface resemblance to a bar of chocolate.

The designer says: "There is a need for a new type of social environment in which the home is central. House concerts are becoming more frequent moments of meeting in the home.

"Music Chocolate fits into this context, combining a classic taste with new hi-tech features so that the furniture itself becomes the protagonist of these moments."

Another Michi Jung design at the show is the Chaiselounge (below), a classic chaise longue design with a twist: the cushion at the head again has an integrated amplifier and speakers, and the whole thing has what the designer says is "the particularity of being able to swing a little while it was accompanied by music."

Meet Bobby - the world's most powerful (and quite possibly evil) universal remote control?

2009-06-24T13:50:00Z

We're still enjoying the novelty of using an iPhone or iPod Touch as a basic remote control - and for many other handy AV uses, as our recent feature covers - but at CEDIA Expo, we experienced an iPhone app that could elevate Apple's pocket wonder to a whole new level.

Bobby is an application with the potential to control all your home entertainment kit from your iPhone or iPod Touch, plus to integrate a range of related home-automation tasks - think dimming the lights, lowering the blinds/your projector screen - into single, graphically driven commands.

The app, from Silcon Valley start-up, cRemote, is only a few weeks old, but can already access a database of more than 400 popular TVs, Blu-ray players, receivers and more - and users can upload their own macros, too. The company modestly dubs its creation 'the world's most powerful universal remote control'.

You can browse through pictures of all your home's devices, room by room- even uploading your own photos for a tailored look. The remote control for each device can be further customised so the most frequently used buttons are just where you want them. At last, a chance to over-ride some of the more obtuse layout decisions that manufacturers can make for their remote controls.

From Neighbours to 'the neighbours are watching what??!'

So far, so universal remote, but then Bobby takes it further. It will integrate with an app-based TV guide, so you can go from browsing what's on to turning your TV and system on to enjoy that show - all with one touch. US TV viewers can already enjoy this service, with UK services, including Sky and Freeview, on the agenda.

There's more - and here's where it starts to get a tad scary. Integration with social-network mapping means you could see what your friends and family are watching and decide to tune into the same (any bets Bobby could be named in future divorce actions?!).

When Bobby met Hal

Future developments get even more sci-fi, when Bobby gets an artificial-intelligence upgrade. The app will be able to learn your preferences - say, lights dimmed when watching horror movies; volume up for parties; volume down for late-night listening - and then offer you the same settings when you watch similar content/listen at similar times.

It will even use the Apple iPhone's built-in microphone to measure ambient noise before making volume suggestions/adjustments - after all, you may have turrned up the volume because the washing-machine was going full-pelt next door!

Bobby needs hardware

The Bobby remote control is already available from the iTunes App store, priced £5.99, but you'll need to add one of these, at @£100, to enjoy the full, learning-remote functionality. Still, by home-automation standards, that's a snip...

We'll bring you more on Bobby - including a full review - as its plans for world domination continue!

NaimUniti: rearranging the way you listen

2009-05-20T12:00:00Z

Apologies to anyone waiting over the weekend for my blog giving my first 'hands-on' impressions of the NaimUniti: I didn't get round to writing it simply because I was having too much fun.

Regular Forumites will know that I went down to Naim Central in Salisbury to pick up the system last Thursday. Spent some time listening in the company's impressive main dem room; got to take a peek at some new products due to be rolled out at the Munich High End Show later this week; and saw the tiny development room in the factory where new products are tweaked.

Apparently blinds have had to be installed to stop weekending Naimees peering through the window to see what the company's up to. Yes, really...

Naim is growing
And just as an aside, things seem to be going rather swimmingly at Naim at the moment: extra production lines have been installed to keep up with demand, with the Nait XS and NaimUniti being the big sales stars of the moment, and even products such as the HiCap are selling very well indeed. And that's got to be a design with the better part of three decades under its belt.

Anyway, back to NaimUniti – and yes, it is one word.

Came back with a unit in the boot, and every intention of getting it up and running Thursday night, but a particularly knackering drive back – rain, traffic – and a full schedule meant it got powered up and left to cook, but that was all.

Saturday morning I decided to bite the bullet and start to tackle it. But then the Uniti – oops, NaimUniti – doesn't take much tackling. Plugged in, it found the wi-fi network, asked for the security key and, with that typed in, was all set to go.

Bit of 'new readers start here': the £1995 NaimUniti combines in one box a CD player derived from the company's CD5i, using the same swing-out transport found in the CDX2, and a 2x50W amplifier based on the Nait 5i. So that's the better part of £1650's worth of equipment replaced by a single box already. Sweet...

However, you also get:

An FM/DAB/internet radio tuner, with 40 presets available transparently across all three radio systems
A five-input – two optical, two electrical and one front-mounted MiniTOSlink – digital to analogue converter
Five line inputs including one on a 3.5mm socket on the front panel, and a powered DIN to allow a Naim phono stage to be added
Unity gain on the line inputs to allow the system to be integrated with an AV processor or receiver
Line-out, preout and twin subwoofer output sockets
Music streaming from computers or NAS devices via Ethernet or built-in wi-fi
iPod connectivity with the addition of an optional n-Link cable, yours for £95
Front-panel USB for memory key music
Oh, and a headphone socket

In fact, the only thing you don't get is a pair of speakers, but given the heritage of the amplification here, the system is more than capable of driving some pretty serious boxes.

Simply addictive
It's a comprehensive package, and could all too easily be fiendishly complex to use, but the ease with which the NaimUniti sets itself up and installs is just the precursor for how simple – and simply addictive – it is to live with.

Within minutes I was streaming music from my newly-installed 1TB NAS over the wireless network, and iPod connectivity was tested with another new acquisition, a 16GB iPod nano. Yes, I've finally had to bite the bullet, simply because so much equipment now comes with iPod and/or wireless capability, so the home testing rig has had to be updated.

What hasn't changed? Well, having tried the NaimUniti running through various small speakers I ended up with it inserted between the front channel preouts of my AV receiver and my PMC OB1 floorstanders, enabling ongoing testing over the next few weeks while still being able to switch back to normal domestic mode at the push of a button. One command tweak on the Harmony remote, and it all happens seamlessly.

Not that much TV or DVD material has been watched over the past couple of days: been a bit too busy in silly grin territory, streaming music from the NAS, listening to internet radio from places as diverse as Minneapolis and Shizuoka – oh, and giving the Passionato online classical music shop a bit of a hammering.

Watched the excellent Birth of British Music programme on Handel the other night, and within a very short time had the Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks bought, downloaded as FLAC files, on the server and streaming out through the Naim. Great fun, but this could start to get expensive...

I'm going to leave it to my colleagues on the test team to give you their definitive views on the sound quality – I'm off to the Munich show, so for the next week the NaimUniti is going to be in their hands for the full workover before I get it back for a forthcoming Gramophone review.

Toe-tapping from the States
But I'm looking forward to getting back and exploring the capabilities of the system some more: only yesterday I found myself enjoying and toe-tapping along with the music being streamed from one of my favourite US radio shows – American Public Media's A Prairie Home Companion – completely ignoring the fact it was 'only' streaming at 64kbps.

The music sounded good, with voices and instruments well-defined – what more could one want on a Sunday afternoon?

Baroque around the clock
Mind you, it doesn't take much hunting to find stations streaming at much higher bitrates, such as the excellent classical stations coming out of Hilversum in the Netherlands. These run at up to 256kbps, with names such as 'Baroque around the Clock' (see what they did there?), and for soundtracks fans there's even a channel solely running film music.

Look further and there are even higher bitrates on offer: MR3-Bartok from Hungary offers up to 320kbps, and sounds superb.

I've also been playing around with different encoding formats for rips, and even trying rips made on different devices, which is where things get really interesting, and a little spooky, given that one should be hearing exactly the same thing when all the parameters are the same, but in fact subtle differences are there to be heard.

I can feel a good few more lost evenings and weekends coming on..

LG, SEOUL: 3D without the special glasses - well, sort of...

2008-11-28T04:16:00Z

One thing you learn about press trips is that they run to strict schedules, so when we left one of LG's facilities half an hour early, we covered a ten minute bus journey from Seoul National University to the R&D centre in about 40minutes, the bus in first gear, hazard lights flashing in the inside lane, much to the consternation of that infamous Seoul traffic.

What were we going to see? This.

It's LG's 3D monitor, not to be confused with 3D TV. The latter needs those special glasses; this one runs dedicated programme material on a standard 1080p screen, and can be watched 'unspectacled'.

It works by showing left and right eye images in rapid succession, but in this case rather than using just alternating frames, the LG system uses ten viewpoints for each frame. We're told the system's already attracting a lot of interest from advertising companies.

All well and good so far, but it isn't able to make cans of fizzy drink leap out of the screen at you at a casual glance. There's a particular viewing distance at which the effect is most convincing - and it admittedly can be very good - but if you imagine a line left to right, parallel to the screen, moving just a smidge along it to one side or another can cause the image to pop into 3D focus or look a bit of a headachey mess.

What's more, when the showreel changes from one clip to the next, what was the optimal viewing position can become wrong, and another little shuffle to left or right is required.

The LG people with pens in their top pockets say they can use material shot for the format, or convert existing 3D movies for viewing on the monitor. As evidence, they showed us a clip from Spy Kids 3D, as you can see from the very 2D picture at the top of this story.

They also demonstrated how standard movies can be converted by the software behind the system, showing a clip of the attack sequence from Pearl Harbor. Opinions among our group were, to say the least, mixed, as they were when we were shown a sequence with a 3D image laid over a standard movie.

The sight of a CGI dragon buzzing over the French Alps as the tracked Peugeot from Taxi 3 hurtled down the slopes was nothing if not surreal. It almost made some sense over a commercial for one of the company's Tromm washing machines, which gives you some idea of how long a day it'd been.

But don't expect this technology to revolutionise your TV viewing any time soon. It's far from 'on the fly' 2D-to-3D conversion, and in fact 15 seconds of content takes two hours to process.

Out with the trusty travelling abacus, and I am here to tell you that converting the rest of Pearl Harbor is going to take quite a while. In fact, with a running time of 184 minutes, if they started on it now and the computers ran night and day, it'd be ready some time around the end of January.

But then the technology is only semi-automatic, needing some operator input (though they're working on that), so let's call it some time in late Spring 2009.

Interesting technology, but we got the impression more work might be needed...

JAPAN: could HD-PLC be about to give you smarter mains?

2008-10-13T14:38:00Z

Been meaning to write about this one for a while, ever since the CEATEC show - which seems yonks ago now, but so much has happened...

HD-PLC was big news at the Japanese show, with a variety of companies showing hardware and components compatible with the system, and the HD-PLC Alliance having an impressive stand packed with everything from computer and AV devices to security equipment.

So what is HD-PLC? It may sound like a high definition limited company, but in fact it's s standard for HD Power Line Connection of devices, bit like the 'Ethernet over the mains' we have in the UK - but taken to the limit.

In Japan, with its high-speed internet coming into the home over fibre-optic cable, HD-PLC is catching on big time, with companies such as Buffalo, I/0 Data, NEC and Panasonic supporting it.

The HD-PLC Alliance, having just celebrated its first anniversary, is concerned with ensuring complete interoperability of equipment, which ranges from door and window controls to internet radios from the likes of Tangent to doorphone add-ons for plasma TVs, all of which can be connected using the very simple system.

Plug units into the mains, hook up an Ethernet cable, press one button and communication is established without the need for a computer to set it all up.

It can even control who plugs into your mains to charge up their electric car, should you have gone the whole eco route. If the car doesn't handshake with your home, it doesn't get the juice.

And HD-PLC could be coming to your home soon: the Alliance is keen to spread the standard to other markets. You see, while Japanese legislation limits its use to the home, research is going on into business and mobile add-ons for other countries.

The most startling piece of kit this century?

2008-06-25T10:34:00Z

Yesterday we got our hands, eyes and ears around something very, very special. A piece of kit so good, we're almost struggling to comprehend it. All roads led downstairs to one of our listening rooms as slowly but surely the entire staff on the magazine were left open-mouthed in awe. At what? Well, you'll just have to wait and see - our September issue will reveal all.

Suffice to say, it was one of those occasions when for just a few moments you can't quite get your head around what's happening. We've had the odd review like this before, but it's been a long, long while since anyone here can remember a product that seems so bafflingly brilliant at what it sets out to do, and looks set to hit its supposed opposition for the most effortless six imaginable.

While we love what we do, we're a pretty level-headed bunch here at What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision, which is why today's events are so striking. Said piece of kit is of course still being put through its paces but barring some kind of collective loss of perspective, we're pretty sure that come the end of July - when you get your hands on our September issue - therein will lie a piece of kit that, quite frankly, will blow your mind...

In the words of our favourite antipodean artist, can you guess what it is yet?