Take LEGO, add pseudo-Steampunk style and throw in glitchy electronic music and you might end up with something like Yoshi Akai’s wonderful LEGO Sequencer MR II. A hand-crafted 8-step sequencer, the bizarre instrument uses LEGO bricks to build up patterns of different sounds.
Video demo after the cut
Philips is heading into the hi-fi game, with its new SoundSphere home stereo lineup. The MCi900 and MCD900, will both set sail with two speakers, 100 watts of ample amplification, and “free floating” tweeters that are physically outside of the speaker enclosure, for better acoustics.
A robot designed and built at the University of Malaga can tell you the name of any song at all. You can sing it, play it, whistle it or really convey it however you would like, and the robot can tell you the name of the song. Being able to tell you the name of the song is a pretty cool trick but that’s not all it can do: the bot can tell you the gender of a singer and how many participants of each are singing at any given point in the song, together with suggesting music you may also enjoy based on the music it “hears”.
It can be hard getting your product to stand out at CES, so one good way of doing so is pretending it’s January 7th and pushing out a press release prematurely. Pass Labs are bringing their new X260.5 Power Amplifier to the show, a 260W mono-block amp which boasts the company’s Super-Symmetry circuit that – as far as we can tell – promises to more accurately synchronize a stereo pair of the units.
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Excellent news, old school vinyl lovers. Despite earlier reports from Technics Australia suggesting that parent company Panasonic were planning to axe the Technics 1200 and 1210 decks in February 2010, the company has issued a statement saying they have "no current plans" to discontinue the iconic turntables.
Looking for a guaranteed way to confuse press and customers alike, and dilute your new brand? Creative have a good example: they’ve called their latest iPod speaker dock the ZiiSound, which you’d expect to thus include some of the clever ZiiLABS “StemCell Computing” magic they’ve been discussing this week. Instead it’s a bog-standard speaker dock, with nary a whiff of a Zii processor.
Harmon Kardon have been known for putting out some unusually shaped speakers in the past, but we can’t help but think that the company have gone slightly too far with their GLA-55 system. A two-piece setup intended to look like chunks of ice, the Harmon Kardon GLA-55 pairs the company’s Atlas woofers and CMMD tweeters for what they claim is the best sound out of 2.0 speakers.
Korg have outed their latest product range, including the MicroSampler mini-synth shown here, a new digital percussion instrument, the WAVEDRUM, and a stage keyboard, the SV-1 Stage Vintage Piano. Of the three, we’re perhaps most intrigued by the MicroSampler, a compact keyboard with a sampler, loop sequencer and onboard effects, all of which are intended to be used in real-time performance.
The “sensation” of Pro DJ’ing is surely staying up to 4am, packed into a mixing booth before a sea of heaving, ketamine-fuelled bodies swinging their arms rapturously, while your ear-drums are slowly pounded out of existence by far more bass than is medically advisable. Unfortunately, Hercules seem to have decided that their version of that sensation is actually all about tweaking your MP3s into digital mixes, and with that in mind they’ve launched their latest DJ control surface, the MP3e2.
The “earth friendly” juggernaut continues, with even high-end home automation specialists feeling the need to slap some green on their spec sheets. You’d find it pretty hard to fault the range of amps and control panels from Knoll Systems generally, but if the one factor stopping you was concern for the livelihood of the Crested Grebe then their new GSZ44 and GSZ67 controller-amplifiers should salve your conscience.
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