Pioneer’s Latest Elite Receiver Packs Brains and Brawn
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On this day in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham made their live debut as Led Zeppelin at a Teen Club in Gladsaxe, Denmark. However, at the time, they were billed as the New Yardbirds because Jimmy Page’s old group, Yardbirds, who were supposed to embark on a Scandinavian tour together, broke up. Wanting to fulfill his commitments, Page assembled a new version of the band to play at the already-booked gigs. Upon completing the tour, the newly-formed band began recording their first album and changed their name to Led Zeppelin (thanks to a cease and desist letter by a former Yardbirds member.) The rest is history!
Europe’s largest consumer electronics show, IFA, is currently taking place in Berlin. Before the show even began, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony were already making a splash with big announcements. So what are the new and continuing tech trends of the second half of 2017, as we slowly make our way into the holiday season? And what can we expect from our CE devices in the near future? Here are our main takeaways from IFA 2017!
The War for Cloud AI Control Heats Up
In what we see as a very Game of Thrones maneuver, Amazon and Microsoft have formed an alliance. Before the show began, it was announced that Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana voice interfaces will soon be able to interact with each other which potentially opens up a powerful combination of Microsoft’s business app integration with Amazon’s rapidly growing Smart Home device integration. This sort of cooperation between competing technologies is huge news, especially in a market that is known for closed ecosystems. This alliance will serve as a blow to Google and Apple, whose Google Assistant and Siri, are still struggling to integrate 3rd party devices.
Speaking of Google, back in May, they opened up their AI software development kit (SDK) in the hopes of getting Google Assistant integrated into a plethora of third party smart devices for the home, a move directly in response to the “The Amazon Home Takeover” at CES in January. At IFA, it was announced that Google Assistant will be integrated into new smart speakers, like Sony’s biggest unveil at the show, the Apple HomePod look-alike, LF-S50G (rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) and various LG home appliances. Although this is all great news for Google, it’s not hard to notice that Amazon is still way ahead in the race for smart home ownership – which is ironic, since Google paid $3.2B in 2014 to buy IoT pioneer Nest Labs. Is this an indication of Google’s growing disfunction as a company?
Wireless Woes
Ever since the iPhone 7 ditched the headphone jack last year, other smartphone manufacturers have begun to follow suit. At IFA this year, wireless headphones were in an abundance. Beyerdynamic has unveiled Aventho Wireless headphones, a beautifully designed wearable, using their super high-end Tesla drivers. The only problem? These ultra lux Hi-Fi quality headphones use APTX HD Bluetooth, a lossy-compression algorithm that is only supported in about 5 Android phones, meaning most of the time you’d be listening to the gurgling mess that is regular Bluetooth SBC. If ever a product deserved lossless HD streaming over WiFi…this just seems like a complete missed opportunity. Sad! And then there are the new Marshall Headphones Bluetooth speakers, which are adding WiFi for multi-room capabilities. (Even Bluetooth speakers are ditching Bluetooth.)
Conclusions
IFA 2017 has shown us that the smart home is getting smarter, and cell phones are expanding their wireless capabilities. And thanks to new low-cost, low-powered chipsets, it’s WiFi all the way as far as connectivity. Now all we need is a protocol that runs on standard WiFi, connects multiple brands, is agnostic to the voice AI wars and has the performance to handle streamed media. Hmmm….
The top WiFi Router brands have recently introduced Whole-Home, multi-unit mesh network systems (WiFi extenders) for extending your WiFi coverage across larger buildings. Examples are Eero, Luma, Orbi, Google Wifi and Apple Airport Express. These systems comprise a base-station which is hard-wired to your internet connection, plus one or more extender units that connect wirelessly to the base station and relay the signal further than a single router can reach.
Although the latest Whole-Home systems have resolved many of the reliability issues plaguing earlier mesh networks, there is still a “hand-over” process as a device moves out of range of the base station and into range of an extender unit. For a streaming device, this hand over can sometime cause the WiFi connection to be momentarily lost, resulting in a visible or audible drop-out. Also, these systems can be confusing to configure since the base-station and the extenders may all share a single SSID (network name), and sometimes switch automatically between the 2.4GHz band and the 5GHz band so you often can’t easily tell where your devices are connected, or at what speed.
We’ve put together a few tips to help you get the most out of these set ups.
You can check out some routers that Blackfire Research recommends here.
Fifteen years after Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes was involved in a fatal car crash while filming a documentary in Honduras, the remaining members of the iconic 90’s R&B trio – TLC – “Chilli” Thomas and “T-Boz” Watkins, have released their fifth and final TLC album with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. In early 2015, they asked fans to help finance the project by donating at least $5 to reach their goal of $150,000. In less than 48 hours, they surpassed their goal and become the “fastest most funded pop project in Kickstarter history,” raising a total of $400,000. Clearly, the group that fostered feminist anthems like “No Scrubs” and “Unpretty,” are still relevant today. TLC delivers as a perfect farewell album: from opener “No Introduction” (“We don’t need no scrubs chasing waterfalls”), to empowering tracks like “Haters” and “Perfect Girls,” the album is a celebration of their history (“Way Back ft. Snoop Dogg”), their legacy (“It’s Sunny,”) their work as champions of social justice (“American Gold”), and, most heartfeltly, their fans (“Joy Ride.”) Chilli and T-Boz may be saying goodbye to new TLC music, but they’re not splitting up – they’ve promised their devoted fans that they will continue to perform together for as long as they can.