Premium home audio manufacturer and Blackfire Research partner, Harman Kardon, has teamed up with Microsoft to take on Amazon, Google, and Apple in the smart speaker realm. The Harman Kardon Invoke is the newest smart speaker on the market. While Amazon’s Echo line of smart speakers have Alexa as it’s voice assistant, the Invoke’s voice AI is powered by Microsoft’s Cortana, which makes this an excellent smart speaker for Windows lovers. This is the first smart speaker to feature the Cortana voice assistant, which in the past has lived in Microsoft’s Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs.
The beautifully designed Invoke smart speaker is cylindrical in shape, with a narrow top and wide base (107 x 242mm), and comes in either pearl silver or graphite. The Invoke features 360-degree audio with three 45mm woofers, three 13mm dome tweeters, dual-band (2.4GHz/5Ghz) wireless connectivity, Bluetooth, and seven far-field microphones (which can be muted). Through voice commands, you can ask the Cortana powered smart speaker to stream music, set reminders, control paired smart devices, manage your Office 365 and/or Outlook calendar, ask questions, get the news, and make/receive hands-free calls via Skype to mobile phones, landlines and Skype-enabled devices. At the moment, the Invoke only works with three streaming services: Spotify, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn, but Microsoft has promised that Cortana will support Pandora sometime in the future.
And because the Invoke smart speaker is by Harman Kardon, you know the audio will sound great. In fact, according to Digital Trends, the Invoke’s audio performance beat out the Amazon Echo and The Google Home.
At their recent hardware event, Google announced two new additions to their smart speaker agenda, both of which are ready to take on the ever-increasing number of competitors in the field. Say hello to the Google Home Mini and the Google Home Max.
The Google Home Mini has the same functionality as the original Google Home, but at a fraction of the size (and cost). With voice command, you can ask Google Assistant to stream music, control your smart home, check your calendar, and search the internet. The Mini is nearly 4 inches in diameter (roughly the size of a hockey puck), with the top portion covered in fabric, which is available in three colors: chalk, charcoal, and coral. The fabric hides the speaker (1.5-inches) and a far-field voice-recognition microphone. The design is pretty simple and sleek (although as a cat-parent, I wonder how much hair that fabric covering will collect over time). The Mini is a direct response (and a direct competitor) to the Amazon Echo Dot, the cheaper, more popular version of Amazon’s flagship Echo smart speaker. Will The Mini overtake Echo Dot as the most popular pint-sized smart speaker? According to some reviews, The Google Home Mini certainly sounds better than the Echo Dot (it boast 360 degree sound with a 40mm driver), but in overall functionality, there isn’t much of a difference between the two. At $49, the Mini is the cheapest smart speaker option currently on the market.
The biggest announcement of the day, however, belonged to the introduction of Google Home Max, a premium version of the Google Home smart speaker designed to compete against Apple’s HomePod and Sonos. The Home Max is a stereo speaker that runs Google Assitant and looks quite similar to the Sonos Play:5 speaker. The speaker is designed to intelligently adjust audio depending on a user’s surroundings using AI (or what Google calls “Smart Sound”), similar to what Apple’s HomePod speaker does. The Max has two tweeters and two 4.5-inch woofers and the company has emphasized the speaker’s powerful bass. The Max supports multi-room audio via Chromecast Audio only, but supports many streaming services including Pandora, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. In terms of connectivity, the Home Max supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Chromecast. At roughly 12 pounds, this is by far the largest smart speaker on the market, and the priciest as well. The Google Home Max will set you back almost $400, but Google is giving away 12 months free of YouTube Music with every Home Max purchase. The speaker will be available in two colors: chalk and charcoal, and can be displayed both vertically or horizontally via an adjustable silicon base.
The real question is: will the Google Home Max sound as good as the company claims? The answer is, most likely, no. Smart speakers don’t have a very good track record when it comes to audio quality. That’s why many smart speaker owners look for alternative ways to playback their music, especially for multi-room. To achieve excellent wireless multi-room, or multi-device set ups, entertainment systems need greater reliability over standard Wi-Fi, more precise synchronization, and multichannel capabilities, which smart speakers like Google Home, and the Echo, lack.
The good news: Blackfire Research offers the most synchronous, reliable, and cost effective wireless solution on the market. We call it the Blackfire RED framework, and it can be embedded into premium wireless speakers and voice-activated smart speakers, creating a truly connected home smart entertainment system. Voice service solutions require a high performance, multi-room solution like the Blackfire RED framework, allowing for multiple devices to respond to voice commands simultaneously.
Combining individual entertainment systems to work together to create a truly connected smart home is non trivial – but with Blackfire RED, it can be done, and with stunning results. Blackfire RED can be integrated into a broad spectrum of high quality voice service applications, so the Blackfire connected smart home ecosystem has no limits.
Harman Kardon, Pioneer, and Onkyo are leveraging Blackfire’s technology in over 100 new products this year alone. Join the Blackfire Revolution today!
At CEDIA 2017, premium audio manufacturer and Blackfire Research partner, Onkyo, announced the impressive TX-RZ920. The TX-RZ920 is a 9.2 channel A/V network receiver that boasts 135 watts of sound per channel. Part of Onkyo’s flagship RZ Series of A/V receivers, the TX-RZ920 features top-quality components, a massive custom transformer, and is THX Certified for movie theater quality sound right in your living room. The TX-RZ920 also features Chromecast built-in, so you can stream any music from your smartphone, laptop, or PC to the TX-RZ920 with ease. With the Onkyo Controller app, you can browse and play music from your favorite online streaming services, including Spotify, TIDAL, Deezer, Pandora, and TuneIn. The TX-RZ920 is designed for both a full home theater and smaller listening setups and supports both 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi connectivity.
But the best part? The Onkyo TX-RZ920 features Blackfire Research’s own FireConnect Multi-room Wireless Audio. FireConnect mirrors network audio and external analog sources connected to a master component (from streaming services to vinyl records) to any Blackfire-compatible speaker (like the Onkyo NCP-302 Network Speaker) in any room, all over standard Wi-Fi. Now, your favorite music can follow you from room to room.
Learn more about purchasing options for the Onkyo TX-RZ920 here.
With the announcement in late July that Apple is officially retiring the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle (the last of the pre iPhone iPods) we can safely say that “video killed the radio star” or rather, the rise of online/app-based streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music, have essentially wiped out the need for music file downloading on portable devices (and the products that were designed for that sole purpose.) When the iPod debuted in 2001, Steve Jobs promised 1,000 songs in your pocket. Today, through streaming, you can play almost any song in existence, instantaneously and fairly cheaply, without bogging down your smartphone or tablet’s storage. Thus, it’s not surprising that Apple is finally saying goodbye to the standalone MP3 player (although it does pierce a knife right into the heart of my childhood.)
With online/app-based streaming swiftly becoming the norm, home A/V and speaker manufacturers are adapting as well by offering products with built-in streaming services like Spotify Connect and Chromecast built-in, allowing music lovers to stream their music wirelessly from their phone or tablet to their speakers. But this shift comes at a price because they are exposing major flaws, not just in their products, but in the wireless protocols their products are built on.
Conventional Wi-Fi runs on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) which was designed in the 1960’s for transferring files down wired Ethernet lines, not streaming real-time, wireless, audio. Unfortunately, most products out today that boast wireless streaming capabilities still use these outdated protocols and therefore, can’t properly support wireless streaming.
This has posed a huge problem for manufacturers who want to stay on trend, but are unwilling to invest in new, wireless infrastructures. As we’ve seen with Apple’s retirement of standalone MP3 players, products that support app-based streaming are the future. And yet, manufacturers continue to release products that are fundamentally unable to support the future of wireless home entertainment.
So what can be done? Well, Blackfire Research has an answer for that.
It’s called the Blackfire Realtime Entertainment Distribution (RED) framework, and it’s the industry’s only wireless and entertainment-centric infrastructure software framework built from the ground up to both overcome the limitations of Wi-Fi and meet the needs of wireless, entertainment-related apps and products. Top global audio brands, such as Harman Kardon, Onkyo, Pioneer, and Integra have already licensed the Blackfire RED framework, and are currently shipping products that leverage its capabilities: reliable multi-room, multi-channel, low latency, wireless audio and video over Wi-Fi. With the Blackfire RED framework in products such as home A/V systems, wireless speakers, smartphones, and TVs, home owners can finally become Smart Home owners – enjoying all of their digital streaming services wirelessly, synchronously and seamlessly throughout the home.
With the original iPod, you could carry 1,000 songs in your pocket. Today, the Spotify song collection alone boasts over 30 million. We’ve been adding more and more music into our pockets, but after all this time, we’re still trying to figure out how best to get it out.
This past Spring, Onkyo rolled out a new set of firmware updatesfor select A/V and hi-fi components and systems initializing Blackfire’s FireConnect wireless multi-room audio distribution. Now, Onkyo has released their NCP-302 Wireless Network Speaker featuring FireConnect by Blackfire Research for the US market, another major step in expanding the Blackfire wireless home entertainment ecosystem. The NCP-302 can link with Onkyo master components such as AVRs, work as a standalone speaker, or can be grouped to create a wireless, multi-room audio system via Blackfire’s FireConnect. FireConnect provides reliable, fast and flexible performance, enabling dynamic, real-time wireless streaming.
With your choice of black or white, this 2.6 kg speaker will look smart anywhere in your home. The NCP-302 features dual-band 5 GHz/2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, built-in Chromecast, and online streaming services such as Spotify, TIDAL, Deezer, Pandora, and TuneIn. With the Onkyo Controller app, you can control playback, explore services, and distribute audio throughout your home, all from your mobile device.
