By David Ponce

One of the highlights at this past CES was seeing Bob Marley’s son pitching products for the House Of Marley. Yes, Bob Marley had a son. Who knew?! Turns out they have a bunch of audio products that share an eco-friendly vision. The Bag Of Rhythm is the Marley interpretation of a boombox, with green components.

Essentially everything about this monster is recycled or recyclable – not that you’d ever want to recycle such a lovely amalgamation – and is made to give you a unique experience as well as vision. The wood you’ve got here is FSC certified Birch, the canvas is durable and will bring you back to your army days, and the plastic throughout the setup is entirely recyclable as well. The packaging is recycled as well, so you’ll have nothing you need to throw away when you get the device in the mail; you get to recycle it instead.

The speakers you see here are both 4.5-inch high-definition woofers, but there’s also two 1-inch tweeters and 32 watts of power and DSP Sound Processing.

The music is fed to the machine via an iPod/iPhone dock (or an AUX line in for anything else), which recharges the device, presumably when plugged in. It’ll ship later this month for $349.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Slashgear ]

By David Pomnce

Imagine a hipster party, if you will. There are skinny jeans and thick brimmed glasses everywhere. People talking about undiscovered coffee houses and never heard-of music bands while pondering the philosophical implications of breathing seeing as it’s so mainstream. How could you maintain a proper atmosphere in such a setting? German designer (and hipster extraordinaire) Livia Ritthaler proposes the Minimalist Gramophone. It’s nothing more than a needle, a cone of paper and a rotating plate with a central stick. There’s no power mechanism: it’s hand operated. So, as the host of this party you’d have to hire a hipster slave to stand by the gramophone and spin the vinyl manually. All night. But that’d be cool, wouldn’t it? You could be the host of the only hipster party that had a gramophone attendant!

If only we knew just how to purchase this item. Alas, we do not. But how hard can it be to make your own?

[ Product Page ]

By David Ponce

The market for iPhone docks is crowded, to say the least. Most of the ones we’ve come across simply show endless permutations of various features, but very few do anything other than being a dock. Well, if it’s going to be in the house, shouldn’t it be able to do more? Take JVC’s NX-BX3 for instance. It doubles as a little table. It’s got all the usual dock-y things, like SRS StudioSound HD and an FM tuner, but it can also be used to do a variety of other things like: putting a vase on it, putting a glass of milk on it, tossing your keys when you come home from work. The sky’s the limit, really.

We don’t know how much it’ll cost, but it will be available in Japan later this month.

[ Product Page (Translated) ] VIA [ Engadget ]

By David Ponce

I’m almost certain I’ve seen car stereos that cradle your iPhone before, so maybe one of our readers can set me straight. Still, the design of the Devium Dash stereo is intriguing because it’s simple and elegant. The detachable faceplate features one button: a knob for volume. The rest is a space for your smartphone, which when inserted becomes the brains of the unit. While cradled it charges, and you’re free to use any application to listen to the radio or your own tunes. There are several good radio applications on the market, such as TuneIn, so the fact the device itself has no radio features shouldn’t be a problem. The faceplate holds on to the rest of the unit (a full 2-DIN affair) with rare earth magnets, reducing the number of moving components and lowering the risk of mechanical failure. While the first production faceplate is for the iPhone 4 and 4S, there will be versions made for other phones.

One problem with this setup is that the iPhone doesn’t display your applications in landscape mode. There is a companion app however, the Devium Dashboard, that does give you access to some of your apps in this way and makes it possible to use your iPhone exactly how you’d expect it to work in this application.

Normally $300, you can get yours for $250 on pre-order right now. It’s on Kickstarter, and the company needs $45k to make this happen. They’re at $2,7k right now but have 56 days to go. If they reach their goal, you’ll get your delivery in July of this year.

[ Devium Dash Car Stereo ]

By David Ponce

This here is a large piece of bamboo that’s been cut up and turned into a passive sound amplifier for the iPhone. The bottom was machined flat so that it may stand upright and an opening for the iPhone 4/4S dug at the top. It’s then painted, put in a canvas bag and shipped to you for all of $31 ($25 plus $6 for shipping). The “natural properties of bamboo” amplify the sound though to be honest, I don’t think bamboo has anything to do with it. Any material shaped this way would produce similar amplification.

It does look distinct, screams of your love for all things green and won’t break the bank so you can keep buying your tofurkey and other eco-conscious paraphernalia.

Hit the jump for another picture and links.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Technabob ]

By David Ponce

So we all know that Guitar Hero is over and done. It was fun, but it was just a game with a controller that had 5 buttons. Now Rocksmith is out and while it does teach you to play with a real guitar, which I think it awesome (I own the game, by the way), there’s a pretty steep learning curve involved. Not the least of which is playing with metal strings which ends up shredding the tips of your fingers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But bridging the gap between useless toy and overly complex real instrument learning, there’s Ion Audio’s Guitar Apprentice. It’s a guitar shaped dock for your iPad that features a 14 fret board, with buttons replacing the strings. It’s not a full fretboard, but it’s not that far off which means you can actually play thousands of songs with no problem. The buttons work in conjunction with an app that progressively teaches you how to play by lighting up the appropriate buttons.

The company is currently working on licensing songs and the device should be released sometime in Q2 for an undisclosed price. At least not officially, but one rep did tell me somewhere in the vicinity of $100.

[ Product Page ]

By David Ponce

Matt Keeter appears to be a student at MIT and pictured above is the final project for one of his classes. It’s a sweet looking boombox whose case is made from a set of retro-inspired nested octahedral prisms. They’re all laser cut from 0.208″ plywood. Music plays off a standard SD card, while the rig is powered by a 9V battery. The controls on the front are capacitive and the entire thing holds together with barely any glue.

It’s not for sale but the link below leads to his project page where you can read about his step-by-step and even download the required files to make your own, assuming you have access to the same equipment he did.

Incidentally if one of our readers ends up making one of these, we promise to feature it.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ TrendHunter ]

By David Ponce

We think that there’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to audio equipment. There’s a good difference between a $30 set of PC speakers and a $1,000 system. But the difference between that $1,000 system and say, one that costs $20,000 is that you’ll be $19,000 poorer and immeasurably stupider for it. Of course, audiophiles will disagree and find all manners of reasons to justify the expense; we won’t get into an argument here. Suffice it to say we were not impressed with the Blackbody, an Ambient Field Conditioner. It’s a box that doesn’t make any sounds. It doesn’t even amplify. Really, all it claims to do is sit there and somehow “enhance audio playback quality by modifying the interaction of your gear’s circuitry with the ambient electromagnetic field. The Blackbody eliminates sonic smearing of high frequencies and lowers the noise floor, thus clarifying the stereo image.” It’s $1,323. For an audio accessory.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ BoingBoing ]

By David Ponce

All the cool kids are getting iPhones and iPods to play their music, and it turns out they’re all baristas too. Weird. But if you want none of this nonsense, there are other options. Lots, really. The Kube 2 is one of these. This little hexahedron stores its music in microSD cards, which go up to 32GB. It measures 1 inch on all sides and has a touch sensitive interface: “A quick swipe will allow the user to switch to the previous or next track. Placing a finger at the top or bottom of the Kube2 will raise or lower the volume, respectively.” The battery should be good for about 6 hours and if you get sick of the way it looks, you can purchase little stick-on skins for $4 a pop.

The best part is perhaps the price: $35.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Technabob ]

By David Ponce

The Shure SE215 earphones are not exactly a new product, but we were recently sent a pair for testing and would like to take a short bit of time to give our impressions for anyone considering them.

Shure is known for their quality products and some of their earphones can fetch up to $500+ (like the triple driver SE535). But the SE215 feature a single driver and a much more modest price of $100. And for that amount of money, they deliver a sound almost on par with competitors at $200… like the Beats by Dr. Dre Tour In-Ear Headphones, which we also recently acquired. To be clear, the sound quality is less bass heavy than the Beats and the highs and mids are more crisp. We’d describe it as well balanced and distortion free even at higher volumes. But the more impressive aspect of these earphones are twofold: the sound isolation and the snug fit.

To understand what we mean, hit the jump.

While they come with a variety of interchangeable nibs, it’s the larger memory-foam ones that got our attention. It’s a quality foam that takes quite some time to regain its shape. Once inserted, it expands to efficiently hug the inner walls of your ear and forms a tight seal. It’s this seal that does an impressive job at keeping outside noises out. We’d say it’s almost on par with that of the larger Dr.Dre Beats Studio, which feature active noise cancellation. It’s also this seal that does an even more impressive job at securing the earphones in place, no matter how vigorous the activity. In fact, removing them can be difficult and you end up worrying about the tip detaching and staying in your ear. This never happened, but it’s a small concern.

Also, the particular shape of the earphones conforms exactly to the shape of the part of the ear they’re intended to nestle into. This is an advantage as well as a disadvantage. When you do succeed in inserting them, it’s very comfortable. But getting there is another story. It takes some time to figure out which angle the earphone is supposed to go in at, and it will only fit at that specific angle. It’s a tradeoff between ease of insertion and comfort, but we believe it’s worthwhile. They don’t stick out of your ears as much as the Beats and don’t fall out at all (like when jogging), unlike the Beats.

The first two inches of the cord, after the drivers themselves, retains its shape somewhat. This is important because the SE215 are not meant to be worn like traditional earphones, with the cords dangling straight down towards your front. Instead, you’re supposed to wrap them behind your earlobes and down your back. It takes some time to get used to how the cord behaves once it’s like this, but it’s a minor inconvenience.

Conclusion
We like the SE215 from Shure. They don’t deliver an impressive bass, but it is adequate for someone looking for quality reproduction. The sound is crisp, deep and distortion free. The sound isolation dramatically adds to the enjoyability of the music while the snug fit make them easy on the ears for extended listening periods. For $100, it’s a very value conscious purchase and definitely worth it.

PROS
+ Snug fit
+ Good sound isolation
+ Impeccable sound quality

CONS
- Difficult to insert and remove
- Somewhat weak bass
- Takes time to adjust to proper wear style

[ The Shure SE215 at Earphone Solutions ]