Dolby Sues Over Audio Compression Patents – With the explosion of the worldwide cellphone market, patent-infringements suits are blossoming. Dolby Labs has sued Research in Motion in the U.S. and Germany to seek financial damages and an injunction on the sale of BlackBerry smartphones and the Playbook tablet. Dolby contends the devices infringe on their patents on digital audio compression which they have licensed to all other major cellphone makers. The technology delivers high-quality audio using extremely limited amounts of transmission and/or storage space. They are incorporated into the international standard known as High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE AAC), which compresses digital signals to less than 10% of original size. Nokia and Apple have just settled their patent disputes, but Apple’s disputes with Motorola, Samsung and HTC are still going on.
New Internet Radio Portable – For the most part listening to webcast radio has been among the least portable form of digital entertainment in this mobile age. Services such as Pandora, Rhapsody and Last.FM are listened to mainly on computers with a live Internet connection or on a few Wi-Fi table radios – some plugged into home audio systems for better sound. But Slacker is a service which was built from ground up to work with portable devices. It is available in both free and fee-based Web versions. Their latest pocket-sized personalized radio is the Slacker G2 at $200 or $250 – depending on whether 4GB or 8GB of memory. The non-removable battery runs up to 15 hours before recharging, and it has built-in Wi-Fi, removing the need to attach it to a computer even to download music. (However, you do need to enter each network’s password using the G2’s thumbwheel.) It may be a good idea to connect first at home rather than assuming you can do so anywhere.
The Slacker G2 plays back in MP3, WMA and AAC formats but space for your own tunes is limited to only 1GB in the $200 model and 3GB in the other, and downloading is Windows-only, not cross-platform. There are dozens of pre-programmed stations in various genres, and you can create your own stations tailored exactly to your taste – as with Pandora and Last.FM. The free service lets you skip up to six tunes an hour if you don’t like them. With the Premium version you can request specific tunes be put into rotation on your station and you can skip as many as you wish. The control panel is well laid out; you can fast-forward past a song you don’t like, and go back to play songs you really liked again. Computer users can try out Slacker’s service without buying the mobile device; word is that their selection of music is superior to the other services – though I didn’t see any classical or jazz on their list. The free service has only a :30 commercial every five or six tunes, and Pandora, for one, has stepped up the frequency of their commercials in the free version.
New $4,900 Headphones – Most users will listen to their Slacker G2 with cheap ear buds, but the avid (and wealthy) headphone aficionado might be interest in the new bundled system that features the Audez’e planar magnetic technology headphones, the Red Wine Audio Edition combo headphone amp and DAC, AOL Audio’s balanced Audez’e headphone cable, and a custom carry case. The three companies shared the goal of getting the most from Audez’e’s world-class planar headphones.
