Spotify Mixes are a new family of personalized playlists populated with songs you already like and then supplemented with additional songs Spotify thinks you’ll like, based upon your favorite artists, genres, or music decades. The new Mixes are rolling out globally starting today for both free and premium Spotify subscribers.
The music streaming service already offers a similar feature in the form of Daily Mixes, which appear in the same “Made for You” section. However, the problem with Daily Mixes is that it can be a little hard to work out the unifying theme of each playlist based on their vague names like “Daily Mix 1” and “Daily Mix 2.” Sometimes you can work it out from the included songs, but other times it can be more mysterious.
In contrast, the names of the new Spotify Mixes are much clearer. A marketing image released by Spotify show playlists with names like “Pop Mix,” “2000s Mix,” and “Drake Mix.” Hopefully it’ll make it easy to know what kind of music you’ll find in each playlist without having to look at its track list.
According to Spotify, each Mix category will include multiple playlists, and they’ll update “frequently” to stop your listening from getting stale. Once available, you should be able to find them within “Search” in the “Made For You” hub.
It feels like just about every big tech company is working on a Clubhouse-like social audio feature — Twitter’s Spaces feature is rolling out now, Facebook is reportedly building one, Spotify is making one, Mark Cuban has one, even Slack is getting in the game. But now, the idea of the shared audio space, which started on Clubhouse largely as an exclusive club for tech venture capitalists and elites, has come full circle. Professional social network LinkedIn is working on an audio networking feature of its own, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
“We’re doing some early tests to create a unique audio experience connected to your professional identity,” LinkedIn said in a statement to TechCrunch. “And, we’re looking at how we can bring audio to other parts of LinkedIn such as events and groups, to give our members even more ways to connect to their community.”
LinkedIn said the feature will begin beta testing soon. Below is a mockup of what the feature might look like, which LinkedIn shared with TechCrunch. Like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, it features a stage of speakers front and center and a list of people in the audience lower down the screen.
Image: LinkedIn via TechCrunch
LinkedIn has already been working to make itself a destination for creators with tools like a new Creator mode that denote you as a LinkedIn content creator on your profile. A Clubhouse-like feature actually seems like a natural fit.
(Pocket-lint) – The Google Nest Hub (second gen) updates Google’s first smart display, which originally launched as the Google Home Hub.
Sporting a 7-inch display, it rivals Amazon’s Echo Show models, looking to bring a visual experience to Google Assistant, and slot the Mountain View company into the centre of your home.
This time around, however, Google has eyes on your bedroom.
Design and build
120.4 x 177.4 x 69.5mm, 558g
Four colours
Floating display design
Glance and you’ll miss it. The design of the second-gen Nest Hub is essentially the same as the old, but there are some minor differences on the spec sheet – not that you’ll really spot that from across the room.
The new Nest Hub remains a cute smart display and we’ve always liked this design. It fits in with the mesh covered designs we’ve seen from other Google devices over the past few years, using safe fabric colours to help it blend into your home décor.
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It’s a 7-inch display, so not huge – but glance at the offering from Amazon and you’ll find it sandwiched by the likes of the Echo Show 5 and the Echo Show 8, although we do think it looks a little more sophisticated.
There’s some bezel to the display – now incorporating a range of expanded sensors and mics – while there’s a volume rocker on the rear right and a physical mute switch on the centre rear, within easy reach.
It’s still a great looking device and while some might think that a 7-inch display is too big to have on your bedside table, that’s exactly where Google wants you to put it.
Setup and introducing sleep sensing
Google Home app
Sleep tracking calibration
Setting up the Nest Hub is easy. You’ll need to have the Google Home app on your smartphone, as this serves to control the device and gets setup underway. Once plugged in, it’s a few simple steps to get the Nest Hub up and running – the important part being connecting to your Wi-Fi and logging in with your Google account.
If you’ve used any Google devices before, this will now be familiar – and like Amazon’s Echo devices, signing in gets Google Assistant ready and so you’re quickly connected with everything that you have setup without Assistant already.
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That’s great, because it means that all your connected smart home devices will now work from your Nest Hub, if you have Voice Match in Google Assistant active then it will know who you are and tailor results to you, so you’re good to go.
That would be just about it for a regular Google device, but sleep sensing brings with it some additional requirement: calibration.
Sleep sensing on the Nest Hub uses a range of sensors, including temperature, light, sound and the Soli radar chip we previously saw in the Pixel 4 phones. Together, these sensors will be able to give you a complete picture of how you slept and the conditions you were sleeping it.
But first and foremost you need to make sure that the Soli radar will be able to see you. It sends out low power short-range electromagnetic waves allowing it to detect motion. It’s important to understand that it’s not using cameras for this, so it’s not visually spying on your while you’re asleep.
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This means that positioning is important and there’s a calibration process you’ll have to run through to get the Nest Hub in the right position so it will work. It doesn’t take long and all you have to do is basically lie in bed with the device on your bedside table and it will do its stuff. If it’s in the wrong position, it will ask you to adjust it.
There’s a few things you need to know here: firstly, it needs to be focused towards your upper body and secondly, it actually needs to be about level with you. If it’s too low, it won’t be able to detect anything because it’s looking at the side of the bed, so it’s no good putting it on the floor or on a bookcase a metre higher than you.
For most, it should be simple and within a few minutes it was all setup – but you have to remember you can’t then move it too much and you can’t put things in front of it, like a glass of water, because you’ll block the view.
Sleep tracking and bedside performance
Sensors to detect sleep
Personalised sleep summary
Syncing to Google Fit
Using all the sensors, the Nest Hub gathers data and, using an algorithm, can understand what’s going on.
From this data it can tell when you get into bed, when you go to sleep, when you’re disturbed during the night and when you get up. It also knows when you’re awake but lounging in bed refusing to get up.
This is the first converged device to offer sleep tracking that doesn’t require any physical touch. We’ve seen and used sleep tracking from the likes of Apple, Fitbit and Garmin where you need to wear a watch. We’ve used systems like ResMed SleepScore and Withings Sleep Analyzer – but the Nest Hub is likely to be more popular.
The problem with wearing something is that it can disturb you as you move around – and you’re sweating into it all day and all night. The problem with some of the other detection devices is that they only do one thing – whereas Nest Hub is your familiar Google-based smart display and your sleep tracking buddy.
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We’ve been sleeping with the Nest Hub over the last week and found the sleep tracking to be pretty accurate. But first of all, there’s no need to be concerned about having a 7-inch LCD display next to the bed – it dims really well so it’s not glowing at the side of the bed and keeping you awake.
Detection on getting into bed appears to happen at any point that you get into bed. Come back from a run and flop onto the bed while you check your Strava stats and you’ll see the on-screen notification telling you that it has detected you.
But the Nest Hub is smart enough to figure out what’s happening when. Because there’s processing to be done there are moments when you’ll be told that it’s processing – for example when you wake up. That’s mostly because it’s waiting to see when you leave bed so that it can report on how long it took you to get up and so on.
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Data is available to tap though on the display in the morning or you can ask Google Assistant. The results also sync to Google Fit so you can examine them on your phone, but again, these will vary and might change slightly depending on when you look at Google Fit and how that corresponds with any processing that the Nest Hub is doing.
The results are interesting and certainly accurate, but there’s no breakdown of heavy or light sleep like you’ll get from Fitbit. It also won’t think you’re asleep on the sofa when you’re watching a movie like Garmin sometimes does, but there are limits.
For example, on a disturbed night, you might try to sleep, then do some reading, toss and turn a bit and as a last resort, attempt to get to sleep by putting yourself into a meditative state. Anyone reading who suffers from insomnia will know what it’s like to clear your mind, calm your breathing and just lie still, hoping that you’ll get to sleep – and it’s here that Google thinks you are asleep, when you’re not.
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Otherwise, on normal sleeping days, we’ve found the reports to be accurate, detecting those middle of the night toilet breaks, and knowing when you’ve woken up earlier than you wanted to. It also detects snoring and coughing, which can be a bit thing that disturbs sleep.
Google’s analysis then attempts to give you feedback to improve your habits. For us, our average sleep time has been a little short and the Nest Hub tells us that we’re sometimes going to bed too early and staying in bed awake when we should be getting up in the morning. It’s trying to establish a better routine.
It all makes sense too: those days where we’re told sleep is “fairly restful” we’re awaking feeling refreshed; on the days when it’s been “restless”, we can feel that too. The thing is, we don’t need telling that. Whether this information is useful will be a personal decision.
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What Google doesn’t seem to be doing is putting this into context with anything else. There’s no relationship between sleeping and activity like you get from Garmin’s Body Battery. It’s also unclear what you might have to pay for this data in the future.
That’s right – it’s a free preview through to the end of 2021, but then Google says: “After the preview ends, paid subscription may be required.” Currently we don’t know what that cost might be. We also don’t know how this data might integrate with Fitbit, but Google has said it’s looking at how that might work.
Of course, if everything above fills you with horror, it’s an opt-in service. You don’t have to have sleep tracking at all.
Display, interface and sound quality
7-inch 1024 x 600 pixels
3 mics, 1.7-inch speaker driver
Google Assistant
There’s a 7-inch display on the front of the Nest Hub, with a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution. That’s not hugely high in terms of resolution, but we’ve nothing to complain about when it comes to quality.
There’s a visually engaging interface presented by Google and we think it’s better than Amazon’s equivalent on the Echo Show models: it just looks and feels a little more useful. Much of that comes down to the fact that Google has more information to pull in to serve you content you like, like relevant news.
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You can swipe through the screens to access various sections – wellness, home control, media, communication, including the discover section. The media option will already be connected to your Spotify account (if you’ve linked the two) while YouTube is front and centre.
Google can also take advantage of Chromecast support, allowing you to cast content to the Nest Hub too – so it can be a little more dynamic than Amazon’s device.
Google Assistant remains as smart as ever and has progressive developed over the past few years. We’ve one criticism and that’s the hiss that accompanies spoken replies. That was detectable on the Nest Audio too – something that Google really should fix to increase the overall offering – it’s not something that Alexa does.
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Of the two, we’d say that Google is a little smarter, often being able to give smarter replies, but there are some services better optimised for Echo devices – like requesting the BBC news: it’s just better when Alexa serves that up.
When it comes to speaker quality, the Nest Hub has a single 1.7-inch driver. It has boosted bass over the previous version for a richer overall sound and we think it’s great as a bedside unit, perhaps a little weak if you’re planning to use it as a main speaker in a room – you’d want the Nest Hub Max for that instead.
Comparing that to Alexa briefly and the Echo Show 8 – slightly larger than this model – does have a bigger sound too. The smallest Echo Show 5 also has a 1.7-inch driver, giving you an idea of how these devices compare.
Smart home and expanded functions
Thread, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
Chromecast built in
There’s no camera by design on the Nest Hub and Google had to opportunity to put one on this refreshed version and decided not to. For some people that will be a major downside, for others, a significant advantage.
There are a range of other connectivity technologies however and we’ve covered most already – Wi-Fi for the connection to the internet, Chromecast via the same route, Bluetooth to use your Nest Hub as a speaker or to connect it to a Bluetooth speaker.
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Then there’s Thread. Thread is a relatively new wireless smart home protocol which works on a mesh network. The Nest Hub can be part of a Thread system, just as the Apple HomePod Mini can be – very much working in the same was a Zigbee on the Echo models.
As this is a technology that’s just starting to establish itself, we haven’t tested it. We did test the Nest Hub with the wider set of smart home devices we’ve already linked to Google Assistant via the Home app and found no problems – and in the future, if you are buying Thread-equipped devices, the idea will be that you can control those directly from the Nest Hub without the need to a dedicated hub for whatever those devices are.
All in, the Nest Hub is still a super-connected device, able to play its part as the centre of your smart home, just as the name suggests.
Verdict
This new version of the Nest Hub only makes a couple of changes from the previous version: indeed, if you’re not interested in the sleep tracking, then you might be better off trying to find the older model at a discounted price, because you’re not missing out.
The sleep tracking adds a new dimension. As people are increasingly turning to technologies to track wellbeing, and sleep being a growing area. While the technology works, uncertainty about future subscription costs might give pause for though – or you might want to try it and cross that bridge in 2022.
Fundamentally, the Nest Hub 2021 is a good device. It’s connected, good quality, a refreshingly simple interface and offers the best voice assistant in the business. If you want your home to be smarter, this is a great place to start.
Alternatives to consider
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Lenovo Smart Clock
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The Lenovo is a compact bedside device that gives you all the advantages of Google Assistant in a small package.
Read the full Lenovo Smart Clock review
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Amazon Echo Show 8
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The Echo Show 8 is larger, but features a camera as well as the full skills of Alexa.
Entercom, a company mostly associated with its hundreds of US radio stations, is losing its old name in an effort to signify its broader interest and investments in audio — specifically, podcasts. Today, Entercom becomes Audacy. The company, which owns podcast networks Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Studios, as well as ad network Podcorn, is looking to keep expanding its work in the digital audio space. Along with the rebrand, the company is announcing a new podcast partnership with Demi Lovato; a partnership with BetMGM to create content around sports betting; and a plan to exclusively debut new, original shows on its Audacy listening app (previously the Radio.com app).
“We’ve come to this point where we are really fundamentally different than who we were before,” CEO David Fields tells The Verge. “And it was time for a new identity, a new brand that really reflected the depth and breadth of all the things that we do and the ambitions and vision that we have going forward.”
The branding shift comes as more companies double down on podcasting. iHeartMedia and Cumulus both own radio stations around the US but also maintain podcast businesses. Cumulus owns Westwood One, which hosts shows from political commentators like Ben Shapiro, while iHeartMedia altered its operating structure to report its podcasting division revenue separately from its radio stations earlier this year. Audacy already makes podcasts, and Fields claims it’s the “number one creator of audio content in the United States” considering its news and local sports radio stations’ programming.
“We think that deserves its own platform as opposed to being part of somebody else’s platform,” he says when asked why Audacy wants to launch shows exclusively on its app rather than looking to the biggest listening apps, like Spotify or Apple Podcasts. (Spotify has already locked in exclusives with Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios on shows like Welcome to Your Fantasy.)
Meanwhile, he also says with live audio apps, like Clubhouse, taking off, “there is more energy and enthusiasm around audio today than ever before.” Audacy clearly wants to make sure it stays in the conversation and its investors know it’s serious about podcasting, not just radio.
“I suppose you can’t have true respect for something unless you’re willing to challenge it,” we posit to Nils Frahm. “Exactly,” he replies. “Exactly.”
It feels good to have Frahm agree with you. Not only because his music is as much part of our homes – and the What Hi-Fi? test rooms – as the light fixtures and soft furnishings. It feels good to have Frahm agree with you because he comes across as an expert on whichever topic he is speaking about in that moment.
He even makes his own soap. Because that devilish streak of tinkering with his instrument, which we celebrate today on Piano Day, is just symptom of a wider curiosity this exquisite composer applies to every part of his life. Whether or not he is an expert is almost moot, as that infectious interest in everything travels down the phone line to us.
Even Piano Day cannot be taken at face value when Frahm, the very man who appointed it as the 88th day of the year, discusses the instrument’s more menacing symbolism.
Nonetheless, it is clear that there is a lot of love in this relationship. To celebrate this year Frahm has today released Graz, the first album he ever recorded for Erased Tapes.
This grand piano recording has taken 12 years to surface – though certain pieces you might recognise from his live performances – and captures a more youthful musician nearer the start of a career, and nearer the beginning of this mischievously respectful relationship with his instrument that we hope is nowhere near its end.
Over half an hour, we managed to talk with Frahm about Graz, recording the piano and a heavily customised hi-fi set-up. Not that we’d have put him through it, but we could have spoken for hours upon hours longer.
Lisen to Graz by Nils Frahm, released to celebrate Piano Day 2021, on Tidal or Spotify.
An emotional reaction
(Image credit: Sebastian Rieck)
What Hi-Fi?: We should probably start by congratulating you on getting Erased Tapes to release your debut album, at last. We’ve listened to it a few times and it’s got that real sort of transformational quality that your music has; it goes through that metamorphosis depending on what time of day or when in the year you hear it. Is the album as recorded in 2009?
Nils Frahm: It was recorded in a place where there was a special setup. It was basically a big studio that has variable acoustics, realised through microphones in the room and speakers where there’s a custom-made reverb algorithm, which basically takes the sound from various points – I think it has about 16 microphones and 64 speakers – and you can change the the parameters of the ambience through this.
So the shortest reverb is maybe 1.8 seconds, then you can turn on the engine and it will generate a reverb which you would like to hear in that room. It can be quite impressive; when you close your eyes and you play, and somebody tweaks with the parameters of the settings, you basically travel through space. Basically, while I was improvising, my colleague was turning some knobs and dials from this reverb engine, and that was inspiring me to play in a different way maybe.
WHF?: Reverb, and natural reverb especially, has been a huge part of your playing; it was in All Melody you used a dry well that you had found on holiday. How important for a piano recording is it to hear the space that it’s been recorded in?
NF: I think the room for acoustic instruments plays a big role, because essentially the room makes stuff louder and sound more immersive. With reflections and some sort of ambience an acoustic instrument sounds like it’s floating around you. Coming from various points, it becomes more three-dimensional and big sounding.
This is why a piano or a symphony orchestra sounds much better in a room over being played outside; I still don’t understand why some festivals curate classical concerts outside, because strings or the whole classical ensemble without the natural reverb for me doesn’t blend. You can’t blend the elements together without ambience. So I think the same for the piano: you have a lot of different sounds and notes and things on a piano. With the acoustics you put all of this together in one concept, almost as if you would dress a person from tip to toe.
WHF?: The performance is obviously key, and a recording lives or dies by it, but what other things are important to get right when recording the piano?
NF: The performance. Because when the performance is well put and the balance between the notes and the balance in the voicing, the loudness of each finger, is put right then basically the recording is quite stable. And if you have an unstable performance you have to really work much more with the mixing, or focusing on the microphone position, or choice of reverbs and processing to get the performance organised. Basically that’s the case for every musical performance. When the performance has some integrity and is put well, then as a recording engineer or as a person listening back at home, it’s an easy task to transport that wonderful moment.
Because sound in the end is decoded in our brains into an emotional reaction somehow – I don’t know how that works – but I would say that if you hear something that doesn’t really get you emotionally, you will analyse more technically. And if something just haunts you or something strikes you, and you don’t know why, you will not really ask so many questions.
It’s like a phenomenon. When I listen to Chet Baker records and I hear the voice then hear the piano, the piano sounds kind of bad, honestly. But together with the voice, the quality of the piano and the quality of the voice becomes something that’s hard to explain why it works. I think it’s because Chet really just sings so beautifully, and the piano just really plays wonderfully, and that gives you so much freedom as a producer to put these elements wherever you want. When you play really good you can make that element 6dB louder or 6dB quieter: it will still be amazing. If you have a bad arrangement or a bad take, you will fiddle with the volume to fit it in, because it will never be right.
A rebellious angle
(Image credit: Leiter Verlag)
WHF?: You have what we would describe as an almost two-way relationship with the piano, in that it feels like it’s rewarding you for the care you put into its tone and its timbre. What makes it such a special instrument?
NF: I think all instruments are pretty special. The piano is so special because I think it has had such a big success in the history of music. Ever since it was invented it played a huge role in the creation of music, especially in the Western world. Not so much in other places in the world. The piano is also testimonial to an industrialised society, a Western capitalist industrialised society, because it’s very difficult to make unique heavy machinery; you need vast skill sets and machines to make a piano. And you need a lot of money!
And so the piano is a symbol for power as well. These are all components I am also aware of. I try to have the awareness to treat the piano with a certain respect, but also show a sense of humour. Because when you take the piano too seriously, you also take the society we live in too seriously. You might get more interesting results from the piano if you treat it with respect but also with a rebellious angle, because there are many things I don’t agree with. I don’t think the West created a fair world, or a better place for everybody. So if the piano is a statue or symbol for all of this, then whatever the critique is towards a society or towards our philosophy, or our culture, the critique also addresses the piano.
So that’s why I respect it but I also disrespect it, in terms of changing its sounds or putting things inside, or doing wrong things maybe with it. Because I think the piano shouldn’t rule us, we should rule the piano; in as much as the values of a capitalist society or a white supremacist society shouldn’t rule us, we should rule the society. So it’s very philosophically put, but the piano is a symbol also for all the things I don’t agree with, and it creates an interesting angle for me to approach this special instrument.
WHF?: You can’t have true respect for something unless you’re willing to challenge it.
NF: Exactly, exactly.
WHF?: As well as experimenting with your instrument, on Spaces in particular you have a lot of different ways of recording; it’s almost a collection of field recordings. Is using things such as reel-to-reel an experiment, or is there a particular sound to each medium that you really like and want to capture?
NF: For me it’s a little bit like with photography: the best camera is always the one you have with you. You can say the best recorder is always the one you can just work with in the moment, and is reliable and records the music. And true, they sound all a little bit different, but when I choose to record something on a cassette tape it probably reflects the approach of that session. I probably just don’t have real good equipment available and I take maybe just a really cheap USB junk sound card rather than my really high quality converter that I only have in one place.
I like to record on really interesting broadcasting master recorders. I like quality from all eras, and when I buy a cassette deck on eBay for 200 bucks, it’s maybe the Marantz PMD master recorder that was built for broadcasting documentaries. It has a certain quality: it will always turn on, it’s made out of metal, you can listen to the record head and you can definitely check what you’re recording. I really go with whatever sound comes out of it, if the machine is so well designed.
I’m a big fan of the Nagra tape recorder as well, or I record a lot on portable to track field recorders, made for film sounds. For me – tape, digital, analogue – whatever gets the job done and I feel happy with is my colour of choice. Because I know that whatever I do there is so much flexibility to treat material further in the mixing processes, and have more decisions. Of course, when I put something on tape I will never make it sound like a really good modern recording, but there’s still so many places that I could go with it that I just trust what will come out.
WHF?: It comes back to the performance being key; but if you set a certain recorder up do you think that affects the way you play?
NF: I don’t try to make the recorder a big inspiration or compositional element. I would rather record in a way that I can play loud notes without distortion, and if I play very quiet I will record in a way that I don’t just hear noise. But obviously the piano is a very dynamic instrument: if you want to get a good recording done, before you start playing you should think ‘is this a loud piece or a quiet piece?’.
I always turn the gain on the mic preamps to an according position, because the piano has over 90dB of usable dynamics. If I play super quiet and I have to crank the preamps up otherwise I will record almost nothing, and if I know I’ll play a loud piece or dynamic piece I have to turn the amps down knowing the quietest elements will not otherwise sound as good. So obviously I take this into account [but it doesn’t change the way I play].
WHF?: Do you have a list of favourite piano recordings that you go back to again and again?
NF: I think my favourite piano record, that I have gone back to for years, is one that doesn’t really sound like my style of recording. It’s actually the opposite: it’s a very far, distant sound. It’s a recording called Bagatellen und Serenaden by Valentin Silvestrov. He is a Ukrainian composer living in Kiev; I think it’s like nobody recorded the grand piano in such a loving way as ECM has done. Another mind-blowing recording from ECM is Der Bote by Alexei Lubimov. And there’s one piece [on that record], In the Landscape by John Cage, and that piece is just sounding unreal.
But again most of that is how the piano was treated and prepared by the piano technicians prior to the session. They really make the sound of the piano, these people, the piano tuners. They don’t tune the piano, they touch it in every possible spot; they put oil here, they sand down the hammers, they put needles inside the hammers to see whether the density should be different. So each note gets basically custom tuned, and so the whole piano becomes one thing that sounds like an instrument, which inspires the player. Because a piano that doesn’t inspire the player will not lead to a good take.
So all becomes like one beautiful thing: the room, the acoustics, how the piano is set up, who is the piano builder and the player, the performance. All that composition. And out of a thousand piano recordings, there are some that are just reaching far beyond what I thought was possible. That always sets imagined horizons, for me to remember: ‘wait, maybe we’ll get something else out of that wooden box, something more engaging than what we’ve heard.’
Principles and physics
(Image credit: Leiter Verlag)
WHF?: We want to talk to you about not just what you listen to, but how you listen at home. Do you have a mix of sources, amplifiers and things?
NF: At home I listen strictly to vinyl at the moment, just because I don’t need flexibility. I have the studio where I can listen to digital files. At home I just play records. I have a good pick up on a customised [Technics SL-1200] MK2. I just love that record player; I actually like how it looks also, people hate the Technics now but I still have mine and I’m very happy with it.
And that goes through a phono stage. I forgot the name: it’s a custom box from Sweden by a guy who put all the equaliser curves of all the different pressing plants – the Philips and Columbia and whatever – because I have a lot of original Columbia records for my US tours. I collect some original jazz records. And so I can just set the equaliser settings, because I realise that some of the records sound really much different when I change the EQ – and that makes sense when you know the history of that.
Then out of the phone stage I go into a… Jesus Christ, I’m so bad at names; I just bought this thing.. it’s an Air Tight, used 34-watt tube amp. I go straight into that and I need the boost to drive my 15 Ohm Klangfilm speakers. I made some custom wood panels for it so it’s not a closed chassis, it’s an open-baffle speaker. They have a coaxial driver with a tweeter in the centre, which is similar to the system I use in the studio, but it’s from the 1940s or something. And I made my own frequency divider for this with just an old British condenser, which sounds fantastic and takes the low out of the tweeter.
It’s very rough but it gives me such a good overall sound and tone. It isn’t very good with very low bass, and it’s not a fast speaker, but when you play resonant, atmospheric music like piano or jazz or old records especially, it sounds almost like people are in your room playing. It’s absolutely mind-blowing. Obviously it’s not a reference system, but it’s a very good sound system.
WHF?: It sounds a lot like the way you approach the piano, tinkering and tailoring to make it fit your own taste. Is that something you’ve always been interested in, on the listening side?
NF: Yes, every aspect in life for me is similar. I don’t want to buy brands, I think it’s boring when you just go ‘I like this brand and I like that brand’. I want to go beyond and when I like something I want to know why; I want to understand the principle, and often it’s not the magic of some brand. I mean, people think they should buy Bose speakers – I don’t want to bash Bose, they just don’t do the equipment I like – but if people trust the name, they think whatever they do will work.
Even if you listen to people with the everyday stuff, they say ‘oh, I have to buy the soap from this brand’ and ‘you have to buy the soap from that brand’. And I am always like, well let’s take that soap let’s look at the back: so it’s this, it’s this, it’s this… and then I go back and try to find the basic components. Usually it gets much easier without the additives and the weird colouring stuff, and it’s for the same for me with instruments or speakers.
I want to know, why do I like this? For example, why do I like coaxial speakers? The principal for me is much more important than the brand. All the forums that try to figure out how to make stuff sound good, they discuss brands and models; but people don’t really discuss physics, and they don’t really discuss principles, and types of signal flow. So there’s little knowledge about Class A, B, C, D – and so people try to remember what they should buy, and they think, ‘so I heard Class A sounds the best, so I need class A’. But often you don’t need class A. For me it’s always about looking under the bonnet.
WHF?: It’s testament to your creative mind that everything is an interaction rather than a consumable for you. Is it a similar tweaked set-up when you’re touring and on the move?
NF: No, my life is simple: when I don’t have a sound system that I like, I don’t really listen to music. I also need time away from sounds and away from music, nobody wants to listen to music 24/7. So if I’m not in the studio or not at home, I just stop listening to music. And if I’m in the car, I go with whatever sound system is in there. I would never spend money on that: it’s just a car. Maybe I listen to NPR or something like that, and it helps me also to listen to music on just a very average sound system, just for double-checking mixes.
So yeah, I’m not a picky type. Like I said, I value good-sounding records over a good-sounding sound system. Because I learnt a lot of people who are crazy about good speakers, they start buying CDs that are only made for good speakers, where the music was recorded through golden cables or whatever. And the musicians are not so good, but their sound recording is really good, and so they listen to reference where the music is not so interesting. For me, that is the point where I’m just getting lost, because the sound system is just there to play music from talented people with a message. Sometimes these moments are recorded great, and then if they’re recorded great I can also listen to that on a shitty sound system where it will cut through.
My first Radiohead experience was like that. I listened to a €100 or whatever, portable, shit CD player back in the day in the late 90s, designed for a children’s room. And I sat and I played Amnesiac, and it sounded huge. It sounded absolutely insane, it sounded completely different to all the other records I had, and I could never really get sound out of that box. I was at that point more interested in bypassing the quality of what people have as a hi-fi, and try to make music which transforms the speaker, whatever quality it is, into to what the composer or the artist wants from it.
I know examples of records that will sound good on every sound system I know, and that’s not 100 per cent what is important but it’s very interesting to learn about this. Especially when people don’t make music and they just buy equipment to play back, and they’re not so familiar with how music is made. They need to know that when something doesn’t really sound right in that room ,or something doesn’t really sound right in that moment, it’s mostly a problem with the producer. It should not be the problem of the consumer to help whatever didn’t work in the recording or production stage. So whenever we want to listen to good music, we just have to find the good music. It’s very easy and you don’t need to spend too much money on on anything
WHF?: Those recordings you know will sound good on any system, what are they for you?
NF: Basically anything Miles Davis recorded In the 50s and 60s, especially Kind of Blue and the soundtrack he did for the French film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. That will transform your iPhone into to a huge soundstage. And obviously the Chet Baker example is is the most convincing for me, because when you put Chet Baker on your iPhone and you put your iPhone into a Pringles box, it will also almost sound as good as if you listened on thousand euro speakers. Maybe just 90 as opposed to 100 per cent. It’s a rough statement to make, but people probably get the point.
MORE:
10 of the best movie scores to test your system
40 of the best 1990s albums to test your speakers
Music for sleep: the best ambient albums to help you relax
Qobuz has beaten Tidal to become the first music service to bring 24-bit hi-res audio streaming to Sonos speakers. It’s quite a coup for Qobuz – and welcome news for Sonos owners who have been waiting patiently for the chance to stream higher quality audio.
You’ll need a subscription to either of Qobuz’s tiers, Studio Premier or Studio Sublime, plus the Sonos S2 app, which supports 24-bit 44.1/48kHz for FLAC and is compatible with most Sonos speakers including the new Sonos Roam.
“For many years hi-res audio was only available to a select few with the knowledge of where to get it and how to play it”, noted Dan Mackta, MD of Qobuz USA. “Now, millions of people have the hardware in their homes already – and the source has never been easier to access than through hi-res streaming with Qobuz on Sonos.”
The Sonos S2 app already lets users play 24-bit files from a local drive, but this is the first time that users have been able to stream hi-res tracks from a music service.
Quboz launched in 2007 and quickly became the first music service to offer CD-quality streaming in the UK. A subscription costs from £12.49 a month but new users can try it out for free here. In 2013, it became the first service to offer 16-bit streaming on Sonos, which may go some why to explaining how it got the jump on its biggest rivals – Tidal and Amazon Music HD – in this instance.
Qobuz 24-bit hi-res streaming is available now on Sonos in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Meanwhile, Spotify has announced plans to launch Spotify HiFi later this year. The new subscription tier will offer “lossless audio” streams, but not, it seems, 24-bit high-res tracks. But will that matter?
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Deep dive: read our in-depth review of Quboz
Here’s our pick of the best music streaming services
Naim Mu-so 2nd Gen wireless speakers get Qobuz support
Acer’s Predator Triton 300 SE is chasing after the hype that Asus built with last year’s excellent Zephyrus G14. It’s similar in a few key ways: it’s a sophisticated-looking gaming laptop bordering on ultrabook territory in terms of its sleek and relatively thin design. It has a 14-inch 1080p display with a fast refresh rate and respectable graphics capabilities to top it off. Even its price hits a similar spot at $1,399.
Asus’ latest G14 hasn’t made its way to us for review yet, so we don’t know exactly how it’ll compare to this one in all of the ways that matter. But in the meantime, Acer’s new model already has some clear advantages, like a built-in webcam and the Thunderbolt 4 port. It also achieves commendable gaming performance with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, but don’t let the similarities (or even the few perks) trick you. Calling the new Triton 300 SE a Predator is a little bit of a misnomer.
Last year’s G14 defied my colleague Monica Chin’s expectations for what a gaming laptop could achieve when it comes to battery life. Comparatively, Acer’s new laptop isn’t nearly as long-lasting, but it’s not terrible. The Triton 300 SE has a 60Wh four-cell battery that lasts around six hours on average with relatively light usage. More on this later, but safe to say it’s considerably less than the 10-hour battery life Acer claims. You can feel confident taking the Triton 300 SE out to a cafe to do some work for a few hours. But if you intend to be out all day, or use it to do any gaming, you’ll need to bring the charger.
Whether limited battery life bothers you or not, there are some other issues that I couldn’t help but notice. The interplay of all-plastic on the lid and an all-metal chassis looks fine, but the lid feels flimsy in a way that makes me concerned for its longevity. Applying just a few pounds of pressure to the Predator logo beneath the display makes it bow more than it should. On the unit that Acer sent us, the softer plastic built into the screen’s bezel that cushions the lid when it closes has tiny gaps where it’s not seamlessly adhered. And near the keyboard, the “Turbo” key that amps up the fans has a slight imperfection on it. Lastly, Acer stuffed far too much annoying bloatware into the Triton. About every hour, there’s a pop-up asking me to install or subscribe to something.
All of this makes for a laptop that doesn’t feel as high-end as its cost indicates it should.
There’s just one configuration of this model right now, containing a four-core Intel Core i7-11375H processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, 512GB of NVMe SSD storage, as well as the aforementioned RTX 3060 graphics card. The performance of that GPU depends a lot on how much power each manufacturer wants to allow it to draw. And in this case, it has a 75W maximum power draw and can be boosted up to 1,382MHz. After spending time with several RTX 3070-equipped gaming laptops with more headroom than that, I wasn’t expecting much here. However, I was pleased to see gaming performance in multiple titles getting around 60 frames per second without requiring compromises in the settings.
Horizon Zero Dawn, a system-intensive, open-world game, ran at an average of 60fps with ultra settings turned on. Testing Triton 300 SE’s RTX-enabled ray-tracing chops, Shadow of the Tomb Raider on ultra settings with the ray-tracing shadows set to medium got 61 frames per second. Turning the ray-tracing setting up to ultra knocked it down to 48fps. Running that game with ray tracing set to ultra and Nvidia’s deep learning super sampling (DLSS) technique turned on that lowers the render resolution, then uses AI to upscale textures, Acer’s laptop achieved 55 frames per second, splitting the difference. Red Dead Redemption 2, another demanding open-world game, ran at 53 frames per second on ultra settings.
It’s not surprising that, with its newer components, Acer’s laptop puts up more favorable numbers than the 2020 G14 that had an RTX 2060. Performance in some of Asus’ 2021 models could fare slightly better in terms of 1080p performance, even though it similarly uses the RTX 3060. That’s because its graphics chip has a slightly higher 80W power ceiling compared to 75W in the Triton 300 SE, not to mention that its AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS processor has eight cores compared to the four cores with this 11th Gen Intel processor.
The Triton 300 SE’s metal chassis effectively turns into a heatsink to dissipate heat under heavy use, and I noticed it getting warm during gameplay. Unlike most laptops, the heat extended all the way down to the wrist rest, but it wasn’t bothersome. I appreciate the thought that went into the cooling system, which takes air in through the back, then pushes it out the sides of the laptop. Some laptops do the inverse of this, and it can make actually using laptops on your lap a little too toasty, even for non-gaming-related tasks.
There’s a “Turbo” button located above the main batch of keys that overclocks the CPU and GPU, sending the fans loudly into overdrive. I didn’t need to use this mode to achieve the frame rates I cited earlier, and turning it on didn’t seem to make a huge difference during my testing. I also didn’t notice an appreciable difference using it with Adobe Premiere Pro to export a 5-minute, 33-second 4K video. It took 5 minutes and 40 seconds to run through the test. Considering the price and size of this machine, these results rank highly among other laptops we’ve tested recently.
Acer uses a 14-inch 1080p IPS 16:9 aspect ratio panel with a 144Hz refresh rate with up to 300 nits of brightness. During general use and gameplay, I have no complaints about the color accuracy or brightness, though there’s some noticeable ghosting, likely attributed to a higher response time that adds latency. As a result, the mouse pointer doesn’t glide across the screen as smoothly as I’ve seen on other high refresh rate screens, and it extends to gameplay looking a little blurry at times, trivializing the technical achievement of hitting 60 frames per second in games, as well as having a 144Hz refresh rate in the first place. Despite multiple requests for a comment on the response time, Acer didn’t provide the spec.
Additionally, this screen’s viewing angles are far more limited than I expect from an IPS panel. It’s easily viewable straight-on, but less so from other angles unless the brightness is amped up. Next to the less-than-stellar battery life, this is a big miss for Acer that might be less forgivable for gamers.
I was right at home with Acer’s keyboard, though, both in terms of the layout and feel of the keys here. This keyboard has three-zone backlit keys (you can customize each zone to be a different color in its Predator software), and though many features require holding the “Fn” key to use, the layout is intuitive and doesn’t feel overly cramped.
The glass trackpad supports all of the gestures I expect with Windows Precision drivers, but it isn’t as responsive to my touch as it should be. I think it’s more an issue with the screen’s response time than it is an issue with the trackpad. A fingerprint scanner you can use as an alternative to a PIN is embedded in the top-left corner of the trackpad, but I’ve found that it only works half the time. With that failure rate, I’d rather just have more trackpad real estate.
Acer included the essentials in terms of ports. There are two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports — one on each side, with the right-facing port being able to charge some devices. The star of the show is the Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port, which can be used to transfer data or connect a display. Additionally, I’m happy to see an HDMI 2.1 port, offering up to 4K resolution at 120 frames per second. There’s also a headphone combo jack and a DC-in port for its relatively compact 180W power brick. I wish Acer allowed this laptop to be recharged via USB-C, but it’s all handled through the proprietary DC charging port.
Coming back to battery life, it’s not the biggest flaw that this laptop can only get between five and six hours of battery life per charge while using apps like Microsoft Edge, Spotify, and Slack. The issue here is that Acer claims it will last up to 10 hours, but it doesn’t outwardly mention that you’ll only get that kind of longevity if you’re doing something very simple, like watching HD video with no other apps running. That’s fine if you’re on an airplane for hours on end, but most people rely on a laptop for more than that, so it’s far from the best method for judging battery performance. Based on my testing, the best results you should expect with light usage is about six hours at most. It’s not bad for a gaming laptop, but it keeps the Triton 300 SE from hanging with the battery performance you can get from other ultrabooks or even the Zephyrus G14.
It was daring of Acer to jump into the ring against Asus’ Zephyrus G14, a gaming laptop that ticks a lot of boxes (aside from the missing webcam) for the price. This is a more elegant-looking machine than the G14, and compared directly, it’s hard to not appreciate its Thunderbolt 4 port and a webcam. It’s also a capable performer with games. But Asus proved that a gaming laptop can be more than just a powerful machine. It can also have good battery life for portable use and competent build quality without a bunch of bloatware. The competition is fierce, but the Triton 300 SE is more like prey than a bonafide Predator.
Deezer has revealed a new subscription tier combining the benefits of its ad-free Family and Hi-Fi packages called, unsurprisingly, Family HiFi.
If you’re already a Deezer HiFi user, you can upgrade to Family HiFi immediately and get up to six individual, password-protected profiles for £19.99/$19.99 a month (the service isn’t rolling out to Australia just yet) – that’s an increase of £5/$5 over a regular HiFi subscription. New subscribers will get the opportunity to open a Family HiFi account for the same price later in the year.
A single Deezer HiFi account currently costs £14.99/$14.99 per month for which users can listen to 70 million tracks in 16-bit, 1411kbps CD-quality across several devices, including iOS, Android, desktop, plus various other audio products, from multi-room speakers to AV receivers. The top-level service also allows access to the 360 by Deezerapp that allows you to experience tracks encoded in 360 Reality Audio, Sony’s immersive audio format.
Those who upgrade to FamilyHiFi will also get the benefit of parental controls, dedicated customer service for HiFi users, and a specially curated Family Mix, so you might want to vet the tastes of your relatives before sharing.
The announcement brings Deezer in line with its streaming rivals in offering a multi-user CD-quality tier with Amazon Music HD (£19.99/$19.99), Tidal (£29.99/$29.99), and Qobuz (£24.99/$24.99) already offering the option to add up to 6 users to their top tiers, although Deezer still doesn’t have the option of hi-res audio.
With streaming giant Spotify set to join the party later this year with its CD-quality Spotify HiFi tier, and no word on the pricing or if it includes a family subscription, Deezer appears to be attempting to strengthen its offering in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Cambridge Audio has announced a firmware update to bring Tidal Connect support to its music streamer line-up.
The update is already available for the Edge NQ, CXN (V2), 851N, CXN (V1) and StreamMagic 6 (V2), and will arrive for the CXR120 and CXR200 from 7th April.
Given that the oldest model receiving the upgrade came out in 2014 (that makes it well into middle-aged in tech-years), it’s a nice touch that Cambridge is rolling out the new feature to their entire current offering.
Tidal Connect (like Spotify Connect but for, er, Tidal) lets subscribers stream music to compatible products directly within the service’s app. Unlike it’s Spotify alter-ego, however, this lets you stream music at higher quality if you’re a Tidal HiFi subscriber. Simply select your Tidal Connect-enabled product in the device selector at the bottom of the ‘Now Playing’ screen.
To this end, Tidal integration will be removed from the Cambridge Connect app and the front panel of the streamers (although will continue to work through the StreamMagic app).
While one of the benefits of Tidal Connect is passthrough of hi-res (MQA-powered) Tidal Masters, this won’t be available with Cambridge streamers as MQA implementation requires a hardware modification. You can, however, workaround this incompatibility by connecting a USB-A-to-USB-B cable between a PC/laptop and the network player to enjoy MQA content through the Tidal desktop app.
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10 of the best hi-res albums on Tidal Masters
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Musicians aren’t thrilled with Spotify — they say the streaming platform undervalues their work and they deserve to be paid more per stream. So today, Spotify’s trying to address those concerns with a new website called Loud & Clear, which offers more insight into how much the platform pays artists and how that money is distributed. The site also includes a calculator so artists can see where their work ranks on Spotify, like how a song with 100,000 all-time streams would only be in the top 2,710,000 tracks on the platform.
Notably, the company says it’s paid over $23 billion in royalties to rights holders, including over $5 billion in 2020, which is up from $3.3 billion in 2017. It also notes that there are 1.2 million artists with over 1,000 listeners on the platform — it doesn’t say how many artists there are total — and that 15 percent, or 184,500, of their catalogs generated recording and publishing royalties of at least $1,000. (Those payments don’t go directly to artists and are instead paid to their rights holders, like distributors or record labels, which then refer to the contracts they hold with artists to pay them. This means the artists likely didn’t receive the full $1,000 from their Spotify streams.) On the higher end, only 870 artists’ catalogs generated $1 million or more in royalties.
You can play around with the website to see all the data and, if you have questions about how streaming royalties work and how the company figures out how much to pay rights holders, there’s a video on that. I’m embedding it below.
Spotify’s increased interest in transparency comes about during a time when a couple of its competitors are experimenting with new ways to pay artists. Earlier this month, SoundCloud announced that it’d pay indie artists based on their actual listeners, rather than share of overall streams. So a SoundCloud subscriber’s subscription fee or advertising revenue is divvied up among the artists they actually listen to, rather than going to a big pot and being split up and shared with the platform’s most popular artists, like Spotify.
In a chat with The Verge, Charlie Hellman, Spotify’s VP and head of marketplace, noted that the company’s internal research doesn’t suggest that this model would meaningfully shift the types of artists that succeed, but that if the industry decided to move toward the change, Spotify would be “open” to it.
Maybe transparency will help artists feel like Spotify isn’t just profiting from their work, but it’s hard to imagine that being the case. Spotify, to its credit, has attempted to make it easier for artists to directly profit, with features like a tip jar and the ability to sell merch and concert tickets through the platform. But how much artists have earned through those features isn’t detailed on this new website, and the website makes clear that hundreds of thousands of artists earn far less than a living wage through the platform’s streams.
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If you’ve used a ThinkPad before, you probably know 90 percent of what to expect from the ThinkPad X1 Nano. All of the staples are here. It’s got the black carbon fiber chassis, the discrete buttons on top of the touchpad, the mechanical privacy shutter, the ThinkPad logo on the palm rest, and (of course) the red pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard.
But one thing is unique about the X1 Nano: it’s the lightest ThinkPad Lenovo has ever made. Starting at just 1.99 pounds, the Nano isn’t technically the lightest laptop on the market. But it’s still one of the best combinations of portability, build quality, and performance that you can buy.
Lenovo has made a few other useful tweaks as well, though they’re not tweaks you’ll necessarily notice when you’re looking at the machine. There’s not much to overthink here: it’s a smaller, lighter ThinkPad. Lenovo didn’t reinvent the wheel, but the updates it made succeed in keeping the Nano current among its rapidly innovating peers.
The keyboard is “nearly full-sized.”
Here’s what’s new with the Nano, in addition to its lightweight build. It has a 16:10 screen, a feature that a number of this year’s ThinkPads are adopting for the first time. It has a new 11th Gen Intel processor, and it’s certified through Intel’s Evo program (which is the chipmaker’s way of verifying that a laptop includes its latest features like Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6, instant wake, and fast charging). And there are a few enhanced security features, including a match-on-chip fingerprint reader and a dTPM 2.0 chip, which will mostly be notable for business users.
What looms over that verdict, of course, is the Nano’s price. Technically, it starts at $2,499 and maxes out at $3,719. The good news is that Lenovo’s products are very often heavily discounted, and the current sale prices at the time of publish range from $1,149 to $2,231.
The Nano is highly customizable. It comes with a Core i5-1130G7, a Core i5-1140G7, a Core i7-1160G7, or a Core i7-1180G7, all of which support Intel’s vPro. You can also select 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB through 1TB of SSD storage, and a touchscreen or non-touch screen (both with 2160 x 1350 resolution). There’s even a Linux option. My review model (which runs Windows 10 Pro) is in the middle, with a quad-core Core i7-1160G7, 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage, and the non-touch display. Folks interested in the touchscreen should note that those models are heavier (2.14 pounds) and a bit thicker as well.
You’re paying a premium for the Nano’s weight and the extra business features. A comparable Dell XPS 13 to my test model, for example, is $1,599.99 and 2.64 pounds (over half a pound heavier than this unit).
That said, the Nano’s weight is astounding. I feel like I’m carrying nothing while I’m holding it, even one-handed. I’d easily haul it in my purse or throw it into my backpack and forget that it’s there. For a few comparisons: it’s half a pound lighter than the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9. It’s close to a pound lighter than the ThinkPad X13, as well as the latest MacBook Air. These are already laptops known for their portability, and the Nano is noticeably slimmer.
The laptop achieves this without sacrificing durability, which is often a concern with ultra-light devices. The chassis feels sturdy — there’s just a tiny bit of flex in the keyboard and screen, and I’d be very comfortable jerking it around in a briefcase. Lenovo says the Nano has been “tested against 12 military-grade certification methods,” so there’s also that.
I’m also very happy with the 16:10 display, which is about the same height as a typical 14-inch 16:9 screen. In addition to the extra vertical space it provides, it’s sharper than a 1080p display, and it delivers a nice picture.
There’s also a Dolby Atmos speaker system, which includes two upward-firing and two downward-firing woofers. The laptop comes preloaded with Dolby Access, which is one of my favorite audio apps. You can swap between presets for Movies, Music, and other scenarios (as well as custom profiles), and the settings make an audible difference. You can also personalize the four-microphone array for different uses, including conference calls and voice recognition.
My one quip with the chassis is the keyboard. It’s a fine keyboard, and the little red nub is there if you want to use it. But the Fn and Ctrl keys are swapped from the locations where you’ll find them on other laptop keyboards — every time I meant to hit Ctrl, I hit Fn. After a week of use, I have not yet adjusted to this.
Now, I want to be very clear: I know this is the way ThinkPad keyboards have been laid out since the dawn of time. I also know you can swap the two keys in BIOS. Still, if you’re not currently a ThinkPad user, you should note that you’ll either need some time to get used to this keyboard layout or you’ll be using mislabeled keys.
The port selection is also limited, though that’s not unique among thin devices. You get two USB-C ports and an audio jack, and they’re all on the left side.
Performance-wise, the X1 Nano did an excellent job. It’s not what you’d want to buy for demanding tasks like heavy gaming or video editing, but it kept up with my gaggles of Chrome tabs, spreadsheets, and streaming apps without a stutter. I never heard any noise out of the machine or felt noticeable heat, even when I was running fairly taxing loads.
“Anti-fry circuitry” ensures that USB-C chargers send the correct voltage.
As mentioned earlier, the Nano has a number of new security features that are coming to 2021 ThinkPads across the line. The one I found most useful was the presence-sensing tool, which automatically locks the device when you’re not in front of it and unlocks it when you’re back. ThinkPads aren’t the only business laptops to adopt this technology, but it is convenient and worked well in my testing. You can also turn it off if it creeps you out. Elsewhere, there’s a match-on-sensor fingerprint sensor next to the touchpad (the qualifier means that fingerprint enrollment, pattern storage, and biometric matching all happens directly within the sensor). The sensor also uses AI to distinguish between real and fake fingers, in case that was a concern of yours.
The one feature that isn’t quite stellar here is the battery life. I averaged 6 hours and 38 minutes between charges with my daily workflow (around a dozen Chrome tabs with office stuff like emailing, Slack, Google Docs and Sheets, occasional Spotify and YouTube streaming, with brightness around 200 nits). That’s fine, and not unexpected since the Nano only has a 48Whr battery, but I often see over seven hours out of machines at this price. It means that if your workload is similar to mine, you may not make it through a full workday on a charge. The 65W charger took 43 minutes to juice the device up to 60 percent.
In the ThinkPad X1 Nano, Lenovo is playing to its strengths. You’re getting a comfortable keyboard and touchpad, a red nub, and a capable processor in a sturdy system that’s built to last. The Nano brings a new factor to the table — a chassis that’s (just) under two pounds. The target audience here is clear: business users who like the traditional ThinkPad look and feel and are willing to pay more for an ultralight machine.
The main compromises you’re making are the battery life and port selection. Neither of these is an absolute disaster for the Nano, but they mean that a chunk of users may find competing business laptops more practical. There are a number of ultraportable business laptops with superb battery life, more useful ports, and comparable weight (such as Asus’ ExpertBook B9450 and HP’s Elite Dragonfly). That said, for users who are attached to the ThinkPad brand and want the lightest of the light, the X1 Nano will deliver.
(Pocket-lint) – If your TV audio isn’t up to snuff then there are a bevy of options on the market to help step things up a notch. Among these is Polk Audio’s React soundbar, which is available for less cash than many a rival.
But just because you’re paying less doesn’t mean you’ll get less in terms of raw sound capability. Especially if, as we have for this review, you opt for the bundled React soundbar and React Sub package.
That said, the Polk React doesn’t offer any fancy object-based sound decoding, it doesn’t even play pretend – as there’s no Dolby Atmos surround output here from the bar itself – instead sticking to Dolby Digital and DTS surround formats.
You can later invest in Polk’s RS2 surround speakers, which are simply paired at the touch of a button, to create a fully fledged 5.1 system (if you have the Sub) in smaller steps rather than forking our a massive chunk of change up front. That, we think, is a big part of this soundbar’s wider appeal.
Design & Setup
Ports: 1x HDMI (ARC) output; 1x optical input
Controls: Included remote / four-button top-of-‘bar panel
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Alexa voice control integrated
Dimensions (soundbar): 56mm (H) x 864mm (W) x 121mm (D)
Dimensions (sub): 348mm (H) x 218mm (W) x 419mm (D); 7.5kg
Having recently reviewed the JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam – which is an all-in-one box solution that can’t ever be connected to separates – it was interesting to dig into the Polk React for its points of difference. The Polk is a longer soundbar – at 864mm it’s 160mm longer by comparison – so even sat against a 55-inch telly, as pictured, it’s fairly good at covering the majority of the screen width, which is handy for a wide soundscape to help match the action on screen.
The Polk is simpler than the JBL in terms of core specification, though, as there’s no HDMI input, just the one HDMI input – the latter of which is ARC (audio return channel) capable. For us this meant a slight rejig of our TV’s four HDMI ports, as we couldn’t passthrough using the soundbar itself, ensuring the HDMI ARC cable provided was running from TV to React ‘bar.
Thing is, our ARC port is one of the two 4K resolution capable HDMI ports on the TV (every maker does this at present), so our BT TV box for telly had to be relegated to HDMI 4 (running Full HD maximum – which, in fairness, is how majority content from there is streamed) to save HDMI 1 for our PlayStation 5 (our source of Blu-ray and 4K streaming apps such as Netflix). ARC does its job though: once the TV is switched on the audio handshakes between device and soundbar.
Well, it didn’t at very first. For a brief period of time we were in a no man’s land of having both TV audio and soundbar audio outputting simultaneously. That’s because the setup is, to our mind, a little finicky. The soundbar needed an update out of the box, that much it told us (by voice alert), but having advised us to install the Polk Connect app – which we did on our Google Android phone – it then didn’t like it, forcing a handover to Amazon Alexa instead. But the Alexa app initially failed to get things talking successfully.
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Success did come after a few attempts, after which there’s been no issues, but it very much points to this Polk’s intentions: it’s an Alexa voice control soundbar through and through. There’s even an Alexa button pride of place on the included remote control. There’s not even a proper off button – as your main TV remote will take over for that duty anyway – and there’s always a glowing light of some colour to the front of the ‘bar, which we think is a design downside when watching movies in darkened rooms.
Oh, and Alexa shouts crazilyloud for some reason too – almost to the point of distorting – and there’s no simple way that we can find to turn this down, which is irksome.
The included remote isn’t the prettiest, but it’s well appointed, able to switch between TV and Bluetooth audio sources. There are adjustments for bass up/down on the left, volume up/down in the middle, voice up/down on the right, four quick-select movie presets below this, and surround sound volume/balance adjustment to the bottom of the controller.
That surround sound adjustment won’t do anything unless you’ve bought into the Polk’s expandable options though. As the React soundbar itself is a straight forward left, centre, right speaker arrangement. But if you buy the RS2 surround speakers – not on test here – then you can easily sync them at the touch of a button on the back of the soundbar and boost things to a 5-channel system.
Go with the subwoofer – paired in the same way, using the same button to quickly sync without extra wires – and that brings 5.1 channel potential into your living room. The sub is pretty beefy in terms of scale – and deeper than it is either wide or tall – but the addition of true bass at the lower end of the spectrum is transformative to the sound profile. We think it’s an essential addition to make the React ‘bar deliver its potential.
Best speakers for PC gamers 2021: All the sound and RGB lighting you could ever need
Which brings us to the whole reason to buy a soundbar: to enhance audio quality, notching up TV audio to new heights. And the Polk React does a generally decent job, although given its positioning to the base of a screen (inevitable, of course) and lack of object-based sound control it lacks any distinct verticality – so on larger screens voice parts might not give the impression they’re coming from the person speaking with the greatest of precision.
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Otherwise there’s a lot of tweaking that can be done with ease, so it’s great to have all that control directly to hand. The presets are particularly useful, selecting Movie to enhance that extra bass – there’s always a good down-pitched “wommm” in an action flick – or Night to quieten such frequencies and allow your family/neighbours/whoever to get some shut-eye when you’re having a late night session.
The independent controls for bass and voice are handy too, the latter really adjusting the mid-to-high-end of the frequency range to give more curvature to vocal output. So if you’re finding the bass balance is a bit too high, then this can help voices to cut through the mix with greater clarity. We like that it’s a simple system, too, not over-complex in how many ways it can all be adjusted.
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However, bass-wise we’ve heard soundbars with chunkier capability. Which is why, once paired with the React Sub, you’ll really hear and feel the difference. With the React subwoofer linked up the sound has a much more rooted appeal, delivered with gusto. It’s got great musicality too, to the point we’ve ceased using our Marshall standalone speaker in the living room and instead just tuck into the Polk React and Sub on Music mode for the best possible listen.
Through the Alexa app it’s simple enough to get the soundbar to register as part of your home network. With Google Home open it’s easily identified (although not directly controllable here, as Alexa rules the way), so Spotify plays nice – and you can ask Alexa by voice to load your favourites.
We suspect that adding a pair of RS2 speakers would add to the expanse of the overall sound as, like we said up top, the Polk React doesn’t support object-based audio, so you’re not going to get any Dolby Atmos pseudo height and all-around sense from this soundbar. But, really, given how such systems can sometimes fly off the handle in weird (and not always wonderful) ways, we think Polk delivers here exactly what people will want – enhanced sound on a smaller budget.
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That will raise the question, however, as to whether you want something smaller and more technologically complete, such as the JBL Bar 5 MultiBeam that we mentioned at the beginning of this review. It can’t match the smacking bass of the subwoofer by any means, but if you don’t have the space then it might be a better fit to your needs – and the Atmos found there is impressive given the right source material.
Verdict
While the Polk React doesn’t have object-based sound decoding bells and whistles – that’s to say there’s no vertical channels for pseudo surround – as a standalone large ‘bar with decent output and control, for a very fair price, it’s got a lot going for it. Especially if you’re keen on Alexa integration for voice control.
But things really step up a notch when you add a React Sub as part of the package. That’s when the sound becomes extra full, deep and rich – to the point that it’s taken preference as our living room music speaker when the telly is out of use. Now if that’s not high praise, then what is? Keep your expectations in check in terms of technological prowess and Polk delivers strong at this end of the market.
Also consider
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JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam
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It’s a different prospect, as it’s a single box solution – so you’ll never be able to add extras or a sub – but that might better suit your space restrictions. However, it permits passthrough (thanks to HDMI in and out ports with eARC) and offers Dolby Atmos decoding, which with the right source delivers a more complete sound. That said, the Polk’s React Sub, if you want to fork out the extra cash, takes impactful sound to the next step where the JBL simply cannot reach.
Read our review
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Yamaha SR-C20A
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Looking for something smaller? If what you need is a bit of everything from your soundbar – ignoring that, at this price point, you can’t expect surround sound – you can’t go far wrong with this little Yamaha. It’s a one-box solution (so, like the JBL above, there there’s no subwoofer here) and can turn its hand to pretty much anything, without ever making itself the centre of attention. A different prospect, but a nice neat little package.
Many Raspberry Pis are pressed into service as home media devices. They are a natural fit given their price, power and size. But one facet of media consumption where the Raspberry Pi needed a little help was streaming content from services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu which use Widevine DRM to deliver protected streaming media. In a recent update, Ventz at vpetkov.net has announced that an official Widevine package is now available for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 400.
Ventz is well known in the community for Chromium Media Edition, essentially the same Chromium executable but using a custom launcher and user agent that tricked sites such as Netflix, Hulu and Spotify to work with the Raspberry Pi. With the release of an official package for the Raspberry Pi we can now install the Widevine support for the provided Chromium browser.
Installation is a breeze, using just three lines of code, the first two to ensure our Pi is up to date before finally running the Widevine package installation.
We tested the installation on a spare Raspberry Pi 4GB connected via Ethernet. Initially Netflix playback was a little choppy, but after a few seconds everything was in sync and playback was certainly comfortable.
Adding Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ to your home media center just got a little easier thanks to Ventz and the Raspberry Pi.
Starting April 1st, users setting up a new iPhone in Russia will see a screen that allows them to automatically install apps that are officially sanctioned by the Russian government, in compliance with Russian law (via Engadget).
The law in question was passed back in 2019, and requires smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and smart TVs sold in Russia to come pre-installed with specific apps made by Russian companies by April 1st, according to Russian news site Vedomosti. (The law was originally set to go into effect in July 2020, but was pushed back to April 2021). Vedomosti also says that apps won’t be installed if users don’t want them. Apple confirmed to The Verge that it will comply with the law by giving the users the option to install the apps when activating the phone.
Which apps are specifically going to be offered to users remains unclear, though Vedomosti cites a government services app, and apps from Russian companies including Yandex, Mail.ru, and Kaspersky Lab. The government seems to be aware that it might be problematic to favor specific apps, and is planning to expand its list over time: “The Ministry is not at all interested in seeing popular apps included in the mandatory pre-installation list take dominant positions. If alternatives emerge on the market, prove interesting to users and gain popularity quickly, they will be included in this selection and also offered for pre-installation,” a Russian official told Vedomosti.
Apple has historically kept tight control over the iPhone’s setup process, and that appears to now be changing, if only in one market. While Apple has previously made changes to stay on the side of local laws — it’s changed maps, blocked pride watch faces in Russia, and now stores iCloud data on state-run servers in China — this may be one of the more dramatic changes, as it affects a screen that every user will see when they set up their iPhone.
Apple has slowly been allowing users to change how iOS works out of the box, with the ability to change some default apps in iOS 14, but now it’s given a small amount of control over the setup process to the Russian government, too. As the company faces legal challenges from the EU and US over antitrust, and over giving its competitors a level playing field, we may see Apple having to give over some more control to governments if it wants to sell its phones to their citizens — though it probably won’t be compelled to ask users if they want to install Spotify at setup. Probably.
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Microsoft’s new $99 Xbox Wireless headset isn’t perfect, but it’s the best attempt at being an Xbox gaming headset and an everyday set of wireless headphones I’ve tried yet. It’s compatible with the Xbox Wireless protocol, making it easy to pair with any Xbox One or Xbox Series X / S console. It’s also compatible with Bluetooth (version 4.2, SBC codec), and better yet, it can connect through both protocols simultaneously. So you can take a call or have audio from any app come through from a phone, tablet, or a PC mixed in with the sound coming from your Xbox console.
This is far from the first gaming headset to do this, or even do it well. Microsoft’s latest headset just stands out as being particularly impressive for the number of things it gets right for $99. Its design is stellar, a logical fit in the company’s headphone lineup. Next to the Series X, it looks the part with a touch of glossy green detailing around the ear cup dials, covered in matte black plastic. The little holes in the recessed areas between the faux leather ear pads and the dials seem to be there just for cosmetic reasons, but it looks fantastic nevertheless.
Crucially, these are comfortable, even though my head size nearly pushes them to their size limits. The sidearms require two hands to make adjustments, which I like. There’s no worry that they’ll resize just from being moved around. And while I wish this model had a bungee-style headband and swiveling ear cups like most SteelSeries headsets, not having these features didn’t equate to comfort issues here.
In addition to how the headset looks, its functionality is similar to the Surface Headphones, with twistable dials on the outside of each ear cup for adjusting elements of the audio. Unlike the company’s more premium headphones, there’s no active noise cancellation here (I’d complain, but they’re $99), though the passive noise isolation is better than average for this price. The left dial acts as a chat and game audio mixer, so you can tune your playmates down a bit during a dialogue-heavy cutscene or vice versa. I appreciate that Microsoft put it front and center. On the other dial is the volume control. Twist to increase or decrease, nice and simple — no buttons necessary.
Over on the right ear cup, there’s a USB-C port for charging. Microsoft includes a USB-C to USB Type-A cable to charge it, but you’ll get all of the same headset features if you plug into a Windows 10 machine with your own USB-C to USB-C cable. That’s not the case when plugged into a MacBook Pro, which won’t work over a wired connection with the headset. You can still connect to a macOS device and use the headset over Bluetooth, though.
There are only two buttons on the headset: one to manually mute the bendable microphone (an LED on the inner section of the boom microphone angled toward your face is illuminated when the mic is hot), and another that serves as the all-in-one pairing and power button, both of which reside on the left ear cup. Most gaming headsets require days of continued use to fully learn their respective button layouts, but this one’s dead simple. I would have taken one more button if it served as a multifunction button to control my device over Bluetooth, but Microsoft has limited the headset to just two buttons. There’s no way to independently control, say, a phone outside of just adjusting the volume.
The sound performance from this headset is better than I expected. During my tests, I listened to Spotify, and the music sounded good enough to stick with this headset instead of automatically reaching for my Sony 1000XM3s. People with a knack for stellar audio quality will find quibbles, like that the sound can come off as muddled at times, and the soundstage isn’t as expansive as you’d find in a more expensive set of headphones. But again, these are $99 and meant for gaming first. And for that price, I’m pleased.
Hopping over to gaming, I instantly booted up Doom (2016) on the Series X. The soundtrack and all of the various hellish sound effects have an adequate amount of crunch and punch, and I was head-banging to the music while I played. It sounded as it was intended to sound, though, again, the same nitpicks apply here as they do for music. When there’s a lot happening in the mid and high frequencies, the sound can lack clarity if you’re listening closely. I didn’t notice that as much in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, for instance. This headset works with the Dolby Atmos (Microsoft is giving buyers a trial of Dolby Atmos with purchase that will last until the end of September) and DTS: X paid apps available for Xbox and PC, which might enhance the sound. But for the purposes of this review, I tested just the out-of-the-box experience.
The battery life and range are competitive with other gaming headsets I’ve tested in this price range. Microsoft claims 15 hours per charge, and both times I ran the non-replaceable battery down during testing, it lasted for about that long. I was able to roam about my studio apartment, straying about 25 feet or so from the Xbox without experiencing any drop-outs. It started cutting out when the signal had to go through multiple walls, but that’s to be expected. As for charge speeds, Microsoft says it can gain four hours of use out of a 30-minute charge, or a full charge in three hours. In case you were wondering, you can use the Xbox Wireless headset while it’s being charged, but obviously, it’ll then take longer to recharge.
To give you a sense of how this headset handles connections, I first paired the Xbox Wireless headset to my PC with Microsoft’s USB Wireless Adapter (not included with this headset, but it operates on the same Xbox Wireless protocol as the consoles) for music and to take some video calls. Pairing the headset required pressing and holding the pair button for four seconds and doing the same to the Wireless Adapter. To use them on the Xbox Series X, I had to run through the same process. Frustratingly, the headset can’t handle juggling between two previously paired devices that use the Xbox Wireless protocol, so I had to manually re-pair it when I wanted to hop between my PC and the Xbox. I don’t want to overblow this issue, though. Microsoft’s pairing process for Xbox accessories is very simple. This won’t be a problem at all if you connect to your PC via Bluetooth (as I imagine most people will) since the headset can connect to both concurrently.
If you’re someone who’s likely to lean heavily on the concurrent wireless connection feature, I like that this headset automatically lowers the audio streaming from the Xbox Wireless protocol device when a call is incoming so you can hear it. You can adjust the volume of just your Bluetooth device with its own controls, but not from the headset itself. Cranking the volume with the dial makes it louder for both devices you’re connected to.
The Xbox Accessories app on PC and Xbox lets you fine-tune adjustments.
The level of customization this headset allows is also impressive for the price. Through the Xbox Accessories app for Windows 10 or Xbox, you can adjust the equalizer (movie, music, game, heavy bass, and speech are the presets, or make your own) and boost the bass. Additionally, there’s an auto-mute feature that can mute noises happening in your surroundings. There are three levels (low, medium, and high), and Microsoft says each step up will increase how aggressively the mic mutes things that aren’t your voice. During a video call, it seemed to work as intended, if not better than I expected. The person on the other end said that my speech wasn’t getting cut off, which is something that can happen with these kinds of features, and that happenings in the background weren’t noticeable. Of course, the effectiveness of this auto-mute feature can vary depending on your household situation. If you’re skeptical, it’s easy enough to just tap the mute button to avoid potential embarrassment.
Two other small but cool features in the Xbox Accessories app let you tweak how bright the mute light is, making it easier to see in your peripheral vision. You can also customize the level of mic monitoring or how much outside sound is fed through the mics and then funneled into your ears.
Up until now, the $150 Razer Kaira Pro was the Xbox-specific headset I told people to get because it’s comfortable, and it supports Bluetooth in addition to the Xbox Wireless protocol. Microsoft’s new Xbox Wireless headset is well ahead of that model in terms of design, ease of use, and functionality — all in a more affordable package.
If it fits my head and can also fit around the Series X, it should fit you fine.
If Microsoft is to be judged compared to Sony on how well it designed a headset to accompany its latest consoles — as it inevitably will be — this one handily edges out the Pulse 3D even though they’re the same price. Sony’s model is comfortable and looks equally dashing next to the console it was made for, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack and 3D Audio support in its court. But it’s tough to compete with the Bluetooth support and button-lite design built into Microsoft’s model. I would have loved it if a USB dongle was included for more support with devices, like the Nintendo Switch. But by design, it can’t connect to other gaming consoles. Microsoft is keeping this one in the family. If you’re in the family, though, you’re in for a treat.
Photography by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge
Correction: The Xbox Wireless headset can get four hours of use from a 30-minute charge. This review incorrectly stated that a 15-minute charge could get you three hours of use. We regret this error.
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