Awesome Stuff: Auds & Ends

from the hear,-hear! dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got some assorted pieces of new crowdfunded audio gear.

waveBlend

The folks behind the waveBlend make a pretty good point: rigging up a house-wide wireless audio system is still a lot more annoying than it needs to be. The best systems out there are expensive, proprietary and always centralized around some sort of master unit. The waveBlend system does away with that: each modular cubic speaker connect to existing WiFi network and teams up with all the others (up to a dozen — however many you need, wherever you need them) to create a no-hassle home audio setup.

gMIX

On the one hand, the gMIX isn't as big a deal as the creator might want to make it sound — a four-channel audio mixer that runs "without batteries" is just a passive line mixer and not a technological breakthrough. That said, the best products aren't always revolutionary, and gMIX does appear to be filling a gap: pro audio gear is expensive, there aren't that many choices of passive mixers around compared to active (powered) ones, and most such gear includes lots of additional features that aren't needed for a lot of applications. The gMIX, on the other hand, is cheap and simple and gets the job done.

Gigcaster

A lot of the innovation around live streaming focuses on video, while audio is often left to languish in "good enough" territory. That's fine for meetings and conferences and speeches, but not so great for music. Enter the Gigcaster: a compact, standalone unit with the sole purpose of making it easy to broadcast quality live music online. This initial model is built using Raspberry Pi, and there are plans to move towards a more fully-featured production model — but there's also a huge focus on hackability, with the device running open source software and allowing for user-made firmware pushes.

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Filed Under: audio, awesome stuff, broadcast, mixer, music