Awesome Stuff: Headphones & Helpers

from the listen-up dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got some technology focused on improving your mobile music listening experience in a variety of ways.

MAGZET

For people with Apple laptops, the days of destroying your power cable by tripping on it are over thanks to the MagSafe connector. Unfortunately, the days of destroying your audio jacks and headphone connectors persist, and everyone knows the pain of having to jostle a broken plug around to get its weak connection to kick in. MAGZET aims to fix that by letting you turn any audio jack into a magnetic connector by connecting the small, two-piece device. As they point out, the standard audio jack hasn't been updated in a long time, and this could be just the smart revolution it needs.

UAMP

There have been many attempts to create products that will stymie the ascendance of lower-quality audio in the mobile device era, but most are overwrought and place too high a bet on the assumption that people truly care. The UAMP, however, is a nice and simple solution that can be easily adopted by those who want better sound without needing to go buy whole new specialty players: a small inline amplifier that lets you get more amplification at higher fidelity than those built into most consumer devices. It's USB-chargeable and about the size of an iPod Shuffle, and aims to retail for around $100.

Aivvy Q

The Aivvy Q is an interesting idea. Not only is it a pair of headphones with a built-in music player, controlled by touch gestures on the side — it actually aims to be a whole music solution for busy people. It grabs songs automatically from its own service while charging, then builds custom playlists and rotations based on your decisions to skip, listen, replay, etc. Of course, the big question is: where exactly is it pulling these songs from, will it require a subscription, and how confident are the makers that they can keep it licensed and robust? Though some of these things remain to be seen, the tech itself looks very cool. They do lose some points for the nonsensical claim that they are about "streaming music without internet", though (that appears to be their odd way of saying it downloads tracks while connected, then automatically plays or "streams" Pandora-style generated playlists from its internal storage later).

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Filed Under: audio, awesome stuff, headphones, music