Surround sound for flat-panel TV
Home Theater
I love my new flat-panel LCD monitor, but playing my iTunes tracks through the screen's built-in speakers is like listening to Led Zeppelin through a walkie-talkie.
No doubt, you've made a similar discovery about your flat-panel display: The increased resolution and viewable area often come at the expense of quality speakers. You will need separate speakers to hear the full tone of Sir Ian's booming voice in ``The Lord of the Rings" and the thumping music underlying those stressful GSW scenes in ``ER."
Swampscott-based ZVOX Audio has just released a single-cabinet surround-sound system that wraps you in sound so rich you'll think its coming from speakers several feet apart. You can plug the all-in-one box, the ZVOX 325, into your television, computer monitor, stereo system, or iPod with a single cable which plugs into your headset jack. Stereo minijacks are on the back of the box. I used the 325 with my television and my desktop PC. The sound with each setup was balanced and clear.
The 325 holds three 3 1/4-inch speaker drivers and a 4x6 subwoofer inside its fiberboard cabinet. Its cover is available in black or silver. The 325 also has an output jack if you prefer to connect the box to your own subwoofer.
The only drawback I see to the 325 (available at $350 at www.zvoxaudio.com), is its size: 17x5x17 inches. That's no problem if you're sticking the 325 on the floor under your desk or adding the box to a stereo rack. But if your computer is in your television room, you may need to make room to accommodate the 325.
ZVOX, meanwhile, is developing a wall-mount version and a seven-speaker, four-subwoofer megaversion of its all-in-one system. But those are still in the prototype phase.
Mobile Phones
Moto's latest offers phone, photo, music
There's a new skinny Moto phone on the block, the MOTOKRZR (pronounced crazer ) K1m. The sleek and slim phone can access Verizon's multimedia services, V Cast Music and V Cast video, and it has a built-in MP3 music player. The K1m also has touch-sensitive player controls and a microSD slot for memory expansion.
You can capture some decent photos with the phone's 1.3 megapixel camera (with 4x zoom) and video capture. The K1m's 1.9 inch color screen will be big enough to see whether you got that bit of video you were after. But I suspect that many will find the phone's small display inadequate for watching the V Cast music videos and sportscasts.
I've also found that battery life is a problem with the thinner phones. My original RAZR's battery seems to conk out after just a few hours, especially when I leave my Bluetooth setting on.
Still, the K1m offers 50 more minutes of usage than the RAZR V3m, up to 250 minutes. It is also advertised as getting 440 hours of standby time, adding more than an hour to what you will get with the RAZR V3m, according to Verizon, which is selling the phone for about $200 with a two-year contract.
Optics and Imaging
A super light and powerful telescope and microscope
Imagine all of the sailing vessels that might have escaped the likes of Master and Commander Jack Aubrey, if their captains could have spotted him on the horizon with the Hungarian-made TothTelescope Raptor ($1,195 at www.telescopes.com). It's a monocular field telescope that weighs less than 18 ounces and collapses into a package less than 6 inches long.
Bird and sky watchers will find the Raptor easy to transport into the wilderness. There you'll be able use it as a microscope, magnifying objects only 4.2 feet away up to 500x, or as a basic astronomy tool providing nice detail of the surface of the moon. Another bonus is that you can use an adapter to fit the Raptor to your SLR camera.
The TothTelescope website (www.tothtelescope.com) shows a number of photos taken with this setup. You won't be doing any leaf peeping with the Raptor this year, however. The current wait time for new orders is about two months.
