Posts Tagged 'Mp3'

SkullCandy Double Agent Headphones

If it's one thing that I hate about portable media, it's the crappy headphones. Ear buds suck so bad, no matter how much you pay for them. Here we've got the best of both worlds: nice ear-cup headphones, with a built-in media player. The SkullCandy Double Agent looks so good. It's got an internal rechargeable battery, a USB cord to behave like portable storage, and if you still have analog electronics, a cord for plugging in to old-school audio equipment. These look more compact and simpler than SkullCandy's other MP3-player-headset, and the Double Agent takes SD cards. Studica shows them available, but the king, Amazon, says they're still not in yet, and SkullCandy's own website doesn't even have them. The article above says they're available June 1st -- but that's come and gone, kids. Still, SkullCandy's headphones (even the buds) are always high on people's lists of quality equipment, so being patient will probably be worth it.

Vinyl to USB Adapter: Records to MP3 in one step

Gadget Gary of Sound & Vision magazine got to try out this slick little machine: the Audio-Technica AT-LP2D-USB. It's a record player (remember those?) with its own analog-to-digital converter and a USB connection to the computer. Plug it in, and you can record right from an album to an MP3. In the old days (i.e. 2003), you had to go through the sound card -- additional connections mean additional noise -- so having everything onboard and away from the electrical noise of the PC is hopefully an improvement. The turntable doesn't do 78s, and since my Gracie has all kinds of kinky old 10" records, I'll have to stick with my 1970s turntable for recording. Still, we've got 45s, and it's relatively cheap (about the price of a nice non-USB turntable), so I might have to put it on my Xmas list. I'd have prefered if Gadget Gary talked more about the audio quality than the software it came with, but I'll bet he'd definitely complain if it sucked.One caveat: Audio-Technica makes two versions of this machine -- one with USB, above, and one without...which is pretty much an average record player. Go with the USB variant.