The year is 2026, and a UK man has been sentenced after pleading guilty to the unauthorized mixing and selling of music CDs, and thus breaking copyright laws. Marc Kearns, 47, of East Cowick, near Snaith in East Yorkshire, has been handed a 26-month prison sentence, which will be suspended for 18 months, reports the BBC. He will also have to carry out 250 hours of community service work (unpaid) for his sins.

Perhaps Kearns’ greatest sin was living in the past. The Yorkshireman could have been untouchable, plying his remixes in the cobwebbed corners of the internet. But perhaps his customers were also firmly embedded in the shiny CD-era, with a fondness for hand-made compilations burned on beige desktop PCs. So, direct physical trade was probably the easiest route to profit from his remix CDs featuring music from well-known artists.

Trading standards officers became aware of his trade in illicit CDs way back in 2018. They then began their lengthy investigatory work in 2019, and a warrant was executed in September 2022. The case has only just concluded with Kearns pleading guilty to a number of charges at Hull Crown Court last week.

Commenting on the sentencing, a council spokesperson said of Kearns “This activity enabled him to commercially exploit protected material, generating income at the expense of legitimate artists and businesses within the music industry.” A local councilor also highlighted the potential for generating “significant illicit profit” from the trade in counterfeit and unauthorized goods. They hoped that the sentencing of Kearns, even though it is suspended, would deter other pirate traders.

As we hinted at above, Kearns was probably caught due to his trade involving this old but not totally abandoned physical medium. The way trading standards investigations work, Kearns’s CD remixes business likely left a traceable commercial footprint. However, the sources don’t mention whether he has a market stall, was a car-boot trader, or found customers through mail order, social media groups, or similar.

A quirky tech enthusiast has attempted to load games to their Sega Genesis console through a vinyl record player. “The idea is, basically, we’re going to record the game data as sound and then play it back,” using a turntable connected to a Sega Genesis, explained Throaty Mumbo, a self-described “weird and impractical tech challenge” aficionado. As well as a console and a record deck, a Mega EverDrive Pro and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board were used for this project. “This should be a quick, easy project,” predicted Throaty, knowingly.

As the TechTuber indicated, this project shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge. The Sega Genesis was released in 1989, offering a super-fast and convenient game cartridge loading system. However, using designed-for-audio media like compact cassette tapes was a common way for home computer users to load apps and games until the mid-1980s, when the slow but widely available and cheap tape format gave way to floppies. Vinyl was/is just another contemporaneous hi-fi audio format.

After introducing the challenge, the first serious step towards the intended goal was to test loading a small homebrew title to the Genesis using the Mega EverDrive Pro cartridge-to-SD card backup system. It worked, as expected.

With that foundation laid, it was time to (re)prove the sound-as-data concept by using an old Nintendo Famicom Data Recorder and a standard cassette tape. A Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was utilized as the bridge to convert audio signals to data ready for the Genesis. It connected to the EverDrive via USB. You can see in the video from around the 25 to 27-minute mark that some small homebrew ROMs were indeed loaded and run on the console (a fractal demo and a version of Breakout) this way.

Now came the time to switch to vinyl. It's only a format change, so what could go wrong? The Teenage Engineering PO-80 Record Factory was chosen as the vinyl player. Assembling this device was a frustrating process for the TechTuber, who blamed the quality of the instructions. Then the Genesis ROM data was transferred to vinyl using a 3.5mm audio connection.

The PO-80 was chosen for its advertised ability as being much more than a player; it can also be used to “cut your very own first 5-inch vinyl record,” according to the packaging shown in the video. Checking out the official PO-80 product page, it is difficult to complain about audio quality, though, as the makers are upfront about this $149 gadget’s “lo-fi sound.” Sadly, lo-fi lived up to its billing, as it simply wasn’t hi-fi enough for storing and playing back Genesis ROM data without corruption.

Throaty spent hours trying to get the loading from PO-80 recorded vinyl to work, fighting against audio clipping (too loud) or inputs being too quiet, but this vinyl-to-Genesis data attempt ultimately failed. At least tape was proven to be a functional, though slow, alternative to game cartridges for the Genesis.

Should you splash out on those upgraded audio cables to take your music listening pleasure up a notch? Probably not - affordable Amazon Basics RCA cables are more than good enough - confirms audio TechTuber Amir from Audio Science Review. This won’t be a surprise to regular readers. However, it is interesting to see Amir’s $7 vs $4,000 cable analysis using scientific audio equipment – as well as drawing from his personal music listening experience.

RCA has been around since 1919

Amir compared the above stereo audio RCA cables. These are mostly used to link Hi-Fi components. Some PC sound cards and breakout boxes will feature them, as will some home video devices. The RCA standard dates back to 1919, so it is over a century old, and audio enthusiasts connecting older analog gear like certain amplifiers, turntables, and legacy components will make most use of these cables. Due to this, RCA will probably be supported for another few decades in its strongest current niches, like Hi-Fi.

Physical comparison

Back to the $7 vs $4,250 RCA comparison and what we have pitted against each other here are the Amazon Basics 2 RCA cables, 4ft in length, that are actually on sale currently at $6.76 (and up to 15ft in length for $8.96). In the other corner, there are the Kimber Kable KS 1036 Select Series Analog Interconnect (Pair), which we can see at Safe and Sound (US) in 1m (3.3ft) length for $4,100.

Amazon promises “crystal clear audio [and] reliable performance [with its] gold plated connectors.” However, the Kimber product aims for premium with its “Black Pearl solid silver conductors drawn in diamond coated dies and insulated with virgin FEP dielectric under the most exacting tolerances which offer the purest transfers of the most demanding highest resolution signals.” It should hardly be a fair fight.

Our host, Amir, noted that the Kimber product gets off to a bad start, with a totally unnecessary flight (Pelican) case. Indeed, it looks very cheap compared with the cable’s prestige target market.

Probably worse for the expensive product is that its locking cable design throws up as many negatives as positives. Basically, locking isn’t a particularly attractive feature here, and could precipitate accidental damage with someone unfamiliar with (or who forgets) the locking mechanism. Making this worse is the observation that inside the connector are “flimsy plastic tabs,” which is an inferior design feature vs traditional RCA cables.

Audio signal analysis

Amir then shifted to scientific audio analysis using Audio Precision analyzer hardware. Is this where the $4,000 cables would at last show their superiority?

Using a constant 4 KHz sine wave transmitted through the cable, a tiny bit of distortion was observed with both cables. There was actually a bit more mains power noise seen with the Kimber cable, but “practically speaking, the two are identical,” Amir said, pondering over this first set of metrics.

Next, we saw the cables exhibit identical response across a very wide frequency range. There was no phase difference seen in the tests. Same with the square wave rise response graph. Even a hugely magnified graph from the Audio Precision analyzer shows that these two cables performed identically.

Last but not least, Amir moved on to comparing jitter spectrum profiles in a bandwidth stress test. It was shown that the Amazon Basics cable shows a slight (picoseconds) increase in jitter. However, our host noted that the cheaper cable was noticeably longer than its boutique rival. And it would cost a lot extra to get one to match the Amazon alternative’s length.

Prestige RCA cables simply unnecessary

The results weren’t unexpected, but from around 13 minutes into the video, Amir explains why no one should be surprised that audiophile RCA cables aren’t worthwhile.

Competent cables like the Amazon model and better have “the lowest noise, lowest distortion, and widest bandwidth of anything in your audio system,” says the audio TechTuber. It isn’t a weak or sensitive part of the signal chain, prone to issues, and audio signals don’t push the ‘capacity’ of RCA cables, so there is little point in investing above a competent standard product like the Amazon Basics.

“Everything else in your system is the bottleneck,” Samir underlines, as far as quality is concerned. He likens the Hi-Fi audio signal chain to two cities connected with a 100-lane freeway (the RCA cables) – traffic problems are in the city, not on the freeway, he says.

To conclude, Amir admits to perceiving differences between cables when enjoying music, but puts the human experience down to feelings, mood, focus, and so on. When actually being clinical about A/B testing – like blind testing, etc - such differences evaporate, suggests the experience of this audio TechTuber.

A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.'

Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier.

Initial test results showed that it’s extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. “The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't," Pano said. "All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren't."

This is quite surprising, especially as we often don’t think of bananas, or even wet mud, as great conductors. However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level.

After waiting a month for testers to submit their results, the following results were tabulated:

As we can see in the image above, there are only six correct answers out of 43 guesses. We put these numbers in a spreadsheet, which showed that only 13.95% of the answers were correct. Furthermore, we used the binomial distribution formula and determined there’s a 6.12% chance that we’d get the same or fewer correct answers if the listeners were randomly guessing — slightly above the 5% significance threshold many statisticians use, meaning the results are consistent with randomness. This goes in line with Pano's conclusion that "listeners can't reliably pick out the original from the looped versions," suggesting that they cannot detect any changes introduced by the loop — whether it's pro-grade copper wire or wet mud from somebody's backyard.

Pano came up with this idea after they watched a documentary, Amigo, where the U.S. Army was setting up a singular telegraph wire in the Philippines. They thought that it wouldn’t work as “you need two wires to complete the circuit.” However, it turns out that the telegraph system used the earth as a return, even through long distances. This got them thinking that if you could send telegraphy signals across the ground, what would an audio signal using the same medium sound like? They then tried various materials like mud and banana, which, although they’re pretty poor conductors, still seemed to introduce imperceptible changes to the signal, at least for the average person.

A developer has ported Doom to a pair of earbuds. That kind of statement might not have the impact it once had, after tales of high jinks and ports of Doom stretching from quantum computers, to USB chargers, to lawn mowers. However, as earbuds don’t have displays (yet), Arin Sarkisian also devised a canny method to stream the Doom action to another device, or even via the internet.

You can’t just use any earbuds for this latest Doom-on-x episode of development gymnastics. Currently, this Doom port only works on the PineBuds Pro, which Arin-S says are the only earbuds with open source firmware. And, yes, these buds are made by the same folks behind the RISC-V-powered soldering irons, like the Pinecil V2 we reviewed in Aug 2022.

In terms of improbable CPU horsepower, the PineBuds Pro are right up there. Inside their snug ear-fitting shells, alongside the audio drivers and battery cells, there is an Arm Cortex-M4F processor. Arin-S tweaked the open-source firmware to boost the CPU clock from 100 to 300 MHz (an astounding OC nowadays), and disabled the low-power mode for the most Doom-tastic experience.

Some more hurdles of using the PineBuds were the less-than-ample RAM and storage. The developer managed to get Doom to run in under 1MB by “pre-generating lookup tables, making variables const, reading const variables from flash, disabling Doom's caching system, removing unneeded variables.” Moreover, the shareware Doom 1 WAD assets file was 4.2MB, just over the 4MB storage on the PineBuds. This payload was reduced to 1.7MB after borrowing some pre-modded-for-size Doom resources.

Lastly, the no-screen conundrum presented its own set of challenges. Arin-S decided the PineBuds Pro’s UART connection was the best choice for achieving game visuals (the only other choice was Bluetooth). A mix of bandwidth, image compression shenanigans, and demands on the Cortex-M4F ultimately meant the best achievable performance was about 18fps, in practice. In theory, it should have been nearer 25fps, but the dev reckons the CPU hadn’t the grunt to keep up with converting the MJPEG stream at that rate.

No PineBuds Pro, no problem

Arin-S shares all the resources needed to get your own set of PineBuds Pro up and running, with Doom loaded. However, the developer has also generously decided to set up a website that streams Doom action from his own pair of PineBuds Pro.

Head on over to this nicely crafted webpage to join the queue (yes, it is popular) and partake in some online Doom powered by the remote earbuds.

Lastly, the developer says that he is currently looking for work if you think you might need someone with his unique set of skills.

Microsoft has quietly removed ‘find album information’ and ‘update album info online’ tools from the Media Player apps supplied with Windows 11. We checked both Windows Media Player Legacy, and the latest Media Player app, and neither could connect to retrieve album artwork, track names, and other useful data like genre/composer, when an audio CD was popped in to play. Several music CDs were tried.

It might be understandable that Microsoft let this feature wither away from Windows Media Player Legacy – as it is a legacy tool. The removal of this feature in the Legacy app was confirmed by The Register earlier this week. Microsoft PR didn’t respond to that site’s queries about whether the service has been retired intentionally.

When we tested the Legacy app with a few audio CDs, we observed that musicmatch-ssl.xboxlive.com wasn’t reachable by the ‘Find Album Information’ service that is built-in.

Our efforts shifted to the new Media Player app that is the default tool for consuming video and audio, as well as handling playlists, on the latest Windows 11 packing PCs. Sadly, this app suffered from a very similar issue. The error message when I tried to update album info online read, “We couldn’t connect to the service. Check your internet connection, then try again.” There was no issue with my internet connection.

Alternative CD audio media players and rippers are available, but it is a shame those built-into the latest Windows OS distributions have been neutered in this way.

Not many computers ship with optical drives nowadays. We have reported on just a handful of PC releases in 2025 which involved optical drive hardware, ready to handle media like Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs.

Some movie, music, and computer enthusiasts are still very fond of their optical media. Even though we are firmly in the ‘age of streaming,’ movie and music aficionados still prefer physical media due to the quality they offer, and the shifting-sands upon which streaming providers like Netflix, Amazon Prime Movies, Spotify, and others, build their offerings.

A Japanese startup has announced that it has developed a portable fabric speaker which emits sound across its entire surface (machine translation). The device from Sensia Technology relies on flexible electronics, and can facilitate a wide variety of new audio applications and experiences. It is the first practical application of this new thin, light, and flexible fabric technology that was originally developed at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in 2018.

We’ve already mentioned that flexible electronics are one of the key innovations behind the new ‘Fabric Speaker Portable’ product. The press release goes on to explain that the whole of the fabric surface can emit sound, as it is woven from flexible conductive fibers arranged in a capacitor-like structure.

Such electrostatic speakers work using two conductive layers separated by a thin dielectric film, to form a large thin capacitor. An audio signal can then modulate the electrical field between the conductive layers, resulting in vibration, pushing and pulling air to produce audible sound waves. All this technology gets an added quality in this new ‘Fabric Speaker Portable’ product due to the flexible materials it uses.

No lumpy speakers or dead spots

If you’ve tested pillow, cushion, or other hidden speaker products before, they will have very likely relied on an enclosed traditional speaker apparatus. Such products therefore have physical lumps where the speaker(s) is located, and the listening experience would rely on the user positioning their ear/device correctly. That’s quite different to the new ‘Fabric Speaker Portable.’

Sensia Technology doesn’t just pitch the new fabric speaker at hidden listening devices, either. The main promotional picture from the firm shows a soft and thin fabric device which it says is good for hanging on the wall like a tapestry, or under a pillow or sheet for enjoying music while relaxing.

The plastic bump you can see attached to one edge includes a compact drive circuit with wireless connectivity and power. Check out the machine translated specifications table for more information, but we’d also like to highlight that the compact device shown is capable of sound levels of 68dB. A pair of them (for 71dB) would approach the volume level of a nearby vacuum cleaner or a washing machine on spin.

We have a few tech specs to hand, but one big thing missing is any kind of description of the audio quality users can expect. However, even if these are as good as the best speakers we have tested, or even offer audiophile quality, that perception will certainly be diminished if you shove the Fabric Speaker Portable under a pillow, or in a hooded jacket, etc.

On this day in 1996, a freshly inked U.S. patent quietly laid the cornerstone of the digital music revolution. In addition to facilitating this now vast internet-based entertainment business, the humble MP3 file format would propel broadband proliferation, usher in the iPod era, and arguably precipitate the iPhone and all the other touchscreen-slabs that remain indispensable gadgets to this day.

MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) files were devised by scientists to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent an audio file. Key personnel behind the invention of MP3 included: Bernhard Grill, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, Ernst Eberlein, and Dieter Seitzer. Brandenburg is often credited as being the father of MP3, for leading this and similar research since 1977, but Seitzer (for example) brought expertise in transferring music over standard phone lines.

Central to this digital audio format’s success was its ability to shrink audio files by 75%-95%. It did this by using now familiar lossy media compression techniques. In other words, the MP3 audio codec discarded audio data to achieve significant file size reductions, with little perceptible difference in listening quality due to the perceptual limitations of human hearing. Depending on the target listening device, users could change compression bit rates, though audiophiles often insisted they could hear the difference between raw CD audio source data, or indeed, vinyl.

Work on the MP3 file format began in 1987, and a patent was awarded for the compression method in Germany in 1989. But it wouldn’t be until 1996 when U.S. Patent 5,579,430 was granted to Fraunhofer, securing the format in the home of leading global entertainment businesses, that MP3 started to gain traction. The inventors were primed to make lots of money from the internet boom that had started in earnest.

From Napster shockwaves to an industry accepted ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’

Unfortunately for Fraunhofer, its software was quickly ripped off and shared widely online. Once it was re-packaged into CD ripper and encoder apps, it was a cinch for music collectors to rip CDs into MP3s and share them with friends. Such activity began online via FTP servers, but in 1999, Napster was launched, changing the music industry forever.

Several tech moments converged to make this a perfect storm for the traditional music industry. WinAmp was released and ready to be your default MP3 player in 1998, the year before Napster arrived. At the same time, broadband was proliferating, which meant it could take seconds, instead of several minutes, to grab the latest number one hit single. Broadband became an accelerant for the physical music media inferno.

We also saw the first MP3 hardware player arrive in 1998. Diamond Multimedia’s Rio 100 launched in the U.S., and Saehan Information Systems' MPMAN became available in Korea. Both used solid-state Flash to store music.

Apple would be instrumental in the legitimization of digital music. Its iTunes software launched in January 2001, with the first iPod hardware released within the same year. However, it would take until 2003 to put together the first groundbreaking partnerships with the music business in crisis. That is when the iTunes Music Store opened its doors with 200,000 digital music tracks at $0.99 each.

The MP3 file format patent expired in 2017, and is an old legacy codec, now largely a symbol of an iconic era in media and internet history. For the same purpose – digitizing physical music media – it has been usurped by modern alternatives like AAC and FLAC.

In 2025, music ripping, downloading, and sharing have taken a back seat to streaming services powered by superfast broadband and 4G/5G mobile connectivity. Ardent music enthusiasts and collectors still prefer their physical media, though, as was the case during the MP3 era.

A motivated Lenovo Legion Pro 7 (16IAX10H) owner has successfully gotten their system’s speaker issues fixed after setting up a bug bounty program on GitHub. Nadim Kobeissi, a Linux user, was fed up with the gaming laptop’s “tinny and muffled” speaker output and suspected an issue with the Realtek codec on the open-source OS. Kobeissi posted the project in October with $500 of their own money, and five others pledged their own funds, bringing the total to $2,000. Now the issue has been solved, and the fixer is getting $2,000 from the community that developed around this rallying call.

Bug bounties have proved to be a worthwhile avenue for even the biggest developers to explore – Apple, Google, and Microsoft are among the big-dollar program organizers. In this instance, it is interesting to see this level pulled on a much smaller scale, but for a quick and successful fix.

Kobeissi fired up support for this GitHub-based bug bounty program, which kicked off in October. “We are a bunch of Linux users with the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 (16IAX10H) and we are sick and tired of our speakers not working properly,” the frustrated Legion user wrote. They added that they “also suck at writing Linux kernel audio drivers,” before promising “we will send you a lot of money,” for a fix.

You can see, above, that the Kobeissi ended up being the second-biggest contributor (money wise) to this bug bounty program. It ended up raising a nice, neat $2,000 for the solution finder.

Kobeissi also did their best to help any potential fixer, with a few educated guesses about the source of the Legion Pro 7’s speaker audio annoyances. Chief suspect was the incorrect detection of the Realtek ALC3306 codec. But there was also an issue with “no integration between the codec and the amplifiers in the audio pipeline,” in this laptop, which sports both Tweeters and Woofers.

The bounty-fix is for everyone!

The fix for this audio issue was posted on GitHub just a couple of days ago, indicating the time from the beginning of the bug bounty program to a solution was approximately a month. Kobeissi provides a step-by-step guide here, which affected users can follow.

This guide works for Linux kernel version 6.17.8. Moreover, the guide will get updates for future kernel versions “until the fix is fully integrated into the kernel,” notes the bug bounty organizer. If when you follow the fix process, “Your audio should now work correctly and permanently. This fix will persist across reboots with no additional steps required,” says Kobeissi.

Developer Yakov Till, AKA Lepsus, is largely credited with the fix (for “95% of the engineering work”). They get the monetary reward and heartfelt thanks of those who pledged to support the bug bounty.

We conclude by pondering whether this kind of private bug bounty, organized to eliminate computing annoyances, could set a trend.

A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds. Excuse Jordan (and us, as we are new to bird-based data transfer performance), but there are definitely a few caveats behind that speed claim.

The segment of the video with the playback and recording of the bird drawing data begins around 17 minutes into the video.

During the introductory segment of the video, we learn about some of the background considerations of this experiment. For example, Jordan outlines why he didn’t use the well-known mimicry skills of a parrot for this PNG data storage and retrieval test.

To cut a long story short, songbirds have some of the best-developed vocal abilities in the animal world, so they were the best choice. A particular feature among songbirds is the syrinx, located at the junction of the trachea and bronchi. This can be tuned by independently controlled muscle groups to control pitch and speed for extraordinary vocal gymnastics. Due to the bilateral structure of the syrinx, even phase and wave interference effects are possible.

A special starling

Last but not least, as far as the backstory goes, is the tale of the special starling you will see in the video and the images here. This bird left the nest early and was found on the roadside as a baby. Its abandoned situation was thought to be due to the stress of its home being next to a busy train track.

Young songbirds learn their calls by imitation, so could potentially be viewed as ‘blank canvases’ for archiving sounds. This special starling, reared by humans, has been even more receptive to reproducing ‘alien’ audio waveforms - like camera shutters and distant human speech with reverb effects.

Uploading to the bird

Around 17 minutes in, Jordan begins the attempt to store a drawing of a bird in the starling’s song memory. From the video, it seems like he created a simple PNG image of a bird, a basic line drawing. Jordan then put this shape into a spectral synthesizer, turning it into a waveform. As such, he could audibly 'play an image’ to the starling.

Jordan spent the recording session playing the sound to the starling, seemingly without noticing that he'd achieved his goal. When he got home and rummaged through “many gigabytes” of audio from the session, something caught his eye.

There was a small waveform that caught his attention, and zooming in, he discovered it was the bird image, but visible much later into the session time than when he was replaying the spectrogram sample from his smartphone to the starling. Which could only mean one thing. It was a bird image produced by the bird itself…

Microsoft has reportedly added a new feature to the latest Windows Insider build that lets you play its output across multiple devices or speakers. X (formerly Twitter) user phantomofearth shared screenshots that showed a new ‘Shared audio’ button in the Quick Settings panel beside the ‘Project’ button (that’s already widely available on Windows 11 devices). When clicked, it reveals a selection of audio devices connected to your computer. You can then tick the checkboxes on the devices you want to listen to and click Share to start outputting sound across multiple speakers.

At the moment, Windows does not support a native way of outputting audio to multiple different devices. A workaround involving the built-in Stereo Mix feature often does not work and can result in unwanted audio feedback. There are some third-party apps you can download, like OBS, Voicemeeter, or Audio Router, but they can get complicated and a bit too difficult for most people who simply want to share their audio experience.

Unfortunately, this new feature remains undocumented by Microsoft — even in the latest Windows Insider Blog — meaning it’s not yet an official or confirmed feature that is on the way to the wider Windows user base. We also don’t know if it works with just physically connected speakers, or if it’s also compatible with multiple Bluetooth devices. Nevertheless, we hope that this makes it through Beta testing and into mainstream release, as it’s a great feature for laptops and gaming handhelds. While not quite useful for 5.1 surround sound effects and the like, the multi-speaker sharing option is great if you want to watch a movie with someone else in a public place, like a plane, without having to share a single pair of earbuds between you.

If you want to get your hands on this feature (and several more that Microsoft experiments with) in advance, you need to sign up for Windows Insider and join the Canary Channel. However, these are often the most unstable builds of Windows that haven’t been thoroughly tested yet (remember, you’re the one doing the testing), so you might run into unexpected issues if you have these updates turned on. It’s also not a guarantee that you’ll get the ‘Shared audio’ feature or any other features you might find other Insiders people have, especially as Microsoft may push updates to different devices randomly.

Maxell Japan has launched a portable ‘Walkman’ cassette player, but this retro audio tech is boosted by modern convenience. The new Maxell MXCP-P100 (h/t Liliputing) looks a lot like the old Sony, Aiwa, Panasonic, and other cassette players which were popular personal music accessories in the 1990s. However, it adds useful new 2020s standard features like Bluetooth (v5.4) and a rechargeable battery that connects to a USB Type-C charger you probably already own.

It is quite surprising to see a new cassette Walkman launched in 2025. The Maxell product page might capably answer questions about the product, its abilities, and specifications - but it doesn’t really address why it reckons launching such a product in 2025 is a good idea.

In the west, Maxell was best known for its tape and disc media, not player hardware. So, that’s another surprise about this announcement. However, it is good to see that some thought has been put into the player mechanism.

There has been talk of very limited audio cassette mechanism availability in recent years, not surprisingly, and the only remaining producers aren’t supposed to sell stellar quality components. Thus, it is good to see Maxell directly address mechanism quality. It says that the new MXCP-P100 includes a brass flywheel that “reduces rotational irregularities and provides high quality sound.”

Some other key features of this portable cassette player are its battery life – it is claimed the rechargeable battery lasts nine hours using wired headphones, or seven with an active Bluetooth connection. A USB charging cable comes in the box.

The device is quite portable at 210g, which is lighter than many modern smartphones. You will have to add the weight of a cassette tape(s) to the carry weight, too. Maxell’s MXCP-P100 measures 122 x 91 x 38mm.

A Windows bug-finding enthusiast has highlighted that the latest Insider Build in the Windows 11 Beta and Dev channels plays the Windows Vista startup sound as it boots to the desktop. However, Xeno's observation wasn’t of an intentional slice of nostalgia aimed at the long-suffering Insiders. Microsoft Senior Program Manager on the Windows Insider Program Team, Brandon LeBlanc, admitted it was “an actual bug” after a bit of joking around.

The latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Build is 26200.5651 (Dev Channel) and the timing of its release coincides with Xeno’s initial Tweet. This OS preview was heralded as bringing features such as new Copilot+ PC experiences, a new Recall export function, a bigger clock/calendar in the notification center, and more.

If the Microsoft exec’s statement is correct, no one intended to change the default startup chime to the one used across the Windows Vista and Windows 7 eras. So the surprising retro refrain is an actual ‘known issue’ in the latest flight.

Joking aside

Other Twitter/X users jumped in on the initial post by Xeno that highlighted the incongruous startup sound. At one point LeBlanc joked that the ‘issue’ was precipitated after he “went in and had some fun with the sound files in Windows and thought folks needed a blast from the past.”

It was then suggested the Windows 95 startup sound would be a good choice for the impending 30^th anniversary of its launch (August 24). But LeBlanc continued to make mirth, stating he couldn’t find that correct .WAV file for that OS release. With his official responsibility as a Microsoft exec in mind, LeBlanc must have felt it necessary to then make clear he was joking, and the startup sound mix-up was “an actual bug.”

Apple’s Vista?

CD ripping tool CD2WAV32 has just been updated to version 4.00jp after 16 years in stasis (machine translated). Developer Moroboshi Ramu seems to have been prompted to issue the update to make the software fully compatible with Windows 11 24H2, but there are several important changes under the hood compared to the ancient 3.X releases, too. Please excuse the rest of the linked developer’s page being mostly about dolls.

Ramu says that the last update to CD2WAV32 was 16 years ago, when a patch that was authored on a Windows 7 machine was released. Going forward, the dev (and doll enthusiast) says that only Windows 11 will be supported, as that is the only system they use now, though the tool has been casually tested on a Windows 10 PC.

With the compiler change to the latest Delphi 12.1 Community Edition, Ramu says the following changes were made to create CD2WAV32 for Windows 11 Revision 4.00jp:

• The internal character code processing is now mostly Unicode.
• ID3Tag related items have also been changed from Shift-JIS to Unicode.
• The tool’s GUI, including common controls, has been updated to the latest Windows 11 style.
• File size and other information related to the files is now processed in 64-bit format.
• The 16-bit code call function of MSCDEX, which can no longer be used, has been pruned, as have TwinVQ compression, and code to alert users of ASPI errors.
• Default compression is now provided by the Media Foundation API.
• The Help file has been removed and is replaced by a PDF.
• It is now possible to start this tool, even if you don’t have a CD-ROM attached.
• And various changes have been implemented to get the CDDB service to run again so ripping can be done with meaningful file names, track titles, artist names, genres etc.

Overall, it looks like a capable tool with lots of options for the end-user. As a Japanese program, with no localized English version as far as we can tell, a quick poke around the UI revealed extensive options for CD-ROM support, file format, compression algorithm, and tagging. It did indeed run on my desktop system without an optical disc drive attached.

Nice tool, but Windows 11’s Media Player App can rip audio CDs

It’s understandable that consoles, computers and displays are the first things to come to mind when thinking about enjoying the latest video game. After all, the visuals are the first thing to pull players into the experience. That’s why serious gamers go for TVs and monitors featuring advanced HDMI gaming features such as Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR).

But audio is an important part of the gaming experience too, and it doesn’t have to bust the budget to incorporate the latest audio technologies’ benefits.

There are a variety of products featuring the latest audio technology, ranging from affordable high-quality soundbars to more pricey premium alternatives such as Audio-Video Receivers (AVRs) with a multiple speaker system that are sure to enhance game play.

HDMI® Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC) enabled soundbars deliver outstanding, lifelike soundscapes that immerse players in their games and fully complement what is displayed onscreen without breaking the bank. Many rely on two to four built-in speakers and advanced immersive audio technologies, such as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, to immerse gamers in realistic audio environments. And the more performance-focused soundbars have several speakers aimed at multiple room points for even a more enveloping and accurate sound portrayal.

Supporting high bitrate, object-based audio formats up to 192kHz at 24-bit, eARC enhances not only game play but also sports, movies and TV with superior fidelity that ensures every sound is precise and clearly reproduced. Part of the HDMI 2.1 b Specification, eARC audio enables seamless connectivity and transmission of uncompressed audio with up to 48Gbps bandwidth.

Those with bigger budgets who are looking for a zero-compromise audio experience should consider multi-speaker AVR systems supporting Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. And even some AVRs are very affordable and feature the latest audio tech.

AVRs with multiple speakers enable gamers to turn up the volume without introducing sound distortion thanks to their amplification modules. Besides powering immersive audio experiences for gaming with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, AVRs simplify overall system setup and use. 

As an AV hub, they make it simple to integrate game consoles and other components into the system. From a usage perspective, they also make it easy to switch between sources—like from a game console to a streaming media player when it’s time to put down the game and watch a streaming show. Plus, with multiple speakers—some supporting up to 13 audio channels—AVRs offer unmatched sound integrity. Just make sure the AVR supports the necessary HDMI 2.1 b features that ensure the best gaming and viewing audio experience.

Whether choosing an AVR or a soundbar, don’t diminish audio performance by selecting inferior cables. All eARC-enabled devices should be connected with genuine Ultra High-Speed HDMI® Cables to take full advantage of an AVR or soundbar’s capabilities.

Beyond game play, heightening audio performance with soundbars and AVR systems ensures watching movies, sports and other entertainment is an equally pleasurable experience.  There’s nothing like one of these alternatives to put viewers and gamers alike squarely in the action.

For more info visit www.hdmi.org.

The terms HDMI, HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface, HDMI Trade Dress and the HDMI Logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc. All other trademarks, logos and brand names are the property of their respective owners.

AI expert Shyam Gollakota from the University of Washington, together with his team of researchers, found a way to use artificial intelligence in real-time active noise cancellation, which can remove specific sounds without altering the headphone's audio. He presented this idea on May 16 at a conference held by the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, where he showed a working prototype. 

Gollakota and his team used a smartphone-based neural network to identify, train, and filter 20 different environmental sound categories, such as sirens and alarm clocks, that one would typically hear daily. This requires the user to select a certain category on the smartphone, which then begins the process of filtering out the environmental sound. This would make headphones incredibly useful in many scenarios where avoiding environmental sound is not possible. 

"Imagine you are in a park, admiring the sounds of chirping birds, but then you have the loud chatter of a nearby group of people who just can't stop talking," said Gollakota. "Now imagine if your headphones could grant you the ability to focus on the sounds of the birds while the rest of the noise just goes away. That is exactly what we set out to achieve with our system."

The prototype shows microphones attached on both sides of the headphone earcups that are connected via USB to an OrangePi board that also provides audio to the headphones via the audio jack. Based on the board's layout, it is likely to be the OrangePi 5B, which uses the Rockchip RK3588S SoC (an eight-core 64-bit processor with a built-in neural processor with 6Tops computing power, which performs real-time filtering). The phone is likely connected wirelessly to the Pi board, where the user can make specific environmental choices. OrangePi has been actively producing boards with an integrated neural chip and recently worked with Huawei to create a development board. 

AI used effectively to enhance user experience

The words 'Artificial Intelligence' are becoming more associated with audio gear, but enabling it for noise cancellation will appeal to many users. This would require a neural network trained to target external sounds and to ensure it does not dampen the actual sound played through the headphones hence having the ability to learn and improve in time.

Since this is performed in real-time in under a hundredth of a second, the processing needed to be done on a connected device rather than by a cloud server, making such Pi boards perfect for such processing. All it needs is to somehow make a PCB with an NPU that can be integrated into the headphones. It also shows this processing can be done by any computing device with an AI accelerator, possibly using existing headphones on a capable system, provided there's a microphone to pick up background sound.

The team believes this technology can be implemented on audio devices and is ready for commercialization. If a new generation of audio headgear recognizes and can integrate this, it could enhance the audio experience, bringing an innovation in noise cancellation. As predicted and published in an IBM blog post, AI will likely play an important role apart from active noise cancellation and equalization. Hence, it is only a matter of time before we hear many such innovations in the audio space.

On this date, 19 years ago, Creative introduced the X-Fi brand to the world. Today, the company unleashed its latest Super X-Fi Gen 4 audio profile for its compatible audio headphones, speakers, and wireless audio ecosystem. The new profiles provide better dynamic range, clarity, and spatial awareness. They will be rolled out worldwide in June and will be available via its SXFI app. 

Since it requires an app, it will work with its USB audio range, which includes the Creative SXFI Air C and Gamer USB headphones, SXFI Trio USB Earbuds, Sounds Blaster X3 USB DAC and amp, and Outlier Gold wireless earbuds.

The company explains that it can do so by recreating an 'immersive soundstage' and further personalized by using artificial intelligence. However, it doesn't mention if it uses currently available artificial intelligence (AI) or its propriety tech. The company advertises that with this update, users enjoy an expanded dynamic range with richer, improved clarity and more detailed audio reproduction. Though initially designed for headphones, it will also be used in its speakers, earbuds, and premium headphone ranges. 

How does this AI engine work?

As multiple companies constantly use AI as a new buzzword, anyone will be curious about this process. AI technology drives interest and sales for many hardware systems, provided it uses components that work with existing LLM engines and apps. Creative Technology mentions that it uses a sophisticated head and ear mapping process. While it doesn't mention the mapping process, it does say it uses hundreds of anthropometric parameters extracted from the features of the head by using real-time image detection and analysis. 

However, this isn't the first time Creative had something similar for its USB audio devices. The Creative SXFI Air Gamer we reviewed a few years ago had a similar app that scanned the user's ear with the help of a smartphone. The earlier system created a different and noticeable sound stage, though it is clear the perception of this difference would vary among other users. While it may not be a feature that would encourage people to buy its Super X-Fi Gen 4 range of products, one would still be tempted to try to see if it brings an improvement. 

Any improvement, whether it uses an AI engine or simply an optimized version, is good. But using such words when it doesn't have any LLM technology does make it sound gimmicky. We'll only know for sure once the app is updated next month. There's also the part where this optimization might be discernible with its earbuds and headphone lineups over speakers. Audio experience is subjective depending on the user, the device, and the settings they use.

Leading mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has announced its first Snapdragon sonic logo (a branding element sometimes also known as an audio logo), a move that comes as it preps to launch its Snapdragon X Elite chips that will intensify its competition with the likes of Intel, AMD, and Apple. From reading its blog post, Qualcomm hopes the “new sound of Snapdragon” will be as successful as those associated with companies like NBC, Netflix, and McDonald’s. However, Qualcomm’s efforts are barely musical, with its sonic logo assembled from a tuneless assortment of finger snaps and beats. Listen below.

It is easy to dismiss sonic logos as trivial marketing fluff, but in today's rich-media communications, having a logo that lacks an audio element is sub-optimal. With Qualcomm’s work in audio-first platforms like streaming and podcast equipment, where visual logos aren’t seen, a sonic brand identity is all the more important.

To create the Snapdragon audio signature, Qualcomm teamed up with an outfit called Made Music Studio. Apparently, the sonic logo you can hear embedded in this article came from a meeting of minds between creatives, researchers, and select Snapdragon customers.

The Qualcomm blog also tries very hard to almost scientifically justify its new sonic logo. Perhaps some skepticism is expected. “Sonic branding is more than just a catchy tune or a snappy jingle — it's a meticulously crafted system of sound and music assets that express the essence of a brand. It's concept-driven, research-based, [snip] and designed with intention,” asserts the Qualcomm Snapdragon blog. “Sonic branding connects the dots between customer touchpoints to form a cohesive experience that stimulates visceral, emotional connections.” There are two more paragraphs of this type of marketing blurb...

In the coming months, Qualcomm promises that people will start to hear its Snapdragon sonic branding popping up in social media posts and at live events. We would also expect to see and hear the brand presence in upcoming adverts and collaborative projects with hardware partners.

Snapdragon sonic vs the Intel bongs and the rest

When Qualcomm listed some iconic sonic logos from other brands, notable by omission were probably the most famous bongs in the PC world - Intel’s five-note magnum opus.

We are also quite fond of the wonderful selection of Microsoft Windows startup (and shutdown) sounds that have been foisted upon us over the years. For balance, the Apple Mac startup sounds from 1980 to 2022 are also in our playlist. Meanwhile, retro gaming fans may also appreciate this video compilation of console start-up logos from 1977 to 2022.

AI effects have arrived for one of the most popular open-source audio editors available. In a recent blog post, it was announced that Audacity would be getting OpenVINO AI effects built by Intel (h/t NotebookCheck). The new AI plug-ins for Audacity are expected to appeal to both music makers and podcasters alike. In brief, OpenVINO tools are being made available for Audacity users who would appreciate AI-enhanced music generation, music style remixing, music separation, noise suppression, and voice-to-text transcription.  All these AI features “run 100% locally on your PC,” asserts the Audacity team.

Generative AI has proven to be one of the most show-stopping aspects of this new era. With Audacity's new Music Generation and Music Style Remix features, users will be able to generate new music from a text prompt, or generate new compositions based on pre-existing audio soundscapes. It is explained that this plugin leverages Stable Diffusion - and Riffusion in particular.

Another audio skill that suits the abilities of AI is Music Separation. Using this new tool, Audacity users will be able to break apart the separate instruments in any music track. This could be a boon for those wishing to learn a particular instrument or for creating backing tracks.

The other new OpenVINO-based AI tools that have been released for Audacity will be welcome among podcasters – as the blog states. Audacity devs admit that the new Noise Suppression tool “behaves similar to Audacity’s built-in Noise Removal effect.” However, if you aren’t happy with the current noise suppression features available, this will surely be worth a try. It should be ‘smarter’…

Last but not least, Audacity has gained a Transcription tool powered by the well-known Whisper.cpp. This is useful for podcasters as it can “both transcribe and translate words and outputs to a label track,” says the Audacity team. It is also a boon to anyone wishing to take notes during a meeting, lecture, presentation, and so on.

Intel, the developer of the open-source OpenVINO, has made the new Audacity plug-ins available on GitHub. Potential users are warned that the release available at the time of writing (v3.4.2-R1) is only compatible with the Audacity 3.4.2 64-bit release for Windows. Step-by-step installation instructions are provided, and there is even a video available showing how to add them and check that they have been made available in the application’s ‘Effect’ menu.

The newly available OpenVINO AI plugins are for Windows only. However, the makers of Audacity seem to be happy for tinkerers to make them available for other Audacity platforms. “The project may be compiled on Linux and macOS, though no instructions are available for the latter yet,” says the Audacity blog.

A new three-port network switch designed for audiophiles has become available to purchase. Priced at an astronomical $4,349, the Innuos PhoenixNET comes with a multitude of eyebrow-raising audio quality claims about signal purity, low noise, better instrument separation, and enhanced realism. However, adding insult to our already injured intelligence, this premium-priced switch offers paltry 100 Mbps performance, as it the company claims that older / slower technology “results in lower operating noise floor compared to Gigabit.”

On the PhoenixNET product page, Innuos says that this network switch has been “designed from the ground up for network audio.” In contrast with a typical switch, it says, the PhoenixNET “can improve sound quality when used with nearly any audio component.” Remember, we are talking about digital audio 0s and 1s traveling via Ethernet. Still, Innuos insists that its switch can deliver “musical details that stand out, a blacker background, better instrument separation and realism.”

Innuos indicates the audiophile PhoenixNET design resulted from its focus on four network switch technology areas: minimizing network switch noise, increasing clocking precision and stability, providing pristine power to components, and minimizing component vibration. To fulfill these objectives it has chosen to do things like limit the switch electronics to 100 Mbps, for the aforementioned audio fidelity improvements.

Elsewhere in the switch’s audiophile makeover, Innuos seems to have brainstormed potential audio-influencing problem points. It looked closely at power delivery and regulation, as well as ensured good quality shielding, soldering, and components were used. It even credits using “anti-vibration feet tuned to the resonant frequency of the chassis” with improving the device’s sound quality.

Note that Innuos has several audiophile ‘accomplices. For example, its new PhoenixNET Ethernet switch is listed at France’s La boutique d’Eric. The retailer claims the device delivers networking that is “very thoroughly cleaned of background noise, regaining dynamics and superb harmonics.” We can’t see this precise claim on the Innuos site. There are also a number of supporting reviews on the web and YouTube if you want to dive deeper down the digital signal purity of networking equipment audiophile rabbit hole.

One two-meter-long Ethernet cable is generously provided in the Innuos PhoenixNET box. However, specialist retailers selling this switch also stock audiophile Ethernet cables like the AudioQuest Ethernet RJ/E Vodka, which costs nearly $600 for a 0.75m length.

We have previously reported on $1,250 Ethernet cables targeting the audiophile dollar, as well as similarly targeted Ethernet dongles, SSDs, and even Hi-Fi SATA cables.  

Audiophile keyboards are now a thing: Fiio has integrated a dual DAC+ dual op-amp into a new HiFi variation of its KB3 keyboard. Fiio has one major edge over other keyboard makers- it can integrate one of its own headphone DAC/amps within the keyboard. The KB3 is listed for sale in AliExpress, with the HiFi wired version selling for $149.99 and the wireless version, which does not have the built-in DAC+amp, for $129.99. The KA13 headphone dac+amp costs $79.99. Let's cover the details.

Audio-functionality of the AMP+DAC

Armed with dual Cirrus Logic CS43131 DACs with two low-noise SGMicro SGM8262 op-amps, the FiiO HiFi Wired KB3 is a 75% mechanical keyboard with a fully functional DAC and AMP for headphones, supporting up to PCM384KHz/ 32-bit and DSD256 output via the Savitech SA9312L DAC USB chip. FiiO makes some of the best headphones, IEMs, amps, DACs, and all-in-one units for audiophiles. Of course, they would like both components to be good enough for the price while being able to power their headphones.

This patented design enables the KB3 to provide 500mW high output power through 3.5mm single-ended +4.4 balanced headphone outputs. Fiio doesn't mention if it integrated components from a headphone DAC+amp it sells, but the main features and components match the one on the FiiO KA13 headphone DAC+amp. It also has the desktop power mode enabled by default, a function you can switch on or off on the KA13 as it is meant to be a portable device for smartphones. 

The built-in desktop DAC+amp function is exclusive to the HiFi wired version of the KB3. There is a barebone version without the keycaps and switches, enabling users to customize their choices with the KB3. 

The Bright Side of this Keyboard

Nothing looks to be compromised on paper with this mechanical keyboard. The KB3 uses all the features you expect on a mechanical keyboard in 2023 - silicone gaskets with sound absorbing and IXPE switch foam with a silicone dampener to give more comfortable actuation and give a more 'thockier' sound profile when typing. Naturally, that would also depend on the switch and keycap paired with this keyboard, and hence, having the barebone HiFi wired option helps users choose preferred switches and keycaps widely available in the market - another two huge rabbit holes.

That isn't the only selling point, as the keyboard also provides dual USB outputs. The fully built FiiO KB3 uses a gasket mount design for a more comfortable typing experience. The fully built KB3 has a Gateron GPro3.0 linear switches rated with 50±15 gf operation force and transparent keycaps. The KB3 uses an aluminium-magnesium allow casing with a textured finish with an integrated step-less volume knob on the right. The keyboard uses VIA firmware and is compatible with both Windows and Mac. The wireless version is integrated with a large 4,000 mAh battery.

The keyboards are pretty chunky, weighing 1060g for the wired and 1115g for the wireless. It should be noted that JadeAudio mentioned Andriod OS support with Windows and macOS, while FiiO only lists dual OS Win/ macOS support. Both FiiO and Jade Audio need to be on the same page, especially since it is usually a typical feature with many desktop mechanical keyboards. 

Fiio will sell these keyboards in four versions- a fully built HiFi Single Mode, which is a wired keyboard with the built-in desktop DAC+amp; a wireless three-mode version, which lets you switch between three wireless devices; and a barebone version with no keycap or switches. All three versions use black faceplates. The fourth is simply the same three-mode wireless keyboard with a silver faceplate. There's also a limited Founder's edition, which uses Kailh Deep Sea Whale switches. It is not known if the fully built and barebone HiFi wired version will have a silver faceplate variation at the time of writing. 

For now, the KB3 is listed for sale in AliExpress, with the HiFi wired version selling for $149.99 and the wireless version, which does not have the built-in DAC+amp, for $129.99. The KA13 headphone dac+amp costs $79.99. On this keyboard, you get its main functions and full features with power output typically from the KA13's desktop mode, which is enabled by default. This explains why a HiFi wired version costs more than the wireless version since you get the main bits from the KA13. 

Potential Userbase

Considering the mechanical keyboard's 75% form factor, one of the few types of users interested in such keyboards will be those who want a better typing and listening experience on a laptop without needing to have multiple devices to add the bulk. Naturally, they would need both the keyboard and the dac+amp to be good enough. This will appeal to both keyboard and audiophile enthusiasts who would like to try the best of both worlds. Sure, PC gamers would consider this keyboard while playing in tournaments, but it largely depends on its performance and overall experience, something that can only be determined in testing.

Of course, it will also appeal to everyday users as it enables them to get a desktop dac+amp-like integration with a dual Type-A USB hub.  The combination helps to have a cleaner output. Since the KB3 uses the main function of the KA13 headphone, which has the option to turn on desktop mode for more power, it makes absolute sense to have the same components, functions, and features from it while having the desktop power mode enabled by default. 

Not the First HiFi Keyboard

Seeing FiiO stretch its wings over the keyboard market may seem bold, but it is not the first to do so. The Moondrop Dash75 keyboard with the same 75% keyboard layout was released a few months ago. It uses an aluminum housing with Poron dampening and more layers below the PCB just like the KB3. It uses its own Moonriver 2 headphone DAC/amp, as it was identified by the system once plugged in. There are some unique selling points as it has QMK/ VIA support, making the whole keyboard programmable. This looks to be more appealing to many as its design is inspired by the Commodore 64. 

Despite the saturation in the keyboard market, we've noticed an influx of companies making new keyboards, such as OnePlus, which is typically known to make Android smartphones. What differentiates between them all is the key features multiple keyboard makers have brought forward- programmable QMK/ VIA keyboards, programmable knobs, additional switches, gasket mounts with foam panels, three-mode wireless with built-in battery, the ability to swap between multiple devices on the fly and various others. Many of these were streamlined and integrated by default based on user feedback and modders who share multiple ideas, such as the duct tape and foam method. 

HiFi keyboards are surely a niche and we'll simply have to see if the overall keyboard community is willing to accept these as options. This shouldn't be an issue, as both keyboard and audio enthusiasts love innovation and the space-saving options available on the market. With companies like FiiO and Moondop being the ones to start HiFi keyboards, it is off to a good start. 

Gaming earbuds burst onto the scene in the wake of Apple’s successful AirPods. It was hardly a surprise: the AirPods made earbuds cool and, in turn, made the thought of gaming on earbuds appealing. But earbuds face several challenges, such as Bluetooth latency, lackluster microphone quality, and a limited sound stage.

Razer’s Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed earbuds attempt to counter these problems with a fast, proprietary wireless connection, strong audio, and a few gaming-centric software features, but it’s only a partial success.

Specs

Design and Comfort of the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed 

Razer’s Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed earbuds opt for a stemmed design that will look familiar to anyone who’s seen a pair of AirPods. These days it looks a bit old-fashioned, as many brands have swapped to a more compact, stemless design. 

Plastic is the material of choice. This is no surprise: nearly all earbuds are made of plastic. Still, Razer’s earbuds appear more plastic-y than do many competitors’, and feel a bit cheap as a result. The earbuds' piano black gloss finish contributes to this problem. Black gloss isn’t in fashion at the moment, and for good reason: it attracts lint, fingerprints, and earwax like a magnet.

What the earbuds lack in looks, they make up for in comfort. This, of course, is subjective based on the shape of each user’s ear, but I found the earbuds comfortable to use for several hours at a stretch. The stemmed design eventually caused fatigue due to how the stems press slightly into my ears, but the problem was no worse than any other stemmed design I’ve tried, and a short break improved comfort considerably. 

The Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed earbuds come with three earbud tip sizes: small, large, and medium. I used the medium size, which is typical of most earbuds I use. They’re made of a soft silicone material — standard for most earbud tips. 

The earbuds support Razer’s Chroma RGB lighting with LEDs placed behind the Razer logo on each earbud. I don’t personally care about this feature, and there are obvious limits to the flair tiny earbuds can add to your setup. Still, the RGB lighting customization worked well in response to input on the Razer Audio App, and the LEDs are bright enough to easily see in a lit room.

One additional accessory lurks in the box: a 2.4GHz wireless “HyperSpeed” adapter, which you’ll need to  connect the earbuds over 2.4GHz wireless instead of Bluetooth 5.3. The adapter has a USB-C connection, but a handy USB-A adapter is provided, too.

Audio Performance of the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed

Razer packs 10mm drivers into the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed earbuds and slaps on the THX certified label, but the company’s claims about audio quality are otherwise vague. This set modest expectations for audio quality which, fortunately, were exceeded — though I found the earbuds performed better for listening to music rather than for playing games.

The earbuds have a strong, voluminous character that often did justice to tunes. Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero was thick, even viscous, with great separation between Swift’s crystal clear vocals and the hum of the bassline underneath. I noticed a similar effect in Boards of Canada’s New Seeds, a complex but purely instrumental track which interrupts its grainy midrange and hypnotic bassline with a shrieking electronic siren’s call halfway through. The Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed earbuds achieved a good sense of depth and separation that encouraged my feet to tap along with the beat.

It wasn’t all good. Yves Tumor’s Echolalia and DJ Shadow’s Nobody Speak had issues with a muddled midrange and indistinct vocals. While these tracks are very different, they share lower, more monotone vocals that stick behind the bass. But while this issue was noticeable, it didn’t ruin the experience.

Loading up a title like Cyberpunk 2077 or Diablo IV made it obvious the indistinct midrange was caused by bass that was turned up a bit more than the earbuds’ drivers can handle. Highs and lows had good distinction and were spatially separated, but details in the midrange — vocals and dialogue, in particular — were snowed under. 

The earbuds' strong highs and lows carried through to the gaming experience, and sounded especially good in those with great music — the tunes of Final Fantasy XIV’s zones and dungeons were a treat.

As for surround: 5.1 or 7.1 surround is not an option, so you’re limited to stereo. A Dolby sound test video showed the earbuds provided good stereo reproduction with distinct left, right, and center channels, but rear and height channels weren’t true to life. This was not unexpected given the specifications. And, to be fair, the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed performed better than many earbuds I’ve encountered. Just don’t expect the 360-degree aural experience found on some price-competitive gaming headsets.

Microphone of the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed

The Razer Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed has a fixed microphone, which is true of all earbuds. There’s no option to mute the microphone on the earbuds, though; it can only be silenced using software on a connected device. The earbuds include tap controls for receiving calls and increasing/decreasing the volume of calls, but no controls for increasing or decreasing the volume of the microphone. 

Audio quality from the microphone was strong — especially for earbuds. Your friends on Discord shouldn’t have trouble hearing you. While the sound could be a bit muffled, it preserved a bit of depth and bass and avoided the tinny, metallic quality often found on inexpensive microphones.

Ambient noise might be an issue, however. The microphone has noise canceling, but its physical location means it’s more likely to pick up nearby sounds. Even the tip-tap of a keyboard or click of a mouse came through in my testing. In short, plan on using push-to-talk — your friends are not going to be pleased if you roll with an open mic.

Features and Software of the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed

Razer’s Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed offers the features typical of most wireless earbuds — and then some.

The earbuds can pair with up to two devices: one over Bluetooth 5.3 and one over Razer’s HyperSpeed 2.4GHz wireless. The low-latency HyperSpeed connection pairs with a dongle that’s included in the box, so it’s best for use with a PC or game console. To be honest, I could not detect any difference in latency between Bluetooth and HyperSpeed, but I did notice the HyperSpeed connection was stronger, allowing me to receive audio anywhere in my home. The Bluetooth connection cut out once I was a few rooms away, which is typical for Bluetooth audio devices in my home.

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) is included and offers three modes: ANC on, ANC Off, and Ambient. Razer’s ANC is unremarkable but functional. Low, repetitive noises, like a fan or air conditioner, were easily filtered away, but noises of a higher pitch, or irregular frequency, crept in. It’s not as good as what you’ll find on Apple’s AirPods Pro but still delivered a big decrease in ambient noise.

Ambient Mode failed to impress. It allowed clear, balanced sound to pass through, which was handy if someone pops in for a chat while you’re gaming. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by a distracting ambient hum, and some unpleasant or distant noises were significantly amplified. The roofers working on a house a block away suddenly teleported to my doorstep with Ambient mode turned on.

The ANC and Ambient Mode are joined with a layer of gamer-specific features, which include Gaming Mode (which blocks incoming calls when gaming over the HyperSpeed connection), customizable controls, and, of course, customizable lighting.

Most features are controlled through the sleek, attractive Razer Audio App, but some (such as ANC and Gaming Mode) also respond to a quick tap (or two, or three) of the earbuds. The app handles remapping of these controls, which is useful if you like a particular feature and crave easier access. 

I found the app quick and easier to use than the tap controls, however. Swiping open my phone to turn a feature on or off was much easier than remembering the exact finger-waggles and taps needed to achieve the same thing on the earbuds.

Battery Life of the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed

The earbuds stash in a rounded charging case that’s extremely similar to Apple’s AirPods Pro — but in black instead of white. Razer wisely went for a matte finish on the charging case, so the fingerprints and grime that plague the earbuds are less apparent on the case itself. You can top off the charging case over USB-C or use a wireless charging pad.

Razer claims battery life is between 3 and 6 hours, depending on whether the lighting and ANC features are on or off. The charge case provides an additional 11 to 24 hours. That puts Razer behind the most popular wireless earbuds, like the Sony 100XM4 and Jabra Elite 3, and might be an issue for gamers who like to grind all day long. 

I typically play for no more than two hours at a stretch, though, so I only heard the low battery warning when I specifically didn’t charge it after use. In my tests, the earbuds managed almost four hours with lighting and ANC turned on.

Razer doesn’t get into specifics about charging speed, but the (optional) charging pad designed for use with the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed supports 10 watts of power, which suggests the earbuds receive at least that much when charged over USB-C. In my testing, the charging case received a full charge in roughly and hour and 30 minutes.

The Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed’s overall battery performance is average but acceptable. Gamers who play all day will need to take a break to charge the earbuds — but that’s true if you’re using Razer’s competitors, too.

Bottom Line

Should gaming earbuds even be a thing?

That’s the question raised by Razer’s Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed. They’re a decent set of earbuds. Audio quality is good, ANC is functional, and the combination of Bluetooth and low-latency 2.4GHz wireless makes for easy connections with a wide variety of devices. 

Yet fundamental problems remain. The Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed can’t provide the sonic oomph of a gaming headset, the microphone can’t filter out all ambient noise well enough to be left to its own devices, and the lack of virtual surround sound is notable. 

I can imagine scenarios where these earbuds make sense. Perhaps you’re a mobile gamer and just want to play on a smartphone, or you have multiple devices and appreciate the earbuds’ flexible wireless connection options. 

But the key issue is this: a lifestyle gaming headset such as Razer’s Barracuda Pro Wireless handily outperforms the Hammerhead Pro HyperSpeed in games (and music, and movies, and on Discord), and still gives you the device freedom you’re craving. Razer’s earbuds are decent value for a niche but difficult to recommend.

The wireless budget earbud market is almost comically overcrowded. A search of earbuds on Amazon reveals a dizzying barrage of no-name buds with lengthy feature lists that prove short on substance. 

HyperX’s attempt to muscle into this crowd with the Cirro Buds Pro, a set of budget earbuds priced at $79.99. Although sorta-kinda marketed towards gamers, the Cirro Buds Pro are better understood as budget day-to-day earbuds for use with a phone or tablet. They do this job reasonably well but don’t move audio quality, design, or features forward.

Design and Comfort

The HyperX Cirro Buds Pro are in-ear earbuds with a round plug shape that nestled nicely inside my ear. I found them comfortable — so much so that I sometimes forgot I was wearing them if I muted my tunes and forgot to resume them. They came with three earbud tip sizes, which is typical for most earbuds. I stuck with the “medium” tips installed from the factory.

The build quality and design of the Cirro Buds Pro left little else to remark on, however. They’re simple, plastic earbuds with a thoroughly conventional shape, adorned only by a subtle gloss-gray HyperX logo that barely contrasts against the surrounding matte black. 

Fashionable? Forget about it. The Cirro Buds Pro are the very definition of basic — in matte black, at least. HyperX also offers the earbuds in tan and blue. These add a bit of style, but the shape and design of the earbuds remains rather generic.

The earbuds are controlled with quick taps used to activate pairing, receive or end calls, and adjust audio modes. I found these controls a bit easier to use than on most earbuds, which I credit to their round, flat exterior surface. It was easy to feel out where your finger needed to land to activate the earbuds’ controls.

HyperX includes a charging case, which shares the earbuds’ functional approach. The case is flat — not rounded — across the top and bottom, and is less likely to slide off a table or desk. A bright LED on front shows the charging status. The case is charged via USB-C and does not support wireless charging.

There’s one more thing about the charging case I need to call out: its transparency — or, rather, lack thereof. HyperX’s product photography showed the case as transparent, and while it technically was, it appeared opaque in most indoor lighting. HyperX also sticks with a matte black charging case exterior even if you purchase the tan or blue earbuds (though a portion of the interior plastic does coordinate with the earbuds’ color).

Specs

Audio Performance

The HyperX Cirro Buds Pro feature 8mm dynamic drivers, but otherwise make few promises about sonic performance. In fact, HyperX’s marketing for the Cirro Buds Pro largely avoided talking about audio quality and instead focused on the earbuds’ features and battery life.

A quick tour through my audio sample tracks made the Cirro’s limitations clear. Boards of Canada’s New Seeds provided clear highs but largely obscured the subtle-yet-hypnotic bass. It was a similar story with Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero, where Swift’s vocals pierced through a thin lower-end. DJ Shadow’s Nobody Speak was especially disappointing: the bass was present but obscured, and the sudden appearance of the saxophones around the minute mark — normally one of my favorite moments — was yawn-worthy.

The lack of bass was the unifying theme, as Cirro’s 8mm driver was not up to task. For what it’s worth, the earbuds did manage to avoid the mistake of trying to compensate with overdriven bass that obscured and muddied the mid-range. There was at least some oomph present, which places the Cirro Buds Pro in front of the least-impressive budget earbuds. But the Cirro Buds Pro largely failed to do music justice. 

Gaming performance on the Cirro Buds Pro is best described as “usable.” The reasonably clear mid-range and crisp highs provided distinct, crisp dialogue, and the chirps and beeps of a typical in-game interface came through with ease. However, the lack of bass means=t dramatic and explosive scenes sound remote and wimpy. Cyberpunk 2077 lacked the cinematic heft and immersion it normally provides.

The Cirro Buds Pro are stereo-only — so surround was barely present. This was no surprise given the earbuds price, but it’s an issue for games — especially more recent, cinematic AAA games. I found the sound stage to be located clearly — and only — between my temples (a surround sound video confirmed this). Right, left, and center were distinct, but surround, rear, and height weren’t obvious. 

There is a silver lining: the earbuds have a versatile, balanced sound that didn’t annoy me. That’s not to be taken for granted in the sub-$100 earbud world. They also handled vocal audio well, so fans of podcasts, YouTube, and Tiktok will be pleased. But gamers shouldn’t mistake the HyperX branding on the Cirro Buds Pro as evidence of gaming chops — these are more suited to daily commutes than late-night esports.

Microphone

The HyperX Cirro Buds Pro have an omnidirectional microphone array with two microphones per earbud and built-in noise cancellation. Microphone quality was usable but unimpressive. Recorded audio was not too difficult to understand but had a flat, hollow quality and sounded a bit metallic at the edges. Nobody is going to mistake you for using a quality headset or a halfway-decent microphone if you take calls with the Cirro Buds Pro.

The mics feature “noise cancellation,” but I found this struggled to fit the bill. It canceled low, thumbing, predictable sounds, but would fail to obscure distant, brief sounds — such as a crow in a tree a few yards away, or the clickety-clack of a keyboard. The microphone will work for audio calls in a setting without too much ambient noise, but it’s a poor fit for an open mic on Discord — push-to-talk will prove mandatory. There’s also no way to mute the mic using the earbuds’ tap controls, so you’ll have to do any muting in an app used to record or transmit audio.

Features and Software

The HyperX Cirro Buds Pro have Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), which, for some, may prove among its most alluring features. ANC isn’t guaranteed at the Cirro Buds Pro’s retail price of $79.99, though there are competitors, such as the Jabra Elite 4 and the EarFun Air Pro 3, which feature ANC and a similar price point.

ANC mode on the Cirro Buds Pro provided a moderate reduction in ambient noise and some reduction of quick, unpredictable noises. There’s a significant difference between the Cirro Buds Pro’s ANC and the ANC you’ll find on premium earbuds such as Apple’s AirPods Pro or Sony’s WF-1000XM, however. Noises that packed real punch — like a passing bus — muscled their way through with ease.

The ANC includes an Ambient Mode, which delivers ambient noises when you need to be audibly aware of your surroundings. I found the Ambient Mode tended to amplify distant and high-pitched sounds, which made the mode grating to use for any length of time. There’s also a Gaming Mode, which drops the Bluetooth connection into a low-latency mode and enables ANC. I didn’t notice any latency issues with these earbuds.

HyperX doesn’t offer a smartphone app for controlling the earbuds’ functions, so you’ll have to stick with tapping the earbuds to control them. This also means the controls can’t be customized, and there are relatively few functions available — if you want to mute a call or change the volume and your phone is inaccessible, you’re out of luck, as the earbuds can’t control these functions.

Battery Life

HyperX says the Cirro Buds Pro will hit up to four hours of battery life with ANC turned on, and up to seven hours with ANC turned off. The charging case stores an additional 35 hours of charge time. These are common figures for mid-range earbuds.

I found battery life to be similar to HyperX’s claims in my tests — the earbuds managed just under four hours with ANC turned on. I used the earbuds for a few hours daily, and the charging case powered more than a week of use for me.

The charging case charges via USB-C and does not support wireless charging. Topping off the charging case took around two and a half hours — again, these times are what I’d expect for modern, sub-$100 wireless earbuds.

Bottom Line

The HyperX Cirro Buds Pro are the earbud equivalent of popping by a grocery store to pick up ground beef: you pay for $80 worth of earbuds, and you get $80 worth of earbuds. No more. No less. If you’re looking for $80 earbuds, these are a fine choice — especially since they have ANC — but they don’t really stand out much from the oversaturated wireless earbud market.

Ultimately, it hinges entirely on price. The Cirro Buds Pro are a reasonable upgrade for shoppers eyeing extreme budget wireless earbuds (under $50). But if your budget is just a hair more, there isn’t really a reason to consider the Cirro Buds Pro. These earbuds remain in the minor leagues, despite their “Pro” monniker.

If you’re preparing to dazzle an audience with a beautiful concerto, you best prepare your ensemble with a Raspberry Pi Pico-powered paper piano. This tutorial was put together by Abdulrahman Alhamed from Cytron and details how you can create a paper piano from scratch using our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Okay, so we don’t really expect this to be the next big instrument for professional orchestration but it is a wonderfully simple side project that gets the noggin joggin’ and is also a great introductory project for new makers. We created something similar before except instead of using a piece of paper to register user input, our associate editor Les Pounder used a banana to control a Pico. 

It doesn’t take too much hardware to recreate this project. You’ll need a pencil, a piece of paper and a Pico. Cytron has designed this project to use their Cytron Maker Pi Pico board which enhances the project with built-in LEDs and more that can respond to your paper piano input. We reviewed this board back in 2021 and found it to be quite a handy dev board that’s low on cost and high on functionality.

To create the input panel, you’ll need to draw a keyboard. Technically you can draw any shape you like. The idea is to fill in blocks of graphite using the pencil that aren’t touching each other. Wires are then attached to the blocks and connected to GPIO on the Pico. When you touch one of the pencil blocks (or keys), this completes a circuit and activates the GPIO as registered input.

When one of the GPIO pins is activated, a corresponding note will sound using the buzzer. The code for this project was written is Circuit Python and is totally open source for anyone who wants to recreate it at home. You can find instructions for downloading it on the official tutorial video and blog post on the Cytron website.

If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project, head over to the Cytron blog post that details everything you need to get started. Be sure to follow them for more cool creations using our favorite SBC and some of their awesome maker boards.

Newly-minted Corsair subsidiary Drop is best known for its keyboards — after all, it started out as a community-driven platform for negotiating group buys on keyboard enthusiast paraphernalia: boutique boards, switches, keycaps, etc. The company also sells its own merchandise, which includes keyboard kits, pre-built keyboards, and headsets (as well as... other things, occasionally). So it’s not too surprising that Drop has decided to take its audio line to the next level with a surprisingly slim pair of desktop PC speakers: the BMR1 Nearfield Monitors.  

The BMR1 Nearfield Monitors are a pair of sleek, unique-looking desktop speakers featuring Balanced Mode Radiator drivers from Tectonic Audio Labs. They can be mounted either vertically or horizontally, depending on your setup — if you mount them horizontally, they’ll fit pretty neatly under most desktop monitors. They feature both analog and Bluetooth connectivity and have an aux-out port that lets you plug in an optional subwoofer. They also feature interchangeable magnetic speaker grilles, which are sold separately in several colors (with more colors/designs in the future tentatively promised). 

If you think these sound pretty awesome, you’re not alone — Drop announced the BMR1s in January with three initial runs, all of which sold out immediately. Two additional runs of 1,000 units also sold out, and the speakers are currently on their sixth run of 1,000 units (still available as of this writing). The BMR1s alone cost $129 and do not come with speaker grilles; grilles can be purchased separately for $25 - $39 (depending on color).

Design of the BMR1 Nearfield Monitors

Design is a big part of the BMR1s’ appeal: these slim, sleek rectangles have a tiny footprint compared to most PC speakers. Each speaker measures approximately 10.63 inches (270mm) long by 2.55 inches (64.8mm) wide, and is just 1.62 inches (41.2mm) deep. The speakers come with plastic “isolation stands” that allow for either vertical or horizontal placement.

Each stand’s footprint measures 2.6 inches (66mm) wide by 3.94 inches (100mm) deep. If you mount the speakers vertically, each speaker will measure approximately 11.3 inches (288mm) tall by 2.6 inches (66mm) wide by 3.94 inches (100mm) deep. If you mount the speakers horizontally, each speaker will measure approximately 3.46 inches (88mm) tall by 10.63 inches (270mm) wide by 3.94 inches (100mm) deep. Size-wise, these speakers are perfect for anyone with an already too-cluttered desk — they take up barely any desk space when mounted vertically, and fit neatly under most monitors when mounted horizontally.

In true Drop form, the BMR1s are sold as a barebones kit, without speaker grilles. Drop sells optional, interchangeable magnetic speaker grilles separately in several colors — black, white, raw steel, “laser purple” (deep purple/navy), “shinai sage” (sage green), and “skiiboard orange” (orange). The grilles cost $25/pair (except for “raw steel,” which costs $39), and are made of coated steel mesh in a plastic frame. The company plans to offer additional colors/designs in the future.

I don’t dislike the “spare, industrial style” of the speakers sans grilles, and exposed drivers are certainly not uncommon in the speaker world. But I do think the BMR1s look sort of unfinished without grilles (especially as you can see the glue around the drivers). It does seem like Drop could have included something in the $129 base price. The speakers are fine in terms of build quality, but the standard-issue black plastic chassis looks and feels a bit cheap for how much these cost.

In the box, the BMR1s come with two stands, attachment hardware (screws, washers, and a hex key), a power block/cord, a 4-foot (1.2m) speaker interconnect cable, and a 3.5-foot (1m) AUX cable. The speaker interconnect cable appears to be proprietary — while most people will not be putting their speakers more than 4 feet apart, such a short cable doesn’t allow for a lot of flexibility when it comes to cable management (the AUX cable is also laughably short, but at least that can be easily swapped out).

The right speaker houses all of the ports, including the power input. For audio input, the right speaker has a 3.5mm stereo aux-in, as well as wireless input (Bluetooth 5.0). The speaker also has a headphone jack (with mic passthrough) and an aux out or subwoofer out for plugging in an optional subwoofer. There’s also a mode switch for switching between 2.0 (without subwoofer) and 2.1 (with subwoofer). And, of course, the proprietary speaker cable input on both the right and left speakers.

There’s a small multi-function button on the front of the right speaker, which is ringed in a bright LED when the speakers are plugged in. (Maybe a little too bright — it would be nice if this could be dimmed or turned off.) Pressing the button once switches to Bluetooth mode (press and hold in Bluetooth mode to enter pairing mode), pressing it again enters headphone mode (if headphones are connected). Default mode (analog-in) is denoted by a white LED, Bluetooth by a blue LED, and headphone mode by an orange LED. I will note that this is not a power button — there’s no power button on these speakers, nor is there volume control.

Aside from their dual-mounting capabilities, the stands that come with the BMR1s are pretty basic: they’re made of matte black plastic and have anti-slip rubber corners on the bottom and Drop’s logo engraved at the base, and they’re not adjustable. The stands have a groove to help guide and stabilize the speakers once they’re attached, but it’s not the most stable setup I’ve seen — the speakers were a little wobbly when mounted (both ways). This isn’t much of an issue, as the speakers are pretty lightweight — the right speaker weighs 13 ounces (368.5g) and the left speaker weighs 12.36 ounces (350.4g). The stands have cutouts so you can access all ports.

Specs

Performance of the BMR1 Nearfield Monitors

The BMR1 Nearfield Monitors are so slim because they use Balanced Mode Radiator (BMR) drivers (manufactured by Tectonic Audio Labs), instead of traditional cone-shaped pistonic drivers. The main benefit of BMR drivers is their size — each of the BMR1s features a flat, square, two-inch BMR driver and dual force-canceling passive radiators. Drop says the drivers are tuned to deliver a “holographic, natural frequency response” that’s perfect for “movies, music, and more.”

BMR drivers also offer wider dispersion than their conical counterparts — they feature more off-axis output and less directional sound, which makes them better for multiple listeners. (This also means you can be more flexible with placement/positioning — the BMR1s will sound largely the same whether they’re mounted vertically or horizontally.

The BMR1s have a frequency response of 80 Hz - 24,000 Hz. That’s not great on the low end, though the dual force-canceling passive radiators do a decent job of producing deep, meaningful bass — and the BMR1s do give you the option of plugging in an external subwoofer if you’re really looking for powerful lows. 

While a lot of articles covering Drop’s announcement of the BMR1 Nearfield Monitors suggested Drop claimed they would have “audiophile-level sound,” I think it’s important to note that Drop pretty carefully tip-toed around making that statement in its press release. (It mentioned “audiophile products,” “audiophiles,” “high-quality desktop speakers,” and sounding “great” — but stopped short of calling these audiophile-level speakers.) And while the BMR1s do sound very good, especially for their size, I don’t think I’d call their sound “audiophile-level.” 

Music sounds quite good on the BMR1s, so long as you’re looking for a very neutral sound profile. If you’re used to listening to music with bass-heavy headphones/headsets, the BMR1s are definitely not... that. If anything, they’re a little too neutral for me, as I prefer my neutral profiles to lean a little warm. The BMR1s have a fairly wide and detailed high range, producing clear but not overly bright treble in songs such as Britney Spears’ Toxic and Pitbull’s International Love. The midrange, by comparison, sounded a little compressed, which caused midrange-heavy songs like K-391’s Lonely World and Pepas’ Farruko to sound less dynamic. 

Movies, TV shows, podcasts, talk radio, etc. also sound very good on the BMR1s, though I did notice some slight graininess in the lower midrange when the speakers were turned up fairly loud. Speaking of volume — while the BMR1s are fairly loud for how little space they take up, they’re not particularly loud for PC speakers. In our volume test, the BMR1s delivered 73.1 dBA at 50% volume and 85.3 dBA at max volume, which is similar to the Audioengine A2+’s maximum volume level. (Of course, the A2+’s are quite a bit larger, measuring 6.25 x 4.2 x 5.6 inches (158.75 x 106.68 x 142.24mm) each and weighing 6.8lbs (3.08kg) together.) But where the BMR1s do shine is in their lack of distortion — these speakers sound almost as good when they’re at or near maximum volume as they do at 50%. And while they’re not as objectively loud as some of the other speakers on our list of best PC speakers, the BMR drivers’ wide dispersion means they can fill a medium-sized room better than you might expect. 

I was also impressed with the BMR1s’ gaming performance — they’re not particularly tuned for gaming like some PC speakers are, but the detailed high range and “holographic soundstage” Drop keeps mentioning make these speakers surprisingly good for both competitive FPS/Battle Royale type games and immersive, aurally-rich RPGs. The soundstage is a bit larger than it is with most 2.0 systems, though it’s still just a stereo setup and not surround (and the BMR1s don’t come with software or even offer a digital connection, so there’s no built-in virtual surround). But gamers will want to plug into the speakers directly, because there’s a very noticeable lag over the BMR1s’ Bluetooth connection.

Bottom Line

The Drop BMR1 Nearfield Monitors are interesting. They’re not only very slim and very lightweight compared to most of the competition,they’re also designed in such a way that I can see them fitting into even the most cluttered desk setup. They sound good, especially for their size, with an almost too-neutral sound profile and a larger-than-average soundstage. 

They’re not the best speakers you’ll ever hear, nor are they my personal favorite listening speakers. But this is all relative: they’re absolutely better than your laptop’s built-in speakers or — (god forbid) — the speakers on your desktop monitor.

But these speakers also have some (several) quirks I think Drop could fix for the next iteration. The electronics in the BMR1s are... let’s say, feisty. The right speaker (the active speaker) gets a little worryingly warm near the bottom when it’s plugged in. This is maybe partly because it’s powered on all the time, because there’s no power button (just a multi-function button with several functions that are not power). The BMR1s’ SNR is good (> 95 dB), but there’s a lot of noise — buzzing, popping, distortion — when you fiddle with either side of the analog connection. And when your PC goes to sleep, wakes from sleep, or powers on/off.  And from the left monitor when nothing is happening but the speakers are in analog or headphone mode. 

I also have a few design petpeeves — such as the proprietary and short speaker cable, as well as the bright LED ring around the non-power button, the fact that the headphone jack is on the back of the right monitor and not easily accessible. I really wanted to like these and I do like them, especially for how easy they are to fit into a desktop setup (I may or may not have a hate-hate relationship with trying to fit speakers into my desktop setup), but at the moment the BMR1s just feel like they’re not quite there. Personally, I’d grab something cheaper, like the Creative Pebble Pros, and wait until the BMR2s drop.

SteelSeries’ Arena 3 is the brand’s entry-level 2.0 system in its ambitious Arena speaker lineup. With a retail price of just $129.99, the Arena 3 might seem competitively-priced — especially considering Razer’s Nommo V2 X starts at $149.99 — but of course there are desktop speakers outside of the gaming peripheral sphere.

⋇ Check out our Best PC Speakers for more options.

The Arena 3 speakers feature 4-inch full-range drivers with organic fiber cones and front-firing bass ports. They’re well-built and situated on tilt-adjustable desktop stands, with a volume knob and multi-function button for switching inputs easily accessible. 

They’re wired and offer analog connectivity (PC and AUX), as well as Bluetooth 5.0 — no USB or optical connection. The Arena 3 is a 2.0 system — no subwoofer, so its bass response is understandably underwhelming. But if you’re not looking for an impressive bass response, there are plenty of 2.0 systems with lackluster lows that cost a lot less than $130.

Design of the Arena 3

The Arena 3 is a wired, two-speaker stereo system with a left channel and a right channel. The speakers look similar to the oval-shaped front left/right speakers in SteelSeries’ higher-end Arena 7 and Arena 9 systems, but they’re larger and more... avocado-shaped. Each of the Arena 3’s speakers features a 4-inch premium organic fiber full-range driver, a front port for improved bass response, and is perched on a tilt-adjustable desktop stand.

The Arena 3’s speakers are housed in matte black plastic chassis with black and dark gray drivers. I won’t say the chassis is fingerprint-proof (it’s not), but it doesn’t attract fingerprints the way Razer’s Nommo V2 Pro speakers did. SteelSeries’ logo is printed in black on the frame under each driver. The speakers are somewhat bulky and oddly-shaped, but they’re very well-built and hefty — together, they weigh a little under five pounds (4.72lbs / 2139g). The right speaker is slightly heavier at 2.44 pounds (1105g), while the left weighs 2.28 pounds (1034g).

Both speakers have built-in tilt-adjustable stands. The stands feature round bases measuring 4.35 inches (110.6mm) in diameter by 0.39 inches (10.1mm) thick, and are lined with a circle of rubbery anti-slip material. The neck of each stand is around 0.75 inches (19.1mm) tall and allows the speaker to tilt backward approximately 20 degrees.

SteelSeries lists the Arena 3’s measurements as 7.72 x 4.97 x 4.13 inches (196.1 x 126.2 x 104.9mm), but these are definitely... off. I measured each of the speakers at about 8 inches (203.2mm) tall by 6 inches (152.4mm) wide by 5 inches (127mm) deep standing “straight.” Fully tilting the speakers adds about 1 inch (25.4mm) of depth and half an inch (12.7mm) of height. So each speaker will take up 8.5 x 6 x 6 inches (215.9 x 152.4 x 152.4mm) of space at most when fully-tilted.

It’s worth pointing out that the speakers do not sit perfectly perpendicular to your desk when they’re standing “straight” — they start out with an upward tilt of approximately 5 degrees, and can be manually tilted back an additional 15 degrees or so. The resulting 20-degree speaker tilt is about the same as the (non-adjustable) tilt of the Razer Nommo V2 Pro.

The system’s inputs, ports, and controls are all located on the right speaker. The base of the right speaker stand has a multi-function button and a volume knob. Pressing the multi-function button once switches between audio input — specifically, between the speaker’s audio and a headset plugged into the speaker’s rear headset port. Long-pressing the multi-function button puts the system in Bluetooth pairing mode.

There’s a bright indicator LED under the SteelSeries logo on the right speaker. The LED blinks blue when the system is in pairing mode, and turns solid blue when successfully paired to a device. The LED is solid green when you’re connected to a wired audio source (AUX or PC), and is solid orange when you plug a headset in. You can turn the indicator LED off completely by double-pressing the multi-function button.

On the back of the right speaker there’s a DC-in for power and three 3.5mm analog input ports: headset, auxiliary, and PC. You’ll want to use the PC port to connect the speakers to your PC, auxiliary to connect to other devices, and the headset port for plugging in a headset. Also on the back of the right channel is a hardwired 6.5-foot (2m) speaker cable that plugs into the left channel. This is way more cable than anyone needs between the right and left channels, but it’s nice to see that SteelSeries erred on the longer, rather than shorter, side.

In the box, the Arena 3 is packaged with a 6.5-foot (2m) speaker cable for connecting to your PC (or other device), as well as a 7-foot (2.13m) power cable with a 30W power adapter. The power adapter features an interchangeable plug — you can order the Arena 3 with the regional plug type of your choice: U.S., U.K., EU, Korean, Australian, or Chinese.

Audio Performance of the Arena 3

The Arena 3 is a 2.0 (stereo) system with a left channel and a right channel, each of which sports a 4-inch full-range driver and a front ported bass reflex system. The speakers have a frequency response of 50 Hz - 20,000 Hz with 91dB sensitivity and an impressive max SPL of 100dB.

The Arena 3 will easily fill a medium-sized room if you crank up the volume — and it sounds pretty good so long as you’re not expecting a desk-shaking bass response. When connected via the 3.5mm PC input, the Arena 3 managed to hit a maximum of 83.3dBA (A-weighted decibels) at 50% volume, measured via handheld sound level meter at 3.3 feet (1m), and a maximum of 94.1dBA at 100% volume. Volume was slightly lower over Bluetooth, with the Arena 3 hitting a maximum of 82.6dbA at 50%, and a maximum of 92.1dbA at 100%. 

We use K-391’s Lonely World, which is a very midrange-heavy track, for our volume test. This was a good thing for the Arena 3, because the system has very strong mids — which are boosted all around, but are especially robust on the lower end to compensate for the lack of bass. This doesn’t really work: while the lower mids are pretty full-bodied, actual lows are noticeably absent. The bass drum at the beginning of Lorde’s Royals, for example, truncates prematurely where it would normally roll off, and the first minute of Hans Zimmer’s Time is barely present. 

The Arena 3 has no subwoofer, nor does it have a port for plugging in a third-party subwoofer. Instead, the system relies on two small front ports — one above each driver — for enhanced bass response. While the front port location is handy because it means you can place the speakers next to a wall (face it — most desks are probably next to a wall), I think the ports are just too small and too close to the drivers to do much in the way of bass enhancement. It seems like SteelSeries probably should have gone with a larger rear port — especially as the Arena 3 has no RGB lighting (both the Arena 7 and the Arena 9 have rear-projection RGB lighting on the front left/right channels).

The Arena 3 doesn’t just lack a low end — its highs are also a little restrained. The lack of detail is most apparent in tracks that slide in and out of the high range, such as Gesaffelstein’s Hellifornia and David Guetta’s Titanium, but I didn’t mind it too much — there wasn’t too much detail lost, and I definitely prefer restrained highs to painfully bright. 

While the Arena 3’s aggressive midrange isn’t ideal for music listening, it’s actually pretty good for gaming (as well as other types of media, such as movies and TV shows). Voices sound especially good with the speakers’ boosted mids — warm, crisp, and clear, even at lower volumes. Auditory cues in games, such as footsteps and gunshots, were also very clear. Ambient environmental noises, such as chirping birds and dripping water, were also present — there was still plenty of audible detail in God of War: Ragnarok and Subnautica: Below Zero.

Features and Software of the Arena 3

The Arena 3 only connects via analog (or Bluetooth), and therefore doesn’t really have any direct software, but it does work with SteelSeries’ Sonar app, which is part of the SteelSeries GG software. Of course, all speakers and headsets (not just SteelSeries’) technically work with the Sonar app, so this isn’t an Arena 3- (or even an Arena-) specific feature. The Sonar app features a 10-band parametric EQ as well as SteelSeries’ virtual surround sound, but of course there’s only so much “surround” you can really get from a 2.0 system.  

Bottom Line

The SteelSeries Arena 3 speakers aren’t bad — they produce nicely balanced, albeit midrange-heavy, audio out of the box, and there’s no question they can fill a room with music. These speakers get impressively loud, and they sound just as good at full volume as they do at more reasonable levels.

But pure volume aside, the Arena 3 lacks detail and power in both the low and high ends, and only offers analog connectivity in addition to Bluetooth. For $130 you can pick up the Creative T100s, which sound great and feature analog, optical, and Bluetooth connectivity, and still have $40 to spend on the extra portable Creative Pebble V3s.

It’s no secret that cosplayers have been known to use our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, to take their handcrafted creations to the next level. We’ve seen everything from Pi-powered Game Boy cosplays to Raspberry Pi Galactus masks, but this is the first Pi-powered Stray cosplay. Maker and developer Dawn DuPriest uses a Raspberry Pi to animate faces for her Stray Companion cosplay and even play music on demand.

The character she’s cosplaying is known as Morusque. This character is known for playing music when you bring him sheet music. To bring her cosplay to life, convention attendees can hand her sheet music that the Pi can recognize with an RFID reader. It then plays music on a speaker built into the guitar prop that houses the rest of the electronics.

The companions in Stray are humanoid robots with screens for faces that play animations for facial expressions. For her cosplay, she wears a wireless screen that interacts with the Pi to change the faces as needed. There are buttons connected to the Pi that DuPriest can select that trigger various face animations.

The screen used for the face is an iPad Mini which can communicate wirelessly with the Pi—perfect for a cosplay that requires so much movement. Driving the operation is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ connected to an RFID reader and a series of buttons. These extra components are connected to the GPIO on the Pi using a Sparkfun Pi Wedge.

The iPad Mini is running a couple of apps enabling it to remotely access the Pi, including Pi Helper and VNC Viewer. This makes it possible to show the Pi’s desktop on the go without any cables. She also explained that the sprite sheets used to generate the face animations were created using an online app called Piskel.

Overall, this is an extremely clever cosplay. If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, check out the full project breakdown at Hackster and follow DuPriest for more cool creations.

The Raspberry Pi is a great go-to tool for all sorts of enthusiasts. Whether you’re into retro gaming or just take network security very seriously, you don’t have to look hard to find a tool to take your hobby to the next level. Today we’ve got an awesome music player to share that was put together by a maker known as Damaniel2. Instead of pulling music from a streaming service like Spotify, this setup is designed to play music over Wi-Fi sourced from an NAS device.

At the moment, it’s streaming the content using a wireless connection which makes it possible to move from room to room. However, Damaniel2 has plans to adjust the setup to a wired connection for better performance.  Despite the wireless connection, Damaniel2 assures that the setup has been working just as intended.

The hardware is housed inside of a 3D-printed shell that Damaniel2 created from scratch just for the project using OpenSCAD. According to Damaniel2, this was their first time creating something in 3D to print and the design needs some more adjustments and a future iteration with a little extra height is necessary.

Inside you’ll find a Raspberry Pi 3B+ but you could get away with using another Pi like a Pi 4 or maybe even a Pi Zero. A HiFiBerry DAC 2 Pro was included to process the audio output while a 5-inch DSI touchscreen interface is used for user input. The HiFiBerry HAT provides audio ports on the back for connecting audio peripherals.

As far as software goes, it’s running Volumio OS. This is an application designed for those who want to stream their own media locally. There are two versions available—free and paid. The free version offers plenty of features to do what this project is capable of but the paid version has extra functions that might be worth paying for if you’re really into streaming music.

If you want to learn more about this Raspberry Pi project, check out the original thread shared to Reddit by Damaniel2 and consider following him for future updates or more cool creations.

A new headphone concept by Olga Orel adds a whole new dimension to these popular (some would say essential) audio accessories. Dubbed the Futureahead headphones, this Behance-hosted "Future Nostalgia" product design mixes influences from retro-technology sources with the modern urge to integrate display panels into everything. The result is a set of cans that wouldn't look out of place in Cyberpunk 2077.

In the mix of product images shared by Orel, you can see a display covers almost the full extent of the ear cup exterior. The boxy shape of the ear cups would help any future manufacturer source an off-the-shelf display for this product.

Having displays hosted on your ears is of questionable merit, and we are therefore thankful that Orel seems to have thought about this question. According to the Futureahead headphone designer, the display will be useful for:

• Sharing your musical experience though album art
• Showing playlist, track information, or lyrics
• Showing music visualizations
• Showing user-configured videos or images
• Showing your feelings
• Device status display (volume, charging, battery, etc)

If you ever take public transportation, you will probably be aware that some people are keen to share the music they are listening to. The Futureahead headphone concept takes this type of conspicuous music consumption to another level with any kind of visuals you can imagine. However, building such a battery-sapping component into headphones for the dubious benefit of others will obviously mean you'll have to charge your square cans more often, unless you use them in wired mode, in which case they'll be sucking the juice from your phone or media player.

Orel shares some more technical specs for the Futureahead design. The headset will work in wired (USB-C) and Bluetooth wireless modes, it is envisioned. We also see that the ear cushions will be magnetically attached, allowing for easy replacements due to preferences or servicing. Some intuitive physical controls are included in the design, like a volume wheel, and a button to toggle the display on and off (that one is sure to be handy for when there's no one around to gawk at you). Outside of these physical controls, users will be expected to do much of the Futureahead headphone configuration via an app -- particularly for choosing and tweaking what is shown on the ear cup display.

Some readers may question the appeal of headphones with an ear cup display, especially those who think form should strictly follow function, and who appreciate minimal design. Even people who love PC frills like extraneous RGB lighting and integrated component displays might still question the worth of a display situated on one's ear. Meanwhile, those who are currently screaming 'take my money' for this product, will have to wait and see if a launch date / pricing emerges for this daringly different headset design.

For readers in the market for a more traditional set of headphones or headset, please check out our frequently updated Best PC Gaming Headsets 2023: Budget, Wired, and Wireless feature. Also, don't forget to invest in some essential audiophile computer equipment for the ultimate listening experience.

You can learn a lot about tinkering with microelectronics, but now, thanks to Adrian Cruceru’s latest Raspberry Pi project, you can use microelectronics to learn how to play the piano. A Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller drives his RP2040 Piano helper project and can be programmed to help students learn any song they like. Just follow the LEDs and press the corresponding key to play new songs on the fly.

The Pico controls a series of LEDs that line up with the keys on a keyboard (or piano). The LEDs illuminate on specific keys so the player knows which key to press next in the song. When not in use, it can also demonstrate a nice gradient effect. The Pico charts out songs by interpreting MIDI files to determine the note and length of time the note is played for.

To learn a new song, all you have to do is find a MIDI file for the song you want and run it through his converter. Songs can be selected from a browser window. You can have the song programmed to light up the keys at predetermined intervals or use the appropriate timestamps from the original song. This versatility makes it possible to gradually learn songs at your own pace.

To create the project, Cruceru uses a Raspberry Pi Pico module that's connected to a WS2812B LED strip. This strip is then adjusted into place above the respective keys on his keyboard. Each LED corresponds with a certain note (or key) so that the MIDI file will always cause the right note to be illuminated.

The code for this project was created from scratch by Cruceru using Micropython. Cruceru was also kind enough to make the project open source. If you want to get a closer look at the code and see how it works from the inside, check out the official RP2040 piano helper project page over at GitHub.

This is one clever Raspberry Pi project you should really see in action. To check out a video demonstration of the RP2040 piano helper, visit the original thread shared on Reddit or watch the video on YouTube. Also, be sure to follow him for more cool projects and any future updates on this one.

We almost don’t have words for this Raspberry Pi project as we’ve never quite seen anything like it. Nonetheless, here we are, and we’re beyond excited to share this creation from a maker known as JupyterJeff on Reddit (or HighQualityFun over at YouTube). Using our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, he’s created a musical robot that can be pushed around using a stroller.

It’s hard to avoid attention with a creation like this in tow. JupyterJeff explains that it was intended mainly to take to festivals, parades, and maker fairs where people anticipate this sort of creation. That said, it would certainly turn heads if let loose down a popular alley or street corner. The Pi controls a series of percussion instruments and runs a synth to back up the beat with some sweet melodies.

Songs must be preprogrammed to perform so he can build up a selection of tunes to rotate through. So, in addition to the song you hear in the demo video, you can also find it replicating Michael Jackon’s Thriller recently at Maker Faire.

Most of the mechanical pieces were fabricated using laser-cut plywood. The drumsticks are designed to pivot on bolts. The laser-cut components are operated via servo motors, and some springs give the sticks enough force to make a strong sound when hitting the drums. A Raspberry Pi 4 is used alongside a Pi DAC+ to improve the audio quality.

The Pi operates the music using MIDI/Karaoke files with the assistance of Rosegarden DAW. A custom Python script reads the MIDI file as it plays and sends instructions to a Polulu server to trigger the drum motors to hit the right beat.

Overall, this is one groovy Raspberry Pi project, and we’re just jealous that we haven’t had the opportunity to check it out in person. If you want to get a closer look at this impressive Raspberry Pi musical robot, visit the original project thread shared on Reddit and watch the demo videos to hear it in action.

Usually, when I see a laptop with discrete graphics, it has a bit of extra heft. That's not the case for the Lenovo Slim Pro 7 (tested at $1,199.99), which is thin and fairly light with its AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050.

The catch, perhaps, is that these parts aren't the fanciest, like what you typically find in some of the best ultrabooks. This Ryzen 7000-series CPU uses Zen 3+ cores, which aren't AMD's latest, and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is an entry-level GPU from a generation ago. For simple tasks, performance holds up. For more intense, multi-core work, this may not be for you.

Lenovo has a wealth of ports, with both USB Type-C and Type-A on the sides of the device. The keyboard is bouncy and comfortable. But other parts, like the touchpad, feel a bit cheap.

If you need a discrete GPU in a slim form factor, just for a slight boost in graphics power, the Slim Pro 7 is worth considering. Otherwise, it's serviceable, though not necessarily exciting.

Design of the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 isn't making any statements. It's a dark gray aluminum rectangle with rounded corners, and Lenovo's name in teeny print on the lid. It's so plain, in fact, that it would be the perfect movie prop for a production company that couldn't get a licensing deal.

With the lid open, the 14.5-inch screen is surrounded by narrow bezels and a small bump on top to fit the cameras. The chiclet keys look a bit like those on a ThinkPad, but there's no pointing stick here (which is fine with me). 

Lenovo has fit the basic ports you need along the Slim Pro 7's sides. The left side has an HDMI port and two USB Type-C ports. One is USB 3.2 Gen 2, while the other is USB 4 with faster 40 Gbps speeds. They're not labeled, but the bottom one, furthest from the HDMI port, is the faster version of USB-C.

The right side has a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port for legacy peripherals, as well as a headphone jack. That's also where you'll find the power button and an e-shutter to disable the camera.

The Slim Pro 7 measures 12.81 x 8.92 x 0.61 inches thick, making it ever-so-slightly thicker than Lenovo's Yoga 9i Gen 8 (12.52 xs 9.06 x 0.6 inches. The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra is 14 x 9.86 x 0.64 inches, while the HP Dragonfly Pro is 12.39 x 8.78 x 0.72 inches.

In a similar fashion, the Slim Pro 7 is the second lightest of the group at 3.6 pounds, while the Yoga 9i is 3.09 pounds. The Galaxy Book 3 is 3.96 pounds, and the HP Dragonfly Pro is 3.53 pounds. 

Lenovo Slim Pro 7 Specifications

Productivity Performance

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 has the distinction of being the first laptop with a Ryzen 7000 HS series processor to hit our labs. This processor, the AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS, uses eight Zen 3+ cores on a 6-nanometer process with a boost clock of up to 4.75 GHz. Lenovo has paired it here with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, a 512GB SSD and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, which is an entry-level GPU that's a generation old.

On Geekbench 5, the Slim Pro 7 achieved a single-core score of 1,527 and a multi-core score of 9,031. That's the second lowest single-core score of the group, which also included the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra (Core i7-13700H) and Lenovo Yoga 9i (Core i7-1360P); the HP Dragonfly Pro, with a Ryzen 7 7736U, was slightly behind. This chip was the weakest of the group on multi-core.

The Slim Pro 7 copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,594.91 MBps, handily beating the Dragonfly Pro. Lenovo's own Yoga 9i was a bit faster, while the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra was the fastest here.

The Ryzen chip took 6 minutes and 36 seconds to transcode a 4K file to 1080p, beating both the MacBook Air and Yoga 9i. But the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, with an Intel H -series chip, took even less time, at 5:26.

On our Cinebench R23 stress test, in which we loop the benchmark 20 times, AMD's new chip started at a score of 12,291.669 and went up from there, spending most of its time in the high 12,900's, and occasionally breaking the 13,000 point barrier (the average score was 12,943.58).The Ryzen 7 7735HS averaged 3.88 GHz and a temperature of 88.1 degrees Celsius (190.58 degrees Fahrenheit).

Lenovo opted for a last-gen RTX 3050 on the Slim Pro 7. On 3DMark Time Spy, it achieved a score of 4,523. That's still better than the integrated graphics from Intel (1,916) and AMD (2,888) in the Yoga 9i and Dragonfly Pro, respectively. But the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, with an RTX 4050, had the highest score at 6,208. Granted, the 3050 Lenovo is using here is pretty tame, with a 63 W max graphics power and 990 MHz boost clock. That's far less power than the 4050 on the Galaxy Book is using, but it lets Lenovo fit it in a thin PC.

Display on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

The 14.5-inch, 2560 x 1600 touchscreen display on the Slim Pro 7 is fine, but it's not amazing. It covers 118% of the sRGB color gamut and 83.7% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, but at 325 nits on our light meter, it's not as bright as the competition.

With the screen brightness all the way up, I didn't have any issues. I watched the 1440p trailer for Blue Beetle, the heroes' blue suit and similarly-hued special effects popped on screen, as did green palm trees in scenery throughout the trailer. A red-hued scene in which the character fights some bad guys didn't look as intense as on some other screens I've seen.

The screen comes close to the measurements from the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra and HP Dragonfly Pro when it comes to colors, but it wasn't as bright as those devices. The screen on the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 is an OLED screen, and it proved more colorful than the rest, though Apple's panel was the brightest.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

Lenovo's island-style keyboard looks and feels familiar. A sticker next to the touchpad promises 1.5 mm of travel, and I believe it. The keys have a bit of a bounce, and I never once felt myself bottoming out. I hit 120 words per minute on the monkeytype test with 97% accuracy. I could quibble that Lenovo's function keys, like a dedicated calculator or clipboard button, aren't as useful as media keys, but to each their own, I guess.

The touchpad is nice and wide, but it feels cheap. I had no issues with navigation or multi-touch gestures, but clicking is loud and sounds unpleasant. It makes the whole laptop feel less premium.

Audio on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

The sound from the Lenovo Slim Pro 7's four top-firing speakers is adequate. If you, like me, occasionally like to listen to music without headphones to give your ears a rest, it'll do, though you may want to turn the volume up.

On the one hand, while listening to Linkin Park's "Fighting Myself," I had to boost the volume to 100% to fill the room. (On the bright side, there was barely any distortion). The rap and rock verses were equally vocal forward, with crisp, clear words. Those who prefer instrumentals may want to check out the Dolby Access app. Switching to the Dynamic preset, which changes based on what's playing, brought out more thundering drums and guitar.

Upgradeability of the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

To open the Slim Pro 7, you'll need a Torx screwdriver (the official maintenance manual suggests a T5 head) to remove the six screws from the bottom of the laptop. There are two in the back that are longer than the four in the front, so be sure to keep yourself organized.

From there, you'll need to pry up the latches, first from the front, then the sides, and lift off the case. With a good pry tool, it's pretty simple. You'll see that the battery, Wi-Fi card and M.2 SSD are replaceable, but the RAM is unfortunately soldered down.

Depending on your market and model (Lenovo sells a similar laptop, the Slim Pro 7i, using Intel chips), you may have a full-length M.2 2280 SSD (like our review unit) or a shorter M.2 2242 with a bracket to hold it in place. Either way, you can remote it and replace it. The SSDs are covered in some mylar for heat protection.

Battery Life on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

As far as systems with discrete GPUs go, the Lenovo Slim Pro 7 lasts a decent amount of time. The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 lasted 9 hours and 16 minutes on our battery test, which browses the web, streams videos and runs OpenGL graphics benchmarks while connected to Wi-Fi with the screen set to 150 nits.

That's longer than the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, which also has a discrete GPU, at 9:03. The Lenovo Yoga 9i (10:38) and HP Dragonfly Pro (13:23), with integrated graphics, lasted longer.

Heat on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

While I ran our Cinebench R23 stress test, I took skin temperatures to get an idea how the Slim 8 Pro feels to the touch under heavy load. The fans spin, but the system can still get slightly toasty.

At the center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, the Slim Pro 7 measured 43.1 degrees Celsius (109.58 degrees Fahrenheit).

On the bottom of the laptop, the hottest point reached 51.1 C (123.98 F).

Webcam on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

The Slim Pro 7 has a 1080p webcam paired with an IR sensor. I'm happy to see 1080p cameras proliferating through the market. They're not always better, but extra resolution rarely hurts. The IR sensor allows you to log in to the laptop using Windows Hello facial recognition.

While video from the camera looked decent enough, stills taken from the camera were a bit blurry, focusing more on the background than my face. A nearby window was totally blown out (that's a challenging condition), and some of the colors were a bit warmer than in real life.

On the right side of the laptop, there's an "e-shutter" switch. This switch is effectively a high-tech way of covering up the webcam. It's not actually cutting power to the camera, but when you open software that uses it, it will act as if the lens is blocked. I personally prefer the built in sliders that cover the camera, as it's easier to see with a glance if the camera is covered or not (and psychologically, it just feels more protected).

Software and Warranty on the Lenovo Slim Pro 7

It used to be that Lenovo laptops came largely with its Vantage hub application and little else. Those days are gone.

Sure, Vantage still exists and it shows information about your hardware, serial number and lets you drill into a bunch of power and camera settings. It also now has articles built in. At one point while writing this review, there was a story about artificial intelligence and medicine which had no byline. Weird. Another provided "tips to keep kids safe in the digital age."

There are three other Lenovo branded apps on board. Lenovo Hotkeys, which exists solely to remind you of keyboard shortcuts to adjust system performance and the refresh rate (these are also included in the box), but doesn't let you set your own. One combination, the Smart Key, lets you pick software to launch. Lenovo Voice is used for voice commands and translation. It's a clunky app, and some of it requires payment to work, though that is hidden deep in the settings. Lenovo Welcome is meant for setup, but most of what you actually need from it can be found in Vantage.

Additionally, there's a trial of McAfee LiveSafe. McAfee has also made its way into the Edge bookmark bar, as has Lenovo and Lenovo support.

Like most Windows 11 machines, there are also links in the Start menu to the Microsoft store, including apps like Spotify, TikTok, WhatsApp, Amazon Prime Video, ESPN and Facebook Messenger.

Lenovo sells the Slim Pro 7 with a 1-year warranty.

Bottom Line

The Lenovo Slim Pro 7 is a thin laptop with a discrete GPU and a CPU fast enough for any single-core workload you want to throw at it. None of it is the latest and greatest tech, but it works, especially if you prioritize a slender design but still want a bit of oomph in the graphics department.

Look, if you want faster, more powerful graphics and performance, it exists in devices like the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra. But we tested that laptop at $2,399.99 — more than $1,000 over the Slim Pro 7 we checked out. So the Slim Pro 7 is also for customers seeking a discrete graphics card on a budget.

In some cases, it's premium, with a 2560 x 1600 display. But in other places, like the touchpad, it feels cheap.

Long story short, if you prefer a discrete GPU and are on a budget, this may do the job for you. But if you don't, consider competing ultraportables, like the Lenovo Yoga 9i,  for a bit of extra luxury.

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iFi-Audio has released the LAN iSilencer, an audiophile accessory which aims to “quiet your network.” According to the Ethernet dongle designers in Japan, this product removes digital signal interference, and thus protects your audio signals from noise. It recommends the thumbdrive-sized device be connected to your router, switch, or wall RJ45 socket to achieve audio bliss.

There is some background information about the problem of ‘noisy’ network audio and an explanation of how the iFi-Audio LAN iSilencer works shared on the product page. The key design features that are claimed to be of benefit to your digital audio’s 0s and 1s are “a zero jitter memory buffer and galvanically isolated inputs.”

The presence of buffers would suggest some built-in delay to your network signals, which doesn’t sound ideal for a number of PC use-cases. Meanwhile, the concept of galvanic isolation is used in mainstream electronic circuit design, but we can’t find any purported audio benefits for the technology. On the topic of galvanic isolation, iFi-Audio says that audio signals passing through won’t suffer due to the interference of ground potential differences and AC power transients. No before / after audio charts or similar details are shared to back up audio quality  / reduced noise claims.

iFi-Audio shares some tech specs for the LAN iSilencer, which is listed for sale in Japan for the equivalent of $109 including consumption tax (10%). The device supports 1000BASE-T /100BASE-T /10BASE-T transmission speeds, has a shielded case, weighs 17 grams, and measures 73.5 x 19 x 16mm. In the examples showing this dongle plugged into various devices, it looks like it would be prone to accidental damage, as it's a rigid device that sticks out nearly three inches from your Ethernet jack.

What we can say for sure, is that iFi-Audio’s claims seem to be significantly less wild than other recent audiophile computing gear we have reported upon. For example, the $1,250 AudioQuest Diamond RJ/E Ethernet cable mixed “Solid Perfect-Surface Silver Conductors” and carbon-loaded synthetics to shield and protect your wiring from RFI. Even more outlandish are the claims about  the $500 SATA SSD cable with Superstar Crystals, which would apparently work its magic even if you didn’t plug it into an SSD. In recent months we have also reported on an audiophile SSD, and the similarly targeted Ethernet Switch UEF.

Given the above products, the iFi-Audio LAN iSilencer is at least relatively cheap for the audiophile useless accessory market. Priced at around $100 before tax in Japan, it seems to be a bargain if you believe the spiel. If you don’t, you can save your $100 and spend it on better quality headphones, speakers, or other audio gear.

Dodepan is a hexagon shaped lo-fi musical instrument from TuriSc which is powered by our favorite microcontroller, the  Raspberry Pi Pico. Using twelve inputs and one sensor, this unassuming instrument creates lo-fi beats to chill to and becomes a MIDI instrument.

The project, Dodepan uses 12 capacitive touch pads, connected to an MPR121 capacitive touch module, as inputs, and TuriSc states that "the lowest note it can produce is C2 (Midi number 36), the highest D8 (Midi number 110), so its chromatic range is 75 notes." The key can be changed using a knob, along with one of 16 scales on another knob. There can be up to six concurrent voices (polyphonic) at once and each of the inputs are assigned a note based on the current scale and key.  What does that mean? Well in short, it can make music from a range of beeps and tones. 

Music is all about expression, which is why sometimes performers will use movement to alter the note in play — think guitarists shaking the neck of the guitar to give it a warbling sound. With Dodepan, TuriSc has included an MPU-6050 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to convert the convert the intensity of tapping the unit into velocity data. This data is then used to change the volume of the notes. The IMU also provides accelerometer data which is used to perform pitch bending. An onboard Li-ion battery is fed power via a TP4056 (a linear charger for single cell lithium ion), a part commonly found for pennies on Aliexpress.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is Dodepan's core. It takes all of the data (inputs, knobs, IMU) and displays the data via LEDs and uses Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to generate the sound. This is then fed to an analog circuit for further processing before reaching a PAM8403 amplifier and speaker. If you want to jam will on the commute, plug in some headphones and make your music to go.

Dodepan is not just a one-trick pony. It can also be used as a MIDI input, sending data to compatible applications using the standard MIDI format. The code which holds this project together is written in C.

You can build your own version of this awesome project as TuriSc has documented the build, Bill of Materials (BoM) and the code on their GitHub repository.

AudioQuest has produced an Ethernet cable which is destined to be a lure for the audiophile. The AudioQuest Diamond RJ/E Ethernet cable promises "superior digital audio." On the product page blurb, the company claims that this cable uses the highest quality materials, as well as techno-babble enhancements like “critical signal-pair geometry, Dielectric Bias-System, [and] Noise-Dissipation System.” Apparently, these technologies stop your ones and zeros from being damaged.  Oh, and it is priced from $1,295.

With its lofty price tag and product name containing ‘diamond’, it is somewhat deflating to study the specifications and see there are no actual diamonds within the product.  The aforementioned Noise-Dissipation System (DNS) is said to be carbon-based, though. AudioQuest explains that the Ethernet cable uses metal and carbon-loaded synthetics to shield and protect your wiring from RFI.

While diamonds were obviously beyond budget, AudioQuest uses “Solid Perfect-Surface Silver Conductors” for utmost clarity and dynamic contrast. In its elaborated claims, it says that these PSS conductors will “completely eliminate strand interaction,” with the effect of minimizing distortion. Audiophiles listen up, the silver connectors are also useful for outputting “clearer, more dynamic and involving sound,” too.

AudioQuest’s Dielectric Bias System (DBS) is also worth closer inspection for signs of cod science. This battery powered feature is claimed to prevent signal slowdown, which would be "a real problem for very time-sensitive multi-octave audio," passing through your Ethernet cable. Just in case your ears don’t alert you the very moment the DBS battery goes flat, AudioQuest has installed a test button and LED for battery checking purposes.

Last but not least, it is great to see that AudioQuest has directional arrows on its cables, to help with proper installation orientation. “For best results have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music,” from router to network player, says the cable maker.

The AudioQuest RJ/E Diamond Ethernet cable is priced at $1,295 for a 0.75 meter length, or $1,995 for a 1.5 meter length. Shipping is free from the source linked, and buyers are offered a 60-day satisfaction guarantee.

While that's a ton of money for an Ethernet cable, there are people out there who will stop at nothing to achieve their dream audiophile PC build, even if that means dropping a lot of money on rather short Ethernet cables. Perhaps it will be used alongside products like the $500 Audiophile SATA SSD cable we highlighted last week, the Audiophile SSD, or the Audiophile Ethernet Switch.

A SATA 3.0 cable, the likes of which we have never seen before, has been listed on eBay for the princely sum of $500. For your money, the listing claims you will receive the “best computer Hi-Fi cable ever built.” We have seen some highly dubious audiophile / computer hardware crossovers previously, so thought this Audiophile Rocks Superstar Crystal Formula SATA SSD cable was worthy of a closer look.

In the pursuit of the ultimate audio clarity audiophiles will pay big bucks. There are many real audiophile grade products on the market. We can't be certain that this is true audiophile product, so take the product with a pinch of salt and remember "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) applies here. But what can we see from the listing?

Looking at this basic component connectivity accessory - without its fancy metal, wood and quartz augmentations – it is a pretty standard 50cm (about 20-inch) SATA 3.0 cable. This would typically cost under $5, so the Superstar Crystal Formula modified cable, at $500, is easily 100x more expensive for its touted audio benefits. However, if there were real audible/audio benefits, the price premium may be acceptable to some…

How has the Audiophile Rocks brand augmented this SATA cable? The first thing you will probably notice is that the cable has been fed through what appears to be a steel braided flexible toilet connector. A reasonable theory might be that this is ‘shielding’, but the obvious problem is that the SATA cable is 50cm (20-inch) and the metal hose is approximately 30cm (12-inch) long.

Inside the woven toilet connector cable there are some further ingredients which are described as “our classic Superstar Crystal Formula,” and are apparently optimized for computer components. Audiophile Rocks doesn’t stop its Hi-Fi optimizations there though, as the ends of the woven metal sheath for the SATA cable has added wooden stoppers with black quartz crystals sprinkles “for extra strength.” We aren’t sure if the maker is referring to the ‘strength’ of the audio signal optimization or the strength of the physical construction.

Enjoy “Double the Effect,” if You Plug the SATA Cable Into a Drive

Last but not least, the listing suggests that this special SATA cable works its audiophile optimization magic by simply being plugged into the motherboard. It doesn’t need to be plugged into a SATA SSD/HDD on the other end to optimize your system, however if you do so you will benefit from “double the effect.” We wouldn't feel comfortable with a flexible steel tube flapping around the inside of a live PC, so maybe connect it up and enjoy the enhanced effect?

Without a review sample, we can’t completely dismiss all of the product listing claims regarding this cable’s Hi-Fi qualities. However, the maker has missed some obvious optimizations, as the design omits any reference to using precious metals or oxygen-free conductors.

If you like this audiophile Superstar Crystal Formula SATA SSD cable, you might also find the audiophile SSD, and the similarly targeted Ethernet Switch UEF appealing. Please be warned that all these products include a substantial audiophile tax.

Someone once said that "bigger is better." That person would probably be very pleased by the renaissance of the 18-inch gaming laptop. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ($3,899.99 as tested) is one of several titanic laptops slated to arrive this year, and the to land in our testing lab.

With room for an Intel Core i9-13980HX and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, the Strix Scar 18 promises top-of-the-line performance. And with a design that's absolutely smothered in RGB lights, there's no question that this is a laptop designed for gaming. (Perhaps, for some people, it will be one of the best gaming laptops.)

The Strix Scar 18 is absolutely aiming to replace your desktop. It's powerful, has a nice big display and solid speakers, and it won't last long without the power adapter. Is it enough power to please gaming enthusiasts? We'll have to see how it performs in our testing, but at least you could carry this rig from room to room.

Design of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

The Asus Strix Scar 18 earns the very specific honor of being the first laptop in my career that I couldn't fit in my backpack. It epitomizes the term desktop replacement for 2023, though it will be far from alone on that front.

To be fair, the Strix Scar 18 is 6.83 pounds and measures 15.71 x 11.57 x 1.21 inches. You can tell by looking at this behemoth that it's not meant to be regularly carried much further than to the next room.

There's no massive design overhaul from previous Scars here. The lid is a dark gray with the ROG logo, sporting an angry RGB eye that is, frankly, ugly. That eye pattern is repeated in a stripe diagonally across the lid. But you really get the sense of scale when you lift the lid, showing the 18-inch screen in its full glory. The bottom bezel is a bit chunky, and the casing for the webcam juts out, but that all adds to how imposing it is.

To be clear, while the 18-inch display is shocking at first, the truth is that it's not that different from the 17-inch panels on the market. These 18-inch displays change the aspect ratio from 16:9 to 16:10, meaning that they're slightly taller, but they aren't any wider than 17-inchers.

On the keyboard deck, Asus used soft-touch plastic that slowly changes from solid black to a very smoky translucent as it gets closer to the hinge, showing some of the internals. Honestly, the company should go full '90s and make the laptop shell fully translucent or clear.

There's no massive design overhaul from previous Scars here. The lid is a dark gray with the ROG logo, sporting an angry RGB eye that is, frankly, ugly. That eye pattern is repeated in a stripe diagonally across the lid. But you really get the sense of scale when you lift the lid, showing the 18-inch screen in its full glory. The bottom bezel is a bit chunky, and the casing for the webcam juts out, but that all adds to how imposing it is.

To be clear, while the 18-inch display is shocking at first, the truth is that it's not that different from the 17-inch panels on the market. These 18-inch displays change the aspect ratio from 16:9 to 16:10, meaning that they're slightly taller, but they aren't any wider than 17-inchers.

On the keyboard deck, Asus used soft-touch plastic that slowly changes from solid black to a very smoky translucent as it gets closer to the hinge, showing some of the internals. Honestly, the company should go full '90s and make the laptop shell fully translucent or clear.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

The Strix Scar 18 is among the first laptops we're seeing with both the Intel Core i9-13980HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. (It's also among the first laptops we're sewing with any sort of -90 series Nvidia GPU at all, which is new for this generation of mobile GPUs.)

I wanted to see how well these components could push Control, which to this day is still my favorite example of ray tracing done right. I turned the settings as high as they went at the laptop's 2560 x 1600 native resolution. The game ran reliably over 60 frames per second, typically running between 60 and 68 fps, with a few small boosts up to the low 70's as I snuck through the Oldest House's communication departments and dodged flying objects being lobbed across the room by an object of power. In the Astral Plane, where the background is an empty white, it reliably ran over 100 fps. Dropping down to 1920 x 1200, the game ran around 100 fps, give or take a few frames, even in firefights with the hiss.

We wish we still had last year’s Strix on hand to test its 3080 Ti and Core i9-12950X with current drivers to see if it is indeed faster than the 4090 systems we’re testing here on Far Cry 6. But it seems likely that the CPU is at least somewhat bottlenecking GPU performance here at lower resolutions. We saw similar issues when testing the more powerful desktop RTX 4090 with Far Cry.

It’s easy to point the blame at Intel for potentially limiting the performance of Nvidia’s top-end mobile GPU. But keep in mind we are seeing this issue on one game. And we wouldn’t expect AMD’s best CPU to do significantly better, given what we know from testing its desktop chips. If anything, this result makes it clear that the mobile  RTX 4090 is best suited to a higher-resolution 4K screen (which the MSI Titan has but this Strix Scar lacks).
 
Red Dead Redemption is still a punishing game. On medium settings, the Strix Scar 18 ran the game at 123 fps at 1080p and 86 fps at 1600p. MSI's newest Titan hit 128 fps at 1080p, and was playable at its native 4K at 48 fps.

On the Borderlands 3 "badass" setting, the Strix 18 averaged 165 fps at 1080p and 112 fps at 2560 x 1600. The new MSI Titan hit 177 fps at 1080p and played at 71 fps on its 4K screen.

To stress-test the Scar, we ran Metro Exodus on its RTX preset at 1080p for 15 runs, which takes about half an hour. The system ran the game at an average of 102.97 fps, which was largely consistent after a faster first run. The Core i9-13900HX's performance cores ran at an average of 3.84 GHz, while the efficiency cores measured 3.37 GHz . The CPU package measured an average 81.2 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the RTX 4090 ran at 2,121.62 MHz and measured 70.34 C.

Our benchmarks test results were impressive. On Shadow of the Tomb Raider (highest settings), the Strix Scar 18 ran the game at 181 fps at 1080p and 124 fps at its native 2560 x 1600. The new MSI GT77 HX Titan, with the same GPU and a Core i9-13950HX, was a single frame behind at 1080p and ran the benchmark at 70 fps on that laptop's 4K screen.

On Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings), the Strix Scar ran the benchmark at 152 fps at 1080p and 132 fps at 2560 x 1600. The Titan ran the game at 176 fps at 1080p and 50 fps at 4K.

The performance on Far Cry 6 (ultra settings) was a bit confusing, with the Strix playing at 107 fps at FHD and 94 fps at 1600p. That FHD number is less than a top-end Strix we tested last year. It’s not entirely clear if there are driver issues, a CPU bottleneck, or component compatibility problems with the game. But the MSI Titan GT77 HX with an RTX 4090 and 13th Gen Intel Core i9 HX hit 102 fps at 1080p, which isn't too far off, and 71 fps at 4K.

Productivity Performance on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

Between an Intel Core i9-13980HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, alongside 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB of SSD storage, we expected strong productivity performance out of the Scar.

We saw gains in both single- and multi-core performance over 12th Gen Core systems on Geekbench 5 (with far more significant improvement in the latter). The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 achieved a single-core score of 2,066 and a multi-core score of 19,233, while the MSI Titan GT77HX, with an Intel Core i9-1350HX and 64GB of RAM, saw slightly higher scores at 2,071 for single-core and 2,0602 for multi-core.

On our file transfer test, the Strix copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,885.81 MBps, beating last year's 17-inch Strix, but was slower than the 2022 Titan. The MSI Titan GT77 HX we tested came in at a blazing 2,299.26 MBps.

We saw some improvements in Handbrake, as well. The Strix Scar 18 transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 2 minutes and 49 seconds, beating the systems with 12th Gen chips. The new Titan came in a bit faster, at 2:38.

Display on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

Yeah, it's 18 inches. Asus's new panel is massive, which you may want if you're replacing an entire desktop. It has a resolution of 2560 x 1600, with a tall, 16:10 aspect ratio. Asus brands this a "Nebula" display, with support for HDR and a 240 Hz refresh rate.

The display is bright and colorful. In the short film Tears of Steel, even the darkest scenes, including one featuring a sniper on his perch, and another with a house covered in vines, were clear to see. Both lush green vegetation and neon blue and pink computer interfaces popped on the screen.

When I played Control, I was impressed by the game's reds, which are a visual motif throughout. I could still make out details in the game's darker areas, though in the Astral Plane, which is all on white, some details could get a bit blown out.

Asus' screen covers 109.4% of the sRGB color gamut and 77.5% of the DCI-P3 spectrum, falling short of the MSI Titan GT77 HX's 4K panel at 161.6% sRGB and 114.5% DCI-P3.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

The keyboard on the Scar 18 offers a decent typing experience, though it has a few oddities considering the sheer width Asus had to work with.

On the monkeytype.com typing test, I hit 115 words per minute with 98% accuracy rate, which is about my usual on a good keyboard. The keys have a decent amount of click, and I didn't feel myself bottoming out as I typed. But considering the size and cost of this machine, I do wish Asus would have opted for low-profile mechanical keys, like we've seen on some Alienware and MSI machines (including the most recent Titan).

There are a few strange layout choices. The right shift key is short, seemingly to accommodate the arrow keys jammed between the QWERTY keyboard and the number pad. The up arrow is right next to that shift key, while the right arrow is jammed into the number pad area.

The touchpad, at 5.1 x 3.4 inches, is spacious. There sure is room for it. It's also nice and smooth, and I had no problem with Windows 11's most complex gestures. When you're gaming, you can turn the touchpad off with the shortcut Fn + F10.

Audio on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

One good thing about a massive chassis: there’s room for solid speakers. The four speakers here produce loud, detailed sound that easily filled my apartment.

While setting up the Strix, I was surprised by the detail in AJR's "The DJ Is Crying For Help," which mixes emotional violin strings with thumping bass and both pop and choral vocals. The song sounded about as clear as I've ever heard it.

Control also sounded good on the Strix, with thumping gunfire, clear vocals (the protagonist thinks aloud quite a bit in the game) and haunting atmospheric music.

The speakers support Dolby Atmos, and you can choose between some presets in the Dolby Access software. I think the "balanced" setting in music mode that comes out of the box works pretty well in a wide variety of cases, but there are also specialized settings for games, movies and voice calls.

Upgradeability of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

The base of the Strix Scar 18 is held in by 11 Phillips head screws. The three closest to the palm wrest are shorter than the rest, so you'll have to remember where those go. The fourth one in that spot (furthest to the right) is captive and doesn't come out.

Removing the bottom took careful prying with a guitar-pick shaped tool. I assumed, incorrectly, that the base would be held on with a ribbon cable, but the RGB lights on the bottom don't come off with the bottom. I prefer it this way, as I've seen ribbon cables attached to the bottom before, which are easy to break.

Inside, there's a ton of cooling, with loads of heatpipes to cool the CPU and GPU. There are three fans in the system, which makes sensegiven how loud it can get.

There are two PCIe SSD slots (both were filled in our unit), and the RAM and Wi-Fi card can be removed and replaced as well. All of those components are under heat-protective coverings. The battery can also be removed and replaced. I'm surprised that Asus didn't go with a bigger 99 WHr battery, looking at the internals: There's some empty space around the 90 WHr one that the Strix ships with.

Battery Life on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

The battery on the ROG Strix Scar 18 feels like a formality. I mean, how much are you really going to move this, aside from room to room?

I hope not much. The Scar lasted only 4 hours and 26 minutes on our battery test, which browses the web, streams videos and runs OpenGL tests, all while connected to Wi-Fi with the display set to 150 nits.

The MSI Titan GT77 HX lasted 3:48 on a charge, which is to say, this is just the type of battery life you should probably expect from these massive laptops with power-hungry components.

So yeah, when you move the Scar around, bring the power connector. You'll need it for gaming anyway.

Heat on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

When you play games on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, the fans spin up loud. That's what it takes to cool the most powerful laptop components on the market now. The question is, do you feel the heat? You very well may.

I measured skin temperatures while running our Metro Exodus stress test, and found that the center of the keyboard measured 33.5 degrees Celsius (92.3 degrees Fahrenheit), while the touchpad, which most gamers will be resting their wrists on, was a cooler 26 C (78.8 F). These are all perfectly reasonable considering the parts inside.

The bottom of the laptop gets pretty hot, reaching 50.2 C (122.36 F). But considering this laptop is too big to realistically use on your lap, it should be OK. Just be sure to keep it firmly on a table or desk.

Webcam on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

Resolution and image quality don't always strictly go hand-in-hand, but higher resolution usually helps. It's a shame that in 2023, Asus has a $3,700, 18-inch laptop with a 720p webcam. It's time to move to 1080p.

And in this case, the image quality wasn't great! Using the webcam at my desk at home, the image appeared cool, with a burgundy t-shirt looking almost purple. My skin was smudgy and my beard and hair looked muddy. I wouldn't want to look like this on a stream. If you're replacing the rest of your desktop, you might as well invest in one of the best webcams, too. 

Software and Warranty on the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18

Asus has a bunch of software preinstalled. Some of it, like Armour Crate and Aura Creator, are useful. Armoury Crate is a one-stop shop for component statistics, settings profiles and lighting. Aura Creator has more advanced RGB lighting effects. Our Scar 18 review sample wasn't working with the lighting software when we tried it but presumably, that will be updated.

There's also some bloat. Virtual Pet, which I've seen on Asus' G14 line before, is effectively a more advanced Tamagotchi that lives on your desktop. (The G14 can also show it on the lid with LEDs. The Scar cannot). It doesn't have the games or other functions the G14's pet does. I opened it once and closed it forever.

Then there's MyAsus, which is functional as a place to check your serial number and warranty information, but I don't see anyone checking it regularly.

There is also the usual Windows 11 software in the Start Menu, including WhatsApp, Spotify and TikTok. Antivirus came in the form of a trial of McAfee Live Safe.

Asus sells the Strix Scar 18 with a 1-year warranty.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Configurations

We tested the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 with an Intel Core i9-13900HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, 32GB of RAM and 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage, which costs $3,899.99.

On Best Buy, there's a cheaper model with a Core i9-13980HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $2,499.99.

Bottom Line

The Asus ROG Strix Scar is big. It's really, really big. With that comes room for some seriously powerful components, and the Intel Core i9-13980HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 deliver some serious might.

Asus has also delivered a bright, colorful display and loud speakers that sound great while watching movies or playing games. That being said, the MSI Titan GT77 HX's screen is even brighter, and higher resolution. And as we noted in the gaming performance section, Nvidia’s RTX 4090 graphics really is better suited to 4K than 1660p.

If you want an 18-inch, 16:10 screen, the Strix is the way to go. But if you prefer the classic 16:9 aspect ratio in a 17-inch panel and want to go up to 4K, you may want to consider the Titan.

These parts are designed for someone who wants to get the maximum they can out of a mobile gaming rig. If you don't play the most intense games at their highest settings, there are better, cheaper options. In most cases, we got some pretty strong performance out of the Strix Scar, though I imagine some driver refinements will also help in a few questionable spots.

The Strix Scar can, in many ways, replace your desktop. If you have a small apartment with no room for a monitor, or you just want to be able to carry your PC from room to room, the Scar 18 is an expensive, competent option.

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Nvidia has released a festive video featuring a cute bobble head avatar of CEO Jensen Huang singing Jingle Bells. The traditional Christmas song has been jazzed-up 50s crooner style with some cool finger snapping action from the leather jacket draped ‘Toy Jensen. This fun video showcases cool technologies and spreads a little holiday cheer.

The video release isn’t just a way to say happy holidays to Nvidia fans, it also demonstrates the abilities of the Nvidia Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE, platform. The performance took “just hours,” to render and demonstrates realistic facial expressions and body movements alongside voice conversion technology which mapped Jensen’s tone to the performance of a pro singer – this isn’t an actual recording of Jensen’s singing voice.

Breaking down the video elements, the Nvidia development team used a recently developed model to map Jensen Huang’s voice tone onto a professional vocalist’s Jingle Bells singing sample. The musical notes from the professional singing were applied to the digital voice of Toy Jensen to make the avatar sing the correct notes and rhythm. It is notable that the musical arrangement for this performance wasn’t AI-generated, but was put together by Jochem van der Saag, a composer and producer who has worked with Michael Bublé and David Foster.

Next, Omniverse Audio2Face and Audio2Gesture technologies were leveraged to generate realistic facial expressions and gestures to match the Toy Jensen avatar’s animated musical performance. For a fuller X-Factor talent show style performance, we think Nvidia will have to develop some new Audio2Walk-down-steps technology.

Putting the above video into some perspective, Jensen Huang hit the headlines in November when he was visiting Taipei and video-bombed a singing duo. During a Taiwan Esports carnival event he managed to squeeze between Lah Yileh Lee and Xinting Lee during a performance of Lady Gaga’s “Always Remember Us This Way.” The performance went viral, but Huang insists he is too shy to record a real-person rendition of Jingle Bells, so tasked his engineers with readying the Toy Jensen performance, embedded top.

Nvidia says that the Omniverse ACE platform will be available soon for early access partners. It doesn’t say whether the release will include a Toy Jensen to play with.

Cleaning up recordings is an excellent use case for Audacity. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the popular audio editor’s ability to manipulate clips. On top of all manner of editing tools there are a heap of audio effects built into Audacity that can be applied to audio recordings creatively to get the sound you require.

Audacity is an amazing piece of free and open source software that is useful for all kinds of audio processing and editing. We’ve already looked at how to install Audacity and how to use it to clean up audio. In fact, in that article, we used effects as tools to clean up the audio recordings and to remove or minimize unwanted noise and other artefacts. In this how-to we will look at applying effects for creative results.

We’d urge you to experiment with all the effects built into Audacity but make sure you don’t export your creatively affected audio over a prized audio recording. You can test and experiment with pretty much any audio file. Making a quick rough recording of your voice to practice on is a good idea.

Selecting an Audio File in Audacity

We can apply effects to either the entire audio file, or selectively to tracks and portions of audio. Both are easily achieved with Audacity.

1. Click on File – Open and open your test audio file. Audacity can handle many different file formats and, for the purposes of testing out audio effects, it’s not too important what type of audio file we use. Alternatively you can click the record button and record a short audio track using your computer's built in microphone.

2. Select the entire clip by pressing Control + A. 

Alternatively, you can select part of the audio clip by left clicking and dragging to highlight an area in the audio clip. 

Adding Reverb to Audio in Audacity

Reverb, which is short for “reverberation” is perhaps the most commonly used audio effect. In Audacity, it makes the audio sound like it has been recorded in a reverberant space and you can change the settings to emulate different sizes and styles of reverb “rooms”. 

1. Select some or all of your audio clip.

2. Click on Effect >> Reverb. You should now see a window appear which has all the controls and settings for the reverb audio effect.

3. Click Manage and Select “Factory Presets”.

4. Try each of the presets using Preview. You can now hear the reverb effect applied to your audio track in preview for a few seconds. You can stop the preview to change settings using the “stop” button.

5. Use the sliders to tweak the reverb settings. Rather than explain every setting in the Reverb effect it’s easier for you to play with the sliders and listen to the changes in effect.

A common pair of settings are the “Dry Gain” and the “Wet Gain'' in simple terms the Dry Gain adjusts the amount of the original audio signal without any effects applied. Wet gain  similarly adjusts the amount of the signal in the final output. These terms are often included in many of the effects units in audio programs and sometimes are found as a single slider mixing between Dry and Wet.

Adding Silence to End of Clip for Reverb Tail in Audacity

Often when you apply reverb to a clip, the reverb will end abruptly at the end of the audio clip and you may well want the reverb to trail naturally after the final audio clip contents. To do this in Audacity, we need to generate and add a silent section onto the end of our existing audio clip and then, when we apply a reverb effect, there is room in this silence for the reverb tail.

1. Open a new test audio file and click the “Skip to End” button on the transport toolbar or press “K” on the keyboard to move the play head to the end of the clip.

2. Click on Generate >> Silence.

3. Set the length of silence you wish to add and click OK to add a section of silent audio to the end of the clip in the selected track. 

4. Apply a reverb to the entire audio clip. The reverb will continue into the newly created clip and will fade naturally.

Adding a Distortion Effect in Audacity

It’s easy to presume that distortion effects are all about making audio sound like heavy metal. While distortion settings can indeed create such sounds, they can also be used in many more ways. 

Subtly applied distortion can add warmth to recordings or to make audio sound like it has been recorded on tape and other vintage setups. The process of applying distortion is the same as it is for applying all audio effects in Audacity.

1. Select all or part of an audio clip.

2. From the Effect menu select Distortion.

3. Click Manage and Select “Factory Presets”.

4. Try each of the presets using Start Playback. Note that, with the Distortion effect, you have three buttons: “Start Playback”, “Skip Backward” and “Skip Forward.” With these three buttons, you can preview the distortion applied to the audio, make changes if needed and skip around the selected audio to hear the changes. 

5. Click apply to add the distortion effect to your audio. One thing of note is that adding Distortion can cause your audio to “clip” which is where the audio passes through the 0dB ceiling. This can cause glitches and pops in speakers and headphones which can be uncomfortable for the listener. Within the Distortion dialogue, you can use the “clipping level” slider to manage this effect, lowering the value to decrease the amount of clipping in the affected track.

Fading In and Out in Audacity

As a final pair of Audacity effects that are extremely useful, we have the effects “Fade In” and “Fade Out”. These are useful when creating a clip to go into a podcast or other work. 

1. Select a section in the audio. Select a section that would make an interesting segment for a podcast.

2. Click on Effects >> Fade In.

The fade effects differ in that you don’t get a dialog box or any user controls. The effect simply creates a volume gradient increasing from zero to the clips inherent volume level across the length of your selection.

Adding a fade out is handled in the same manner. 

1. Highlight the end of the segment to fade out.

2. Go to Effects and select Fade Out. Over the selected length, the audio will now gradually fade out to silence over.

As you can see from the “Effects” drop down menu, there is a great collection of built-in effects in Audacity. Each of these effects are worth investigating so that you get a practical sense of what each effect does to your audio. 

There are numerous “modulation” type effects, for example “Phaser” and “Wahwah,” which can create sweeping filtered effects in your audio. There are straightforward sounding effects that do exactly what they say in the name such as “Reverse” and “Repeat” and there are other effects, some of which we looked at previously, that allow you to effect the equalisation, remove noise and polish your audio. 

Armed with this bundle of effects, whether its a subtle ambience, or a distorted sci fi robot voice you now have enough skills to get the sound you need using this excellent free and open source application.

Raspberry Pi has revamped many of its audio add-ons, replacing the previously black PCBs of the HATs with green ones to match the SBCs they’re paired with. There are a few minor layout and connector alterations too, but otherwise, the boards remain functionally unchanged. In a blog post, Raspberry Pi-maker Eben Upton explained what’s going on.

The audio HATs sit on top of a Raspberry Pi board with GPIO, such as the Raspberry Pi 4, connecting to its GPIO pins and adding high-quality amplifiers, DACs, and phono outputs. IQaudio was founded in 2015 to create better quality sound products for Raspberry Pi boards used for things like streaming audio in stores and other businesses. However, it was absorbed into Raspberry Pi in 2020.

While the Raspberry Pi 4 can output sound via Bluetooth, its HDMI outputs, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, the audio HATs improve on this. The smallest is the Codec Zero, which features a 24-bit 96kHz Dialog Semiconductor DA7212 DAC, a built-in microphone and external microphone input socket, a mono speaker terminal, and stereo input and output channels. It's useful for projects like walkie-talkies and smart doorbells. Or for the amusing chatterbox the Raspberry Pi team built in the video above.

The DigiAMP+ holds a Texas Instruments TAS5756M stereo amplifier and stereo speaker outputs. It requires its own external power source but will also supply power to your Pi board. If you want to turn your Pi into a hi-fi system, this is the one to choose. There's also a pair of DAC boards: the DAC+ and the DAC Pro. They both have headphone amplifiers and sockets, but the DAC Pro adds a balanced/differential output in parallel to the line out. 

The new boards are made in the UK but are available worldwide from approved resellers. Any layout changes aim to make the boards simpler and quicker to manufacture, and the only significant difference is that the PCBs are now green. Raspberry Pi has a specifications comparison document to help you choose which audio board best suits your needs.

The 16-inch laptop is in vogue. Several companies have moved from 15 to 16-inch laptops, especially in the productivity space. With the Dell G16 (7620) ($1,139.99 to start, $1,499.99 as tested and you may get it for less with a Dell coupon), we're seeing this slightly-larger screen size make its way into gaming.

The Dell G16 also brings an aluminum lid, which you often don't find on the best gaming laptops under $1,500 that makes it feel premium. The 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 screen has a 165 Hz refresh rate, and you may even be able to take advantage of that in some games with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 we tested with.

There are still a few trappings of budget gaming notebooks here, like a really stiff touchpad and a truly mediocre webcam, but if you're looking for a gaming notebook that's less than $2,000 and has a bit more screen space, it's certainly one to consider.

Design of the Dell G16

As far as budget and mid-level gaming PCs go, the G16 is an odd, though totally unobtrusive design. When it's closed, it's like a mullet: business in the front, party in the back. I should probably explain that.

The front reminds me of one of Dell's Latitude business laptops. It's "obsidian" black with a Dell logo, but not much else going on. Surprisingly, the lid is metal, giving it a surprisingly luxurious feel at this price point. (The bottom and the keyboard deck are plastic, which is common for gaming notebooks.)

But the back of the laptop has a bump with ports on it, as well as some angular venting. This is more like Dell's premium "Alienware" lineup, which has been putting ports there for years.

When you lift the lid, things get a bit more interesting. The 16-inch display is surrounded by a moderate bezel, but what really caught my eye was the cross-hatch ventilation design. While some of my colleagues shrugged it off, I think it's a cool look.

The keyboard has single-zone lighting (at least, in our review unit. See the configurations section below), so you can only pick one color to backlight your keyboard.

There are ports on three sides of the Dell G16. The left side has the Ethernet jack and 3.5 mm audio port, while the right edge has a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports. On the back, there's a Thunderbolt 4 port, a third USB Type-A port, the HDMI output and the power jack. There's some weird spacing between them, but you won't be looking too often anyway.

Dell's 16-inch gaming notebook measures 14.06 x 10.71 x 1.06 inches (357.26 x 272.11 x 26.90 mm). Our unit weighed 5.72 pounds, though Dell's site says the laptop starts at 5.38 pounds and goes up to 5.95 pounds. It's very close in size to the Alienware m15 R7 (14.02 x 10.73 x 0.94 inches, 5.34 pounds) and MSI Sword 15 (14.13 x 10.20 x 0 . 98 inches, 4.96 pounds), but the G16 is a bit heavier and thicker. Asus' TUF Gaming F15 at 13.94 x 9.88 x 0.78 inches and 4.41 pounds is the smallest of the bunch.  

Dell G16 Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Dell G16

With its Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and an Intel Core i7-12700H, we expected our Dell G16 to run our benchmarks successfully, even at its native 2560 x 1600. We weren't disappointed, though other laptops were extremely competitive.

I played some Guardians of the Galaxy on the Dell G16 to put it through its paces. In a section in which you land Star-Lord's ship, the Milano, the game ran between 92-117 frames per second  on medium settings at 1920 x 1200 (I used this instead of 1080p to take advantage of the screen real estate). Platforming sections of the game typically ran between 90 and 102 fps, though sections with lots of effects could drop it down as low as the 70's. You might be able to play this game at higher settings, but doing so here allowed me to take at least some advantage of the 165 Hz screen and play above 60 fps while actually seeing the benefits.

On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (very high settings), the Dell G16 played at 76 fps at 1080p and 44 fps at its native 1600p. The other laptops, all with 1080p screens, were at least a few frames behind, with the m15 R7 falling the furthest at 69 fps.

Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings) drew strong performances from all four laptops at 1080p. The G16 hit 94 fps, while the Alienware beat it by a frame. The Sword and TUF Gaming both hit 90 fps. At 1600p, the G16 reached 54 fps.

On Far Cry 6, the G16 reached 90 frames per second on the benchmark at ultra settings (51 fps at 2560 x 1600). The TUF won here, at 99 fps.

Red Dead Redemption 2 on medium is still a challenge. Both the G16 and the Alienawre hit 60 fps at 1080p (the G16 reached 38 fps at its native resolution), while the TUF Gaming reached 59 fps and the Sword played at 57 fps.

The G16 did the best of the group on Borderlands 3 ("badass" settings), playing at 74 fps at 1080p and 49 fps at 1600p. The R7 came the next closest at 72 fps, while the TUF lagged slightly at 65 fps.

We stressed test the G16 by looping Metro Exodus 15 times on the RTX preset. The laptop ran the game at an average of 59.76 fps and was surprisingly stable throughout the test. During that gauntlet, the CPU's six performance cores ran at 2.71 GHz, while the eight efficiency cores ran at 2.16 GHz. The CPU package measured an average of 76.42 degrees Celsius and showed some signs of throttling. The GPU ran at 1.6 GHz and measured 77.16 degrees Celsius.

Productivity Performance on the Dell G16

A gaming laptop wielding a Intel Core i7-12700H, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD should be able to pull double-duty as a workhorse.

On Geekbench 5, a performance test leaning heavily on CPUs , the Dell achieved a single-core score of 1,719 and a multi-core score of 12,043. Both the TUF Gaming F15 (the same Core i7-12700H)  and MSI Sword  (i7-12650H) edged it out slightly on single-core, but the MSI fell short on multi-core, leaving the G16 in a slight second palace. The Alienware m15 R7, with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, came in last place.

The G16 copied 25GB of files at a rate of 745.36 MBps, which  is faster than both the Alienware m15 and the Asus TUF, but the MSI Sword 15 blazed past the group at 1,080.53 MBps.

It took the Dell G16 6 minutes and 23 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p using Handbrake. That's more than a minute faster than the MSI Sword, but both the Alienware and the TUF did it more quickly.

Display on the Dell G16

The display on the Dell G16 is a 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 (with a 16:10 aspect ratio) screen with a 165 Hz refresh rate. It's fairly average among its competitors when it comes to colors, but it does get brighter.

The trailer for Creed 3 looked good on the G16. A sunrise behind actor Jonathan Majors while he works out on Venice Beach was a distinct blend of orange and purple, and the end of the trailer, during what's surely the big fight, Creed's white boxing gloves and shorts (against his foe's black getup —  what a duality!) were clean and sharp in contrast.

Dell's screen covers 75.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and 106% of the SRGB color space, putting it ever so slightly ahead of Alienware's 15-inch, 1080p panel and a teeny bit behind the one on the Asus TUF Gaming F15. MSI's display was far less vivid on both counts.

The G16 is the brightest of the bunch at 335 nits, surpassing the TUF Gaming (324 nits), Alienware m15 (289 nits) and MSI Sword (247 nits).

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Dell G16

I have very mixed feelings about the Dell G16's  keyboard and mouse. As a purely gaming device, they may be serviceable. But if this is your only PC, you're going to have a bad time.

The keyboard is as close to "linear" as a gaming laptop keyboard gets without mechanical keys, but without significant travel, I found myself bottoming out while typing. It's less of a pain while hitting buttons in gaming, but it took significant time to get used to typing on it, and even then it tired my fingers out a bit.

The layout is fairly standard, though five customizable macro keys on the keyboard (F2 through F6, which can be set up in Alienware Command Center) stand out for games, especially the real-time strategy and MMO genres. Volume is located on the right side, which is a bit odd but easy enough to get used to.

The 4.1 x 2.4-inch touchpad isn't sizable, but it's just big enough to navigate in Windows. It feels cheap, but my biggest issue was the incredibly stiff click, which tired my fingers out when I used the laptop for non-gaming purposes. If you're using one of the best gaming mice, you can hit F12 on the keyboard to shut the touchpad off to avoid any accidental clicks while using it as a wrist rest.

Audio on the Dell G16

The Dell G16 has a pair of 2.5-watt speakers, one on each side of the bottom of the machine.

For music, it's heavy on the instrumentals — sometimes too much so. Jade Bird's "Uh Huh" was a blur of guitars and drums, and while I could make out the bass, it was slight. Bird's mixes between folk and rock vocals weren't in the forefront as they are on better speakers. 

Vocals sounded great when I played Guardians of the Galaxy, which happens to have a ton of dialogue. The banter between Star-Lord and his crew was clear over orchestral music and rock songs like Billy Idol's "White Wedding." Sometimes that was at the expense of other effects, like the Milano ship crashing into a snowbank, though that's partially the audio design of the game. Sparks sizzling from the engine were nice and crisp.

The speakers get loud, and easily filled up my apartment during testing. I was even a bit worried about disturbing my neighbors in the apartment next door. You can comfortably use them at much lower than the maximum volume.

Alienware Command Center re-routes audio control to Dolby Access, which has dedicated game, movie and voice profiles. In general, I found the default music profile was best, as  movie mode largely added volume. The game mode could be good for games where enemies surround you.

Upgradeability of the Dell G16

To get into the Dell G16, you need to loosen eight Phillips head screws (four of which are captive, so you don't have to remove them). The base simply pulls and lifts off.

The M.2 SSD is under a heat shield, which covers a PCIe 4.0 WD SN810 SSD in our review unit. Curiously, there's a cutout space on the other side of the motherboard that seems to be clearly designed for a second M.2 SSD, but there's no connector for it. Perhaps Dell will be using the same motherboard elsewhere with that addition?

The RAM and Wi-Fi radio are both easily replaceable. You can take out the battery, though you'll want to be careful about cables running over and around it.

Battery Life of the Dell G16

Where the G16 goes, the 240 W charging brick follows. Most gaming laptops don't offer great battery life, but the G16 performed less admirably than some of the competition on our battery test, which involves web browsing, video streaming and light graphics work with the screen set to 150 nits.

The G16 ran for 3 hours and 59 minutes on the test, falling short of the Alienware m15  R7 (8:57) and Asus TUF Gaming F15 (8:34). The MSI Sword 15 was about on par at 3:55.

Heat on the Dell G16

We took heat measurements during our Metro Exodus gauntlet, which should give a pretty good idea of how hot the Dell G16 gets while playing games.

The center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, reached 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 Fahrenheit), though the keyboard deck and touchpad were cooler.

The hottest point on the bottom machine was a toasty 55.1 degrees Celsius (131.18 degrees Fahrenheit), so this is one to definitely keep on your desk. That's toasty.

Webcam on the Dell G16

Dell's 720p webcam on the G16 is fine for casual calls with friends or family. But it's not good.

Images I captured while using the webcam were quite grainy, and sometimes had a bit of blur. While its output is color accurate, down to the blues in my eyes and the multi-colored book spines on a shelf behind me, the pixelation and lack of detail (I swear, it looked like I didn't have eyelashes) bring it down. If this is the machine for your streaming dreams, consider one of the best webcams.

I can't say I'm surprised. While laptops are increasingly moving to higher quality, 1080p sensors (and the two aren't always conflated), mid-level gaming laptops haven't gotten there as a category yet. Maybe it's about time they start.

Software and Warranty on the Dell G16

Dell has a handful of apps pre-loaded in its Windows 11 install, but only one stands out as important: Alienware Command Center. Despite carrying the name of Dell's more luxurious brand, you can use it on the G16 to change RGB lighting colors and launch games from your library.

Other Dell add-ons include My Dell, with access to warranty information, power profiles and support; Dell Customer Connect, which seemingly only exists to feed customers surveys; Dell Update and Dell Digital Delivery for software.

While no third-party antivirus software came preloaded on our machine, a bookmark to McAfee's website came pre-attached to the Edge browser, along with a folder of links to Dell's site. Dell should stop doing this.

There are also some apps that come preinstalled with Windows 11, like Spotify and Disney Plus, which are featured prominently in the Start menu.

Dell sells the G16 with a one-year warranty.

Dell G16 Configurations

We tested the Dell G16 (7620) at $1,499.99 with an Intel Core i7-12700H, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD.

As of this writing, there's only one display option: the 16-inch, 2560 x 1600, 165 Hz panel on our review unit.

The base model is $1,139.99, which is identical to what we tested, except with a lesser, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti.

The top-end model is $1,799.99 with an Intel Core i9-12900H Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of PCIe SSD.

That's all assuming you use the standard, single-zone backlit keyboard. Some configurations with the RTX 3050 Ti or RTX 3070 Ti allow for a Cherry low-profile mechanical keyboard. That's a $50 upgrade on Dell's website.

Bottom Line

Whether bigger is better is a personal choice, but it's one Dell is offering with the G16 (7620). At around $1,500 (give or take a few hundred dollars based on the configuration), its 16:10 aspect ratio is uncommon.

The G16's design is sturdy with its aluminum top cover, and configured the way we reviewed it, with an RTX 3060 and an Intel Core i7-12700H, it did well on our games benchmarks. Some other gaming laptops, like the Asus TUF Gaming F15 were better on productivity, suggesting that they may have better cooling on their processors.

There are still some signs of the Dell G line's budget origins, like a crappy webcam and a stiff touchpad. (Though I imagine most gamers will bring a mouse to the party.) But if you want a 16-inch screen and a decent amount of power for a price that won't break the bank, the G16 is worth checking out.

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When he isn't announcing the best graphics cards, it seems that Nvidia's Jensen Huang likes to party. With his trademark leather jacket, extensive kitchenware collection and fierce silver fox looks, Nvidia supremo Jensen Huang definitely sits at the cooler end of the tech billionaire spectrum, but even we didn’t expect to see him doing karaoke to Lady Gaga. However, unless we’re all being fooled by a deepfake, that’s exactly what a video posted on Commercial Times, and tweeted by VideoCardz, shows.

According to the report, Huang casually strolled onto the floor during the opening night of WirForce 2022, a Taiwan Esports ‘carnival’, entered the BYOC area (which we suspect doesn’t stand for ‘bring your own cocktails’ and is a bit more a of a serious LAN party) and began to interact with the players.

While some have claimed the assembled gamers, and particularly the karaoke singers, who we’re getting to, didn’t know who he was, the Commercial Times report makes it clear the Taiwan-born graphics guru was recognized, with Esports athletes digging out the boxes of Nvidia products to sign, and asking him to pose for group photos. He was reportedly friendly to everyone, though the article doesn’t mention if anyone asked him about the RTX 4090 power connector issue.

In the hour he spent at the event, Huang had a go at a light gun game, and posed for more photos before taking to the main stage and shouting “GeForce!” into a microphone, to the chagrin of some players who complained he was too close, and setting off a big climax in others, according to the Google translated report.

His attention was later caught by two internet celebrity singers, broadcasting karaoke live from near the venue. He became part of the performance, choosing Lady Gaga’s song Hold My Hand from the Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack, and apparently impressing the audience with his singing voice, receiving many high-fives from the performers as well as positive messages from viewers. A video of the crooning CEO was also posted on Reddit by user jarvis-linx, ironically claiming it to be cosplay.

Perhaps one day, anime will be real life thanks largely in part to projects like this one from maker and developer Jess Peter. Peter is using a Raspberry Pi to power a custom holographic anime virtual assistant named Maria that’s completely interactive and 100% adorable.

This holographic virtual assistant features an original 3D design with animations that help bring her to life. Peter implements AI for voice recognition and programmed text-to-speech so Maria can talk back and forth with the user to help complete verbal requests and initiate tasks. Maria is still a work in development so functions are limited but plans are in the works to add more in the future.

Peter has provided plenty of juicy details about she works and how to set her up on your own at home. According to the project website, Maria can provide weather predictions based on WeatherAPI, set custom timers (yelling “Beep! Beep! Beep! when they go off) and even play music using the Spotify API.

This project is running on a Raspberry Pi 4B connected to a USB microphone for audio input and a USB speaker for audio output. The Pi is housed inside of a 3D-printed case fitted with a conical acetate sheet to give the holographic effect. A small, 3.2-inch screen is used to project the image with a resolution of 800 x 400px.

Diving into the software side, Maria makes use a Python server that constantly listens for audio input. Keywords are detected using Webrtvt and Deepspeech and used to determine incoming commands. The text-to-speech functions are handled using C along with Google’s text-to-speech library. A shader is necessary to warp the character on the screen so she appears correctly on the acetate cone. You can read more about the project details on the official GitHub page.

We find this Raspberry Pi project to be thoroughly impressive and implore anyone looking to recreate it to check out the official website where Peter was kind enough to share all the details you need to bring Maria to your home.

Elgato is one of the biggest names in the streaming world, and after its debut Wave:3 became one of the best gaming microphones you could buy, it was only a matter of time before it tapped into the higher-end XLR market. The time has finally come and the Wave DX is upon us.

Compatible with any XLR interface, but enhanced by Elgato’s own Wave XLR, the Wave DX brings with it an upgrade path that just wasn’t possible with the USB-based Wave line-up. It’s a microphone that can grow with your setup over time and connect to professional audio gear instead of just your USB port. It can be used with more than just your PC, and has good enough sound quality that streamers, podcasters, and YouTubers can all find it useful. 

At $99, it’s also surprisingly cheap, but don’t let that fool you. You’ll still need to spend extra on an audio interface to connect it to your PC, but if you already have one or are in the market for a wholesale upgrade from USB, this microphone is worth a look.

Elgato Wave DX Specs

Design of the Elgato Wave DX

The Elgato DX is the definition of minimalism, so don’t expect it to attract a lot of attention on stream. It’s an end-address microphone, so its rectangular body shotguns directly at your mouth. It’s solid black, finished with a matte coating so it won’t reflect light. Since it uses an XLR connection without phantom power, there’s no lighting. The only bit of trim to be found is a removable Elgato logo that can be swapped between sides when you switch the mounting bracket.

The same kind of minimalist design applied to the Wave:3 which we reviewed back in 2020. Even that mic had a bit of flair with its RGB lighting ring. The philosophy here seems to be strip back, fade into the background. It’s all about the content, man. (At least, that’s what I imagine this mic would say if it could talk.) 

That’s not to say it doesn’t have some tricks up its sleeve. Hidden inside its hardened steel shell is a dynamic microphone capsule selected in partnership with Lewitt Audio. Lewitt is a respected brand, and microphones are at the heart of all it does. Its products can be found in recording studios all around the world, are subject to numerous glowing reviews, and the team did a great job when they partnered with Elgato on the original Wave mics. It’s reasonable to expect good things when all history points to Lewitt knowing its stuff when it comes to microphones. 

For only $99, that expectation is handily met. I’ll dive deeper into specific sound characteristics in the next section, but Lewitt and Elgato have crafted a mic that manages to sound rich and full of presence while also sounding natural and detailed. Affordable microphones are often one-trick ponies — stage, broadcast, or instrument — but the Wave DX manages to cross those latter two boundaries with impressive ease.

Still, this is a dynamic microphone with most of the usual benefits and drawbacks. It has a compressed frequency response range of 50Hz to 15kHz. The condenser capsule in the Blue Yeti X extends that on both sides, coming in at 20Hz to 20kHz. The original Wave:3 is a bit less at 70Hz to 20kHz, but obviously the range the DX is able to capture is less. Elgato compensates for that with a tuning that emphasizes the treble more than competing dynamic mics, giving it a more natural, detailed sound.

And in truth, those frequency response ranges don’t mean a whole lot when you’re recording vocals. What you need to know is that the Wave DX makes your voice sound slightly crisp. There’s a pleasant edge, similar to what you hear on the Shure SM7B or the more affordable Rode PodMic. It’s not over-done. My voice didn’t sound crunchy in the same way it did with the PodMic. But there’s a slight  “radio voice” quality that’s very appealing.

Alongside the capsule, Elgato has implemented a built-in shock mount and pop filter. These are usually add-on purchases that drive up the bill, so it’s a pleasant surprise to find that the pop filter in particular is quite good. The shock mount lets through a bit too much noise, however, so you may still want to look for another solution there.

Returning to the outside of the mic, the chassis is peppered with a 360-degree grille except for a strip on the right side. You’ll still need to talk into the end of the microphone for the best quality, but you don’t have to be quite so spot-on to be heard well. Elgato knows streamers tend to move around a lot in their seats, so as long as it’s generally centered in front of you, your quality will be just fine.

The only other features are the rear XLR port and the mounting arm to attach to a stand, which isn’t included. The port is completely standard, but the mono arm is a pretty neat addition. Instead of connecting directly to the microphone, the mono arm screws into the stand. It attaches to the mic with its own adjustment knob, allowing you to angle the mic to meet your mount. Since there’s no external shock mount or u-bracket to contend with, you can make adjustments without bunching up the XLR cable in the middle of your content.

Broadly speaking, the Wave DX is a well-made microphone that does its job well, but it’s not perfect. Even though it’s made of hardened steel, I was surprised by how light the mic felt. It comes in just under a pound, less than half the weight of the Rode PodMic. The grille also has a bit of give when pressed on, and I have no doubt that it will dent easily if hit or dropped. It doesn’t feel cheaply made, but it lacks the tank-like quality of the PodMic.

Sound Quality on the Elgato Wave DX

The Elgato Wave DX offers a full-bodied, broadcast-style sound signature. As a dynamic microphone, its capsule applies a bit of crunch to the voice, giving it radio-like character while still maintaining high resolution, natural-sounding vocal capture. The sound is warm, so your voice has presence, but doesn’t sound dull or over-compressed. This makes it a good fit for vocal work, such as podcasts, voiceover, and of course, streaming.

Even though it has the unmistakable character and enhanced bass of a dynamic broadcast microphone, Elgato has tuned it to bring out a bit more treble detail. This lends a bit more airiness and natural timbre to the sound. Its tuning allows it to be a more versatile recording tool and better for recording instruments on music streams.

It’s worth comparing to the Rode PodMic here, because both mics retail for $99 and both are competing for your upgrade dollars. For tuning and character, the PodMic sounds great when recording vocals but struggles to make guitars and pianos sound completely natural (though you can address this a bit in post-processing). The Wave DX was able to record my acoustic guitar very well without any tweaks whatsoever. I might add a little reverb in my DAW of choice, Reaper, but I would have no hesitation using it to stream live music.

While Elgato’s claim that it can “pick up detail like a condenser,” might be slightly overstating things, it does act as an effective middle ground between the two microphone types. Condensers are still, in my opinion, king of the hill when it comes to clarity and natural tone, but the simple fact is that dynamic microphones are still going to be the best fit for most people due to their excellent noise rejection and insensitivity (PC fans, keyboards, and noisey roommates won’t be nearly as audible as a competing condenser). The Wave DX gives you a blend of both worlds: excellent noise rejection and enhanced clarity at an affordable price.

The integrated pop filter also works very well. I’m usually disappointed by in-built filters, but the Wave DX does a great job of blocking plosives. Even speaking very close to the mic, I wasn’t able to get it to distort with any kind of plosive test using normal speech. Peter’s peck of pickled peppers is safe with this one.

The built-in shock mount isn’t nearly as good. Small taps of the desk and minor bumps of the boom arm all make their way directly into the microphone. The Wave DX is compatible with aftermarket shock mounts that will do a better job, but you’ll need to remove the swivel mount to do so, which impacts how easy it is to position.

There is a bit of self noise to be aware of, but it’s not bad. Underneath your speech is a tiny amount of white noise. It’s typical to microphones at this price, and is easy to remedy with even a very minor noise gate or noise suppressor, but is still something to know about going in. It’s small enough that you might not even mind, but if you want total silence for voice-over work, a suppressor or gate will be necessary.

Have a listen to how it sounds below.

Software for the Elgato Wave DX

As an XLR microphone, the Wave DX does not connect directly to a PC and has no software of its own. It finds itself in a unique position, however, because the Wave line-up is known for its rich software effects and custom audio routing, so the name itself carries some expectation of customizability. Elgato also makes no secret of the potential of its Wave Link software.

The problem is that the actual microphone does not support any of these things because it cannot without a data connection. To access them, you’ll need to purchase the Wave XLR audio interface (another $160) or download third-party software to access VSTs with a competing audio interface.

Should you purchase the Wave XLR, Wave Link allows you to create custom audio channels with both real and virtual inputs. For example, for game streaming, you may want game audio and your Spotify playlist to mix with your microphone feed. Likewise, you can remove sources from specific channels without completely muting them in your own ears.

You may, for example, want to drop your Discord call from the Audience mix so you’re not broadcasting your strategy to the competing team (or have the world hear your friends get too blue). It’s very similar to what we saw with the GoXLR and the Beacn Mic and is a powerful production tool for a one-host streaming set up. If you don’t have a Wave XLR interface, Wave Link is inaccessible.

Available to all interfaces (and you’ll need at least one to use the Wave DX), are plug-ins known as VSTs. These can be loaded into your streaming or recording software to provide additional audio effects. Elgato has created its own easy-to-use Elgato EQ plug-in, but there are numerous others to add compression effects, noise suppression, and de-essing to remove sibilance for your recording.

These can be effective solutions to enhancing the sound of the microphone and tailoring it to your own voice, but they’re not as seamless or as user-friendly as I would like. When accessed from inside Wave Link, VST plug-ins open in additional windows, which feels a bit messy when you’re streaming. They also usually require at least some background knowledge to use them effectively. They tend to use audio lingo that may not be familiar and don’t always explain their settings well, if at all. Prior research will be necessary if you’re not already familiar with vocal effects.

Bottom Line

The Wave DX is a great microphone in a lot of ways. It sounds rich and full, perfect for vocal capture. It also gathers a generous amount of treble detail, so you can record instruments and still have them sound natural while not losing the noise rejection that makes dynamic mics such a good fit for untreated rooms and noisey environments.

But without the Wave XLR, it feels incomplete. Purchasing both together more than doubles the price, and triples it if you also want Elgato’s mic arm and XLR cable. Picking everything up as a bundle is much cheaper than buying them separately ($299 versus $379) but it still feels expensive.

The Wave DX has the benefit of growing with your setup over time, but if you don't see yourself adding external mixers or accessories, some of the best gaming and streaming microphones still come with normal USB connections. If you like the potential of the Wave Link software, and don’t mind the sound difference of a condenser, the Elgato Wave:3 is an excellent alternative that will save you big at checkout. For a USB choice with even better sound crafting, the Beacn Mic is also worth considering.

Even without its software, the Wave DX still offers impressive sound quality and versatile performance for the price. If you don't mind picking up some extras, it's worth a closer look.

Nothing beats the imaginative world-building of a good Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign but what if you could take things even further? That’s where maker and developer Balthazar Rouberol’s latest Raspberry Pi project comes in. Using a Raspberry Pi Pico and a little CircuitPython, he’s created a custom D&D sound mixer that bring sounds and music into the game for a more ambient experience.

According to Rouberol, he wanted to develop an easy way to trigger songs, music and ambient soundtracks at the push of a button. This way, when he and his friends play D&D, they could hear music and sound effects to create a more immersive experience depending on what’s happening in-game.

Rouberol was kind enough to share a demo video of the final project showing off how it works. It features a Pico at the top along with a 4 x 4 keypad illuminated with RGB LEDs. Each key corresponds with either an audio track or control mechanism to adjust things like volume or even overlap the audio so multiple tracks can be played at the same time. The keypad sends data over a serial connection to a computer running a Python application which reads the input and plays the relevant sound file. Media playback on the PC is handled using PyGame, a popular Python module to create games. 

The mixer is driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s attached to a Pimoroni RGB Keypad which provides the key matrix with RGB backlit keys. This is used to operate the effects that control the sound mixer. All of the hardware is tied together with the help of a 3D printed base. This frame mounts the keypad at an angle, making it easier to use with a clean, professional finish.

Rouberol explains that the sound mixer required a user interface, so he created his own using a little more Python code and HTML via the Flask module. Using Flask, Rouberol created the UI to control the layers of audio, adding subtle audio cues for various stages of the dungeon.

If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project, visit the official project page on Rouberol’s blog to see both how it goes together as well as what it looks like in action.

Retro computing enthusiast Matthias Werner has shared his design for a device that recreates the characteristic operational noise of a hard disk drive (HDD). 

The HDD Clicker v0.2, brought to our attention by Liliputing, is said to be both nostalgic and useful. Nostalgic for the ambience, and useful for providing audible feedback in sync with data access and transfers using your shiny new SSD (Solid State Disk).

It may be 2022, but there are still PC users out there who are only now enjoying their first delightful taste of NAND flash storage — having previously relied exclusively upon spinning rust storage. However, as with any change, some people — such as Tom's Hardware Managing Editor Matt Safford, who has promised to never buy a hard drive again — may miss aspects of what they had before. 

They probably won’t miss the slower access and loading times of HDDs, or the relatively heavy weight and fragility (especially important in a laptop), but they might miss the signature clicks, ticks, and whirs an old HDD emanated when powered up and put to work. There must be some people like this, hence Matthias Werner and his €25 HDD Clicker.

The noisy gadget isn’t primarily targeted at PCs, though. As a retro computing enthusiast, Werner has upgraded various old computers with fast and capacious storage, and in a video explains that the HDD Clicker can add the missing noise to people who have added cool retro solutions to their systems, such as floppy or HDD to flash adaptors. If you watch the video you will see his retro system is an i486, and its IDE HDD has been swapped for a CF adaptor.

Werner’s design might seem rather straightforward by people experienced in putting circuit boards together and dabbling in occasional soldering tasks. At the heart of the HDD Clicker is a circuit board powered by an ATTiny microcontroller. This takes its input from your computer’s HDD activity LED pin, as well as a modicum of power from a Molex connector. Lastly, the microcontroller feeds audio in sync with drive activity to a built-in piezo speaker. Thus, it doesn’t need a driver, or any software, so it should work as soon as the computer is powered up — before and after any OS is loaded.

Though the device might be useful, we aren’t that sure whether the sound is a very accurate representation of an HDD and therefore isn't great for nostalgia in its present form. What do readers think? Checking the forums, v0.2 is of course an early version number — perhaps fair to characterize as a work in progress. Various forum users have asked for more / different sounds, so we could see the project expand or branch in the future.

We're two decades into the 21st century, a time where many of us were expecting to have flying cars or apartments on the moon. Instead, tech companies are still selling floppy disks and brand new PCs with an untenable 8GB of RAM. By all means, grab a 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy disk if you still need one. But, for Woz’s sake, don’t get a PC with less than 16GB of memory, unless you plan to buy more RAM and install it yourself.

We’ve reached the point in computing history where you can’t competently run Windows and browse the Internet with less than 16GB on board. On my desktop PC running Windows 10, it takes just 8 Chrome tabs, Slack and Spotify running to cross the 8GB threshold. My regular use case of four dozen tabs takes me up to around 15GB, without running any games or productivity apps. Even with nothing but background services running, I’m using 5.5GB.

Even playing one game will take you past the 8GB limit many $1,000 gaming PCs have. Senior Editor Sarah Jacobsson Purewal shared a screenshot (see how to take screenshots in Windows) of her task manager where Elden Ring is eating 4.4GB of RAM and Steam is gobbling another 354MB. Once you exceed your computer’s physical RAM, the OS will compensate by swapping data in and out of your paging file, significantly harming performance.

Despite the fact that modern Windows PCs really need 16GB of RAM and the cost of adding more RAM is minimal, major PC vendors continue offering systems with a mere 8GB. And we’re not talking about kids’ Chromebooks or $199 cheapo laptops with Pentium CPUs! High-powered $900 gaming laptops and $1,300 ultrabooks also come with just 8GB. By the way, another 8GB of laptop RAM would cost you $25 on Amazon, so it must cost OEMs, who get to pay wholesale, a fraction of that to get this right. 

Imagine that your mouth is watering and you’re dying for a Big Mac dinner. You pull up to the McDonald’s Drive-through and see a sign that says “Big Mac, starting at $5.99.” So you order the burger, but, when you pull it out of the bag, you’re surprised to see that it only has one beef patty, one slice of pickle, no cheese, no Big Mac Sauce and no sesame seeds on the bun. You then find out that a “real” Big Mac with the taste you’d expect costs $9.99. McDonald’s wouldn’t sully its name by offering a sub-par experience that would make Grimace blush. Only PC OEMs would do such a thing. 

Dell currently sells a config of its flagship XPS 13 laptop with 8GB for a whopping $1,249, while Lenovo’s entry-level ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 10) is $1,319 with 8GB. These two laptops are meant to compete with the best Ultrabooks on the market, and they do when you buy configurations that come with a decent amount of memory. What’s worse in the case of Ultrabooks like these is that the RAM is soldered to the motherboard so there’s no way to upgrade. 

Many gaming laptops (including some of the best gaming laptops under $1,500) and desktops also come with just 8GB of RAM, but the good news there is that you can almost always upgrade the memory on your own, a cost you should build into your budget and plan to do right away. For example, Walmart has an MSI GF63 gaming laptop for $599. For that price, you have to settle for lesser specs like a GTX 1650, 256GB SSD and, yes, 8GB of RAM. But you can open it up and swap the RAM for 2 x 8GB DIMMs, which will make your wallet about $50 lighter, but consider that part of the price. (While you’re in there you should also install a roomier SSD, but that’s the subject of another story.)

We’d rather that companies like MSI just make 16GB the minimum standard and raise price as necessary, but as a consumer, you can make 16GB your minimum. Don’t even consider buying a computer with 8GB of RAM that can’t be upgraded. And, if you do see a great deal on an 8GB system, make sure you can also get the RAM and bring it up to 16GB. 

If you already have a PC with 4, 8 or even 16GB of memory, adding more RAM is one of the best sub-$100 upgrades you can make. Just check the service manual for your PC or motherboard or visit Crucial’s Advisor to find out the exact type of RAM you need.

In the world of wireless earbuds, it can seem like there are Apple AirPods and...everything else. Plenty of companies try — and many do a great job, even at budget prices — but it’s hard to snag part of the limelight. However, Asus is trying with the ROG Cetra True Wireless earbuds, which put a gaming tilt to the earbuds space.

The ROG Cetra True Wireless earbuds cost just $99, which isn’t that cheap for true wireless earbuds, but starts to feel like a bargain when you account for the earbuds’ hybrid active noise canceling, long battery life, surprisingly solid audio chops, and wireless charging case. And Asus even tops it off with a little splash of lighting effects.

Altogether, it’s a neat little package worthy of its price. However, it’s also wearing Asus’ Republic of Gamers badge, and the low-latency gaming mode is one area where it came up short, showing noticeable delay between on-screen action and sound effects on both PC and Asus’ own ROG Phone 6 Pro. This may not be an issue for those looking for a great pair of non-gaming earbuds, but it’s not a great sign for...the gamers Asus is aiming for.

Specs for the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless

Design and Comfort of the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless

The Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless buds throw in for style points. The case is a sleek little pearl with smooth edges that slid nicely in and out of my pockets. The design is tough to open one-handed, but it’s also tough to accidentally pop open and send the buds spilling out. The back edge of the case has a USB-C charging port while the base allows for wireless charging. The front edge of the case has a light bar that glows either blue or red to indicate charge levels (albeit, not terribly precisely).

Inside the case, there are form-fitting slots for holding the buds in place to charge and a small dot-matrix ROG logo that lights up in several colors briefly. The earbud stems also have a small bar of light along their stem that lights up when they’re slotted or withdrawn from the case. It’s flashy and unnecessary, but it’s a style touch fans of Asus’ ROG line will be used to and expect.

The buds are the classic in-ear style with a long stem that puts the mics just a little bit closer to the mouth. The design is all black, save for “ROG” and an ROG logo emblazoned on the buds in silver.

The Cetra True Wireless buds come with a set of ear tips in three different sizes. Pressed in firmly, they do a good job blocking out some external noise, and they stay in place well even during a bit of headbanging. Each earbud has a touch control point that responds to individual taps, multi-taps, and long-presses.

While the buds aren’t horribly uncomfortable, having the hard plastic in my ear for the better part of the workday does leave them a bit tender. There’s no specific element of the buds causing this minor discomfort though, so your mileage may vary. If you have sensitive ears that dislike most earbuds, these won’t solve that, but if you’re generally comfortable with earbuds these should suit you fine.

Audio Performance of the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless

When it comes to audio performance, the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless earbuds surprise. Their sound isn’t bulletproof, but they’re contenders when considering all that they already deliver at $100 before getting to the sound quality. The soundstage is compact, making audio feel rather close, but the buds do an impressive job recreating the sonic range.

Whether it’s the spacey sounds of Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories,” the funky and chaotic vibes of Of Montreal’s “False Priest,” or the energetic action of Overwatch, the Cetra True Wireless earbuds put on a little show. Bass notes in False Priest’s opening track have their delicious slink and a tad of oomph to back them, and the thump of drums roaring through Daft Punk’s “Contact” has a touch of life.

The buds perform better in the mids, where they can really pump out a lot of sound even at just 50% volume. The buds struggle a bit to deliver a ton of sound all at the same time, getting a little crunchy and seeing the lowest thump of the bass fizzle out when trying to push through the busiest sections of music or the most hectic moments in a team fight, especially when a lot of bass is called for.

The earbuds also feature active noise cancellation to eliminate some background noise when you’re trying to focus on your tunes. At the volumes these earbuds are capable of dialing up to, it’s possible to simply drown out external noises, but ANC is still a handy option to have. The buds support two different levels of ANC as well as an ambient audio mode that lets you hear external sounds.

At its highest level, the ANC cuts down a little bit on droning noises, but is virtually unnoticeable when listening to music. It’s more apparent while listening to a podcast, where there’s more unoccupied frequency.

The ambient sound feature lets external sound in, but it’s a tad sharp and unnatural, also pulling in a bit of wind. It may do in a conversation in a quiet room, but I didn’t feel it was going to let me really keep my wits about me walking down the street with it enabled.

While the speaker drivers perform well, the Bluetooth hardware struggled a little. I noticed the occasional issue with the buds desynchronizing for just a moment. It’s a minor distraction that ultimately doesn’t ruin the listening experience, but worth noting if you plan to listen in an environment with a lot of radio interference.

Asus’s Armoury Crate app allows for some tailoring of EQ and bass boost, but little else — and the app asks for far too many irrelevant permissions to be worthwhile.

Gamers looking for an edge with these buds using the low-latency Gaming Mode are out of luck. The sound coming out of these buds lags plainly behind the actions in game whether in Gaming Mode or not.

Microphones on the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless

While a lot of earbuds use some beamforming on their mics to better pick up a users’ voice and eliminate background noise, the Cetra True Wireless buds have omnidirectional mics that pick up sound in all directions. The result is surprisingly clear compared to other earbuds, but it comes with the healthy — or unhealthy — dose of background noise.

In a recording with a fan and air conditioner running 10 feet away, the mic presented my voice clearly with just the subtlest hints of sounding like I was speaking through a digital tunnel. However, when I started typing on my keyboard (a quieter membrane one, no less), the mics picked up a bit of that as well. Even worse, when I threw a YouTube video on a pair of desktop speakers, the narration from the video came through almost as well as my own voice.

If you’re in a quiet room, you’ll get a good result from the mics on these earbuds, but that’s where the positives of the experience will end.

One downside that’s nearly universal for Bluetooth devices is that a lot of their positive traits go out the window when you try to use them for input and output at the same time. The audio quality coming through the speakers simply tanks to awful levels when the mics are engaged. So using the buds for gaming and voice comms or Zoom meetings will negate their benefits.

Battery Life of the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless

These buds are no slouch when it comes to marathon listening. Asus advertises them as boasting a 4.8 hour runtime with ANC on or hitting 5.5 hours with ANC off, and the case can add another 17 or 21.5 hours, respectively. I cranked up the tunes, switching between ANC modes occasionally but largely sticking to the strongest ANC level, and it was 4 hours and 20 minutes before the buds gave out. They can also charge quickly in the case. Just 10 minutes back in the case after my battery test brough the battery reading back up to 50%. Though my test fell slightly short of Asus’s estimates, they likely tested at a more conservative volume and ANC level that could see the buds last even longer.

Bottom Line

The Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless are a pretty good value, delivering solid audio performance and features such as active noise cancellation and a wireless charging case — which you won’t find in most $99 earbuds. Unfortunately, they’re just not dependable enough for gaming, which is what the ROG line is all about. If you’re looking for a decent pair of true wireless earbuds, these are worth a look, but if you’re a gamer you’ll find more reliable low-latency options on our list of best gaming headsets.

The Cooler Master CH331 gaming headset is directed toward budget-minded gamers and beginning streamers who want understated RGB style at an affordable price. The CH331 delivers when it comes to surround sound quality and comfort. 

Designed to compete with the best gaming headsets in its price range, the $49 CH331 will most definitely rock you with epic explosions. But it can also tickle your periphery senses with the crackle of a campfire behind you…or the slurping munching of a monster just behind that tree line.

The headset works great right from the box, but you’ll need Cool Master’s Master Plus software to unlock an equalizer and virtual speaker placement app.

Cooler Master CH331 Specs

Design and Comfort of the Cooler Master CH331

The CH331 is a basic corded headset that comes in a single color, black. The Y yoke frame is made of dark gray aluminum, while the headband is steel wrapped in buttery soft PU leather. The black on black vibe is accented with a subtle pulsing RGB light on the earpiece which is switched on from the cord.

The earpieces are quite squishy and covered in more PU leather, with oval shaped cups that completely cover the ear. The earpieces pivot outward on the Y yoke, but are otherwise stuck in place. The headband is adjustable, giving you an extra inch of length on either side.

A fabric wrapped cord is permanently attached to the left earpiece, and a chonky 3 inch long inline control panel sits about 20 inches down the cord. This put the inline control in my lap while seated, but on a taller person it might dangle about the navel. The inline control is extremely light plastic, so it doesn’t seem to add any weight.

There’s another 61 inches of cord from the inline control panel to your USB type A plug for a total of 84 inches (7 feet) between your left ear and your PC. Since my PC sits on the right-hand side of my desk, I can remain at arm's length from my tower without stretching the cord.

The headset is 13 oz, which is extremely close to a pound of extra weight strapped to your head. It’s pretty comfortable, but you will notice it. Since the headband is wrapped in smooth pleather, it's slick and will slide around a bit, especially while chair dancing. 

The inline control panel is a beefy 3.25 x 1.25 x .5 inches and has volume and mute buttons for mic and audio, plus a simple on/off for the lights. The lights are not programmable. 

Between the USB cord and the giant inline control panel, this is strictly a set of headphones for your computer desk, not for walking around.

Performance of the Cooler Master CH331

The CH331 headset performs exceptionally well for such a reasonably priced accessory. It delivers a virtual 7.1 surround sound that really puts you in the game. For example, while playing The Outer Worlds, I stopped to liberate a campsite, complete with a tiny cooking fire. I slowly spun my character and could hear the quiet crackle of the fire move from my left side, to behind me, then on to the right ear. At another spot along the trail, raptidons were lurking on a cliff above and to the left. I could hear them way before I could see them.

Not surprisingly, the CH331 put a lot of emphasis on bass for those bone rattling explosions. But there’s a good bit of range and separation, allowing me to clearly hear footsteps and bird chirping while the game’s soundtrack floated somewhere above my head.

When I switched to streaming music, I had the same experience. Bass was impressive and loud, but I could still hear Billie Eilish breathing in my ear during Bad Guy, something I don’t get from the Bluetooth earbuds I use around the house.

These are not noise-canceling headphones and you can still hear muffled background noise in the room, especially if you’re listening to conversation. If you have rock music pounding away, people will definitely be able to sneak up on you.

Microphone on the Cooler Master CH331

The CH331 has a detachable omnidirectional microphone that plugs into the left earpiece with a standard 3.5mm stereo jack. It’s mounted on a long flexible wire so you can place it in just the right spot. The mic can be muted with the inline control.

Features and Software of the Cooler Master CH331

Cooler Master CH331 headphones are designed to be plug and play. You can tap into an equalizer and adjust the surround sound if you download the optional Master Plus software from the Cooler Master website, free for Windows 10 and 11.

The equalizer didn't do much for midrange tweaking, and the sound profiles for Pop Music, Movie and Gaming all seemed remarkably similar and bass heavy.

The software doesn’t have options for the RGB lights, so you’re stuck with the default pattern that cycles through a rainbow of soft colors.

Bottom Line

All in all, the CH331 is comfortable enough to wear for long gaming sessions and the black on black color scheme wouldn’t be distracting for a streamer to wear. However, the giant control panel and USB cord is keeping this pair of headphones at your desk, not outside in the real world.

This headset has very decent quality for an entry level device, even if it’s rather bass heavy. Retailing at $49.99, the CH331 would make a good budget friendly purchase for a new streamer or gamer wanting inexpensive surround sound.

It may read like a tabloid headline, but it seems that Janet Jackson's 1989 song "Rhythm Nation" has the power to crash laptops, according to a blog post on Microsoft's devblogs - and a subsequent vulnerability has been raised on the CVE database, as noted by The Register.

The tale comes from a Microsoft devblog post by Raymond Chen, who recalls a story shared by a colleague from way back in the days of Windows XP - 2005 or so. It was noticed that playing the music video to "Rhythm Nation" - a moderate hit for Jackson, reaching number two in the Billboard Hot 100 and picking up a Grammy nomination for its production - over a laptop’s speakers would sometimes crash a different laptop placed nearby. 

This was, as you might expect, very puzzling. Eventually, someone applied their massive brain to the problem and worked out that, rather than being a response from the laptop to the quality of the music, the tune contained the resonant frequency of the victim’s 5,400 RPM hard drive, so playing the song near it caused the platters to wobble, contact the drive head, and crash.

As you’ll no doubt remember from high school, resonant frequency is a property of a material that sees an increase in oscillation amplitude when a force is applied at that particular frequency that you wouldn’t see if the force was applied at any other frequency.

The susceptible laptops’ manufacturer responded to the problem by creating a custom digital filter in the audio system that stripped the frequencies, nullifying at least the problem of a Jackson-pumping laptop junking itself. The problem went away, as did 5,400 RPM hard drives in laptops.

Until, that is, Chen published the reminiscence on his blog, dated 16th August. This seems to have kicked something into gear, or possibly sent out a pulse of resonant frequencies, and caused a new addition to the register of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, dated 17th August. The vulnerability has been assigned a reference number, and received an acknowledgement from security vendor Tenable.