Sigalon's Gadget Soup

I rarely get all that excited by the sound of iPod speakers, if only because you can so easily get better sound from a good set of desktop speakers. I've cited Audioengine's terrific little speakers many times in this blog, and I still love them, but there's a new speaker from Emotiva Pro, the airmotiv 4, and it's raised the sound quality benchmark for $399 per pair speakers.

The Emotiva Pro airmotiv 4 speaker

Look at the pictures of the airmotiv 4 and you'll see it's missing something found on most speakers: a dome tweeter. In its place you'll find a Heil air motion transformer. It looks like a ribbon or planar magnetic tweeter, but the Heil is a fundamentally different type of tweeter. Instead of pushing air to make sound, the Heil's pleated diaphragm "squeezes" air. The Heil's large radiating area requires less movement to generate a given sound pressure level, so the Heil produces lower distortion than most dome tweeters.

The airmotiv 4 also has a 4.5-inch woofer, and both drivers are made exclusively for Emotiva. The cross-braced, medium-density fiberboard cabinet feels supersolid. I like that there are no external wall warts or power supplies; ... [Read more]

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You might think the 200 marked runs at Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort in British Columbia would be enough for most skiers.

But just before Christmas, my two teenage boys, a friend and his two teenage sons, and I scoped out a largely untouched stash of snow in an area called Flute Bowl. No chairlifts scaled that part of the mountain, so we hit the slopes early, made our way over to Flute Bowl, kicked off our skis, and hiked 45 minutes to the top.

It was a cloudless day, and on the ridge, we were rewarded with spectacular views of the Coast Mountain range. Then we got to ski the wide open bowl, and the remains of powder that had fallen a few days earlier, all to ourselves. It was one of those moments worth capturing.

So we did. The boys, my buddy, and I fastened two helmet cams--the GoPro HD Hero 2 Outdoor Edition and the Contour Roam--on our lids and tested them to figure out which one we liked best.

Here's footage from Flute Bowl shot with the GoPro:

Both cameras provide amazingly vivid video. In my unscientific review after five days of skiing with the cams, the GoPro produced crisper footage with sharper colors in bright light, while the Contour came up with much clearer video in low light.

Both have an ultrawide 170-degree field of view. And both have a full high-definition mode that c... [Read more]

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