Thanks, in part, to BeatsAudio over-ear headphones have seen quite a resurgence in recent years – a few years ago it was all about having an iPod and those the famous white earphones. Well, everyone still wants an iPod or iPhone, but now those white earphones are not cool anymore – NoiseHush has recognised this sea change – as consumers realised that in-ear technology just can’t compete with the sound quality and comfort of over-ear technology and the coolest headphones you can buy are the big, chunky and over-ear variety.

NoiseHush like many others are looking to seduce you with their new line of HD Stereo headphones. Which offer maximum comfort, a stylish design and ear-pounding sound quality. We gave the NoiseHush NX26’s a thorough testing on range of mediums and devices to see how they stack up against the competition.

First of all, we started with some noisy dance music, a perfect start to test the headphones punch and sound range. We’re glad to report that they performed admirably. They did begin to distort right at the top of the volume range, but for many you’ll never take the NX26’s up to that level.

Next up, we tried the headphones on some movies to see how they handled a wider spectrum of sounds, which is where in-ear headphones usually tend to fail miserably. NoiseHush’s NX26’s performed very well with deep low-ends and crystal clear highs.

The final test we devised was to play some videogames and see how they performed. Again is was the same story of impressive range of sound delivered with crystal clarity. We do own a pair of BeatAudio heaphones and for the money of the Nexus pair they do stand-up against them well. There are certainly on par with the cheaper Solo’s, but can’t really compete with some of the more expensive versions Beats offer.

Where the headphones start show off the cheaper price point is the build quality and comfort. They’re not poorly made, but they’re far from having a high-end premium feel to them, but for the price we can live that. They’re quite comfortable with a padded headband, which is adjustable to fit your head, but we found they only really became comfortable when they were worn-in and had loosened up a bit. The ear cushions are well padded and do isolate a lot of the outside noise without having to use noise-cancelling technology – which tends to mean you have to have some batteries for the system to work, which is one of the major downsides of some of Beats’ high-end range.

The NoiseHush NX26′s do come with a very handy microphone and controller on the headphone wire. You can make phone calls via voice commands and there’s a button to control music playback, volume and you can also answer phone calls with a touch of the button. The tangle-free cable is impressively long compared to the competition meaning they’re ideal for gaming, listening to music or watching movies.

For the price we were pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the NX26′s, for a price of around £60 – they are certainly worth considering, and will some clever design decisions with the length of the cable and on-board controls they’re a great pair versatile headphones for phones, mp3 players, laptops or just about any device.

NoiseHush NX26 HD Stereo Headphones Specifications
• Driver Unit: 40 mm
• Output Power: 30mw RMS
• Speaker Frequency Response: 20HZ-20kHz
• Sensitivity: -42 ± 3dB
• Mic Frequency Response: 100-20kHz
• Cable Length: 5.7 feet
• Audio Connection: 3.5mm Stereo Jack Socket
• Weight: 175g

NoiseHush NX26 Headphones Review is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

What’s the worst thing about Spotify? It doesn’t pay that much to artists. No. It’s devaluing music? No. It’s the fact that the service is pretty poor when it come to music discovery. There’s so much music, that often, it’s hard to find the hidden gems – sure you can use your friends recommendations – but what happens when all your friends just listen to Adele or Jay Z.

Well Spotify has recognised this shortcoming and it’s plan to solve it is to create a new apps platform. A system of apps that look to enhance the experience of users listening to music. It will allow developers and media partners to build apps to run within the company’s desktop application – serving tickets, reviews and recommendations to Spotify users.

The Announcement

The announcement was made last week at a New York press conference, and see’s the Swedish company follow Apple and Facebook’s lead with their own Apps eco-system, a dramatic change for the company. But, interestingly, the apps that are going to be available on Spotify won’t be sold for a profit, in fact they won’t be sold at all – meaning developers will have to get a little creative in order to monetise the system.

Chief Executive Daniel EK said that Spotify will bring a host of new features to the software; such as recommendations, ticketing, editorial content thanks to partnerships with the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Songkick, Last FM and TuneWiki. For example, The Guardian’s app brings album reviews from both the Guardian and Observer into Spotify’s service.

“Today, we become a totally integrated platform,” said Ek. “We’re opening up our platform in a way that lets you curate the apps that you want, and really make Spotify yours … This is the beginning of something game-changing for digital music.”

The apps will of course sit within Spotify’s desktop client, although Ek did state that if successful, the platform may extend to its mobile apps in the future too. The apps will be available for free to paying users of the service.

Developers will have to go through the usual hoops to get their apps on the service. They will have to submit their ideas to Spotify for approval before building and launching anything. This should mean that the Spotify App store won’t be full of useless apps – something Google failed to do in the early days of Android. The premiss of the system will be to add valued content alongside Spotify’s music.

Spotify will be using the apps platform itself, to add new features to the service – starting with a Facebook-style news ticker showing what friends are doing on the service. Ek said: ”We have a lot more in the works. But more than anything we really look forward to being surprised by developers,” he said. “We believe they’re going to deliver amazing new apps within the Spotify platform.”

Recent Criticisms

Ek didn’t talk about the recent criticisms of streaming music payouts to artists during the event, but he did defend the company’s business model, in response to a question about whether its payments to music rights holders risk becoming a bigger burden as more people use Spotify.

“For us, we don’t feel that those are onerous terms in any shape or form. We’re very happy with how our model is performing,” he said. “We are paying out the vast majority of all the revenues, and that’s really how we want to keep going.”

Spotify currently has an impressive amount of users with 10 million active users, and 2.5 million of them paying for the service. It is available in 12 countries, and its users have created more than 500m playlists – a number that has doubled since July 2011.

“The Spotify revolution is really to make access as an alternative to ownership,” said Ek. “We’re just three years in, but we’ve already become the second biggest digital revenue source for all the labels in Europe behind iTunes. And we’ve paid out more than $150m to the music industry so far.”

He also summed up Spotify’s mission statement with a carefully-crafted soundbite: “The ultimate goal here is to be as ubiquitous as the CD, but with all of the obvious advantages of being digital.”

The Apps

We’ve had an extended look at some of the apps that are currently available, they’re not groundbreaking in anyway, and Apple will hardly be quaking in fear of what Spotify has planned. The new app service looks to get users engaging more, and not just running the software in the background.

We Are Hunted’s app is simple and effective, allowing you to instantly playlist 100 of the top tracks from online sources like blogs. Last.fm’s app will have potential for those of you who have scribbling their music for a while. Songkick offer easy access to contert tickets of artists you listen to and The Guardian, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, obviously, offer more of a editorial focus.

Apple Vs Spotify

Ultimately, if Spotify becomes the next big bastion for music delivery this will surely put another nail in the coffin of the labels favoured model: selling music. Something Apple has had a stranglehold on for years. Traditionally, the Spotify vs Apple argument has been often been played down, but, with Spotify’s increased exposure with its Facebook partnership, the Swedish company is the clearest competition to the iTunes crown.

The age old battle of ownership versus access is one that is brought into sharp focus with this new announcement –  we personally can’t see both coexisting without having an impact on one another. The likely winner, surprisingly, could be Spotify. Sure it’s going to take a while, but with an all-you-can-eat ethos Spotify looks to be a better deal for the consumer, and less so for the major labels, Apple and independent artists.

Spotify Vs iTunes: Battle Of The Apps is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Sony Ericsson has just released the first pair of headphones that have been specifically designed for Sony Ericsson’s range of Android Smartphones.  The LiveSound headphones stick the tried and tested in-ear technology. Now we’ll concede that in-ear technology does have place in today’s market. We love over-ear headphones, personally – they produce studio quality sound and are the closest thing you’ll get to Hi-Fi music on the go, but, over-ear headphone just aren’t that practical, if you’re on the move and don’t want to be weighed down by big and clunky headphones you’re only other choice is in-ear.

With the LiveSound Sony Ericsson have tried to make them incredibly comfortable, if you’ve ever used a pair of Apple headphones then you’ll know that they can be really uncomfortable, mainly because everyone’s ears are slightly different, and this is were the LiveSound have tried to improve upon. Their headphones come with a tube of moulds that has a range of sizes, so you’ll be able to find a rubber mould that suits you. The mould is designed to be place in your ear canal so the headphones don’t fall out when you’re walking or even running, and you get a nice snug fit, meaning they’ll be louder and you won’t disturb other people around you when you’re listening to music loud on a train or bus.

Other notable design features for the LiveSound headphones is the use of flat wires, rather than circular ones, this really helps with headphone tangling, which as you’ll probably know is the most annoying things about headphones. When you put them in your pocket or bag most in-ear headphone get frustratingly tangled requiring you to untangle them before you can listen you’re music. LiveSounds new flat wires system pretty much makes this annoyance a thing of the past. As well as a comfortable fitting and clever flat wires, the LiveSound headphones also come with LiveKey, a button that can be programmed to work with you phone so can answer the phone using the handy remote and you can even control certain Android Apps that are LiveKey compatible.

We found the sound quality of the headphones to quite good, with decent clarity and respectable low-ends – they can’t compete with Beats By Dre, but for the fraction of the price they are more than good enough, the sound quality of voice calls was especially impressive, and we’d even go as far stating they produce better voice call than using the traditional method of holding the phone to your head. The headphones will only work with Xperia phones, but, interestingly not on any other devices. We tried them on a laptop and they were incredibly quiet with some form of interference. You can press a button on the remote to get the full sound, but requires it to be held down which is hardly ideal, they also didn’t work on our iPhone, resulting in the same tinny sound, which we couldn’t remedy. For us, this is just a crazy design choice, if you buy a pair of headphones you don’t want them to only work with one type of phone or device.

The build quality is good and we really liked the idea of flat wires and metallic finish to the ear buds. Overall LiveSound are a good pair of headphones, but the decision not let them work with other devices is unforgivable, whether we’re missing something were not sure, but they do seem to work once you hold down one of the buttons on the remote, so were not sure whether they’re faulty or this was a decision to make them work only on Xperia Phones. We did have two pairs to test and them same issue happened on both. If you have an Xperia phone, then they’re a good purhcase, but as a pair of headphone to work with a myriad of devices they fail miserably.

We’ll contact the manufacturer to whether this is a design features or a mistake.

Gaj-it Rating 3/5

Sony Ericsson LiveSound Headphones Review is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Whether it’s your Christmas party at home or at work, these gizmos will get nan off the eggnog or even involve Barry from accounts to end 2011 in a memorable way.

10. Karaoke Machine

What better way to subtly hint to your third cousin twice removed that you fancy them a bit than by singing along to a bit of “All I want for Christmas is You” with Mariah Carey? Or keep the kids entertained for hours by having them re-enact their favourite moments from Glee.

Karaoke Machines come in all shapes, sizes and prices with basic machines costing as little as £40, and Karaoke Box-Set CDs from £20. There are also DVDs players that have a karaoke function, so all you need to do is plug in a microphone and claim your five minutes of family fame.

9. Photo Cube Smartphone Printer

If you have a bit more budget and want something to get the kids involved in, the Photo Cube Smartphone Printer is a great idea to instantly print off pictures snapped on your phone. It only takes 60 seconds for a digital picture to leap off your phone into your hands.

No longer will you have empty promises of sending that great pic you took to everyone else in the group shot, just pop your phone into this printer and provide a picture for everyone. Christmas is sometimes the only time everyone gets together, so it’s nice to provide a memento of your gathering to keep everyone going until next year.

The Photo Cube will set you back £120, with an extra £20 for ink cartridge and paper.

8. Digital Photo Frame

Grandma and grandpa will love the novelty of watching the family through the ages flick past while they sip on punch. Digital photo frames take up little room and are a great feature for a family get-together.

You can theme photos to just show funny snaps, or take a tour through the ages starting with mum and dad as kids moving onto the latest addition of the family. If you’re hosting a work party, fill it with past party photos or as a bit of a look-back on everything that’s happened this year.

Digital photo frames have been around for awhile and as such have dropped in price since they were first released. If you’re a bit of a savvy shopper you can pick one up for £20, but it may be worth spending a bit more to up the photo resolution and memory capability so that you can keep the photo show going for hours.

7. iPod Dock

There are a few options for getting the carols pumping in your house or office this year, and one is getting an iPod dock to shuffle through your tunes through a decent pair of speakers.

Logitech has a range of docks that provide excellent quality sound and will look great on the mantelpiece. The Logitech Pure-Fi Express Plus and the Rechargeable Speaker S315i both sells for £64.99 and are portable so can even come outside should the need for a snow-picnic arise.

6. Snow Machine

For some people, this might not be such a great Christmas Party gadget with the abundance of snow already piled up outside your front door, but for those dreaming of a white Christmas and getting nothing of the sort, a snow machine can make that dream come true.

Priced from as little as £50 for a small device, a snow machine doesn’t have to cost the earth. For this price, you can get a machine that will project snow up to 6 metres, and is remote control so you don’t have to end up looking like the abominable snowman when trying to turn it off.  If you do spend more on a snow machine, you are more likely to get a quieter device that won’t sound like a chainsaw going off in your living room.

Just to be clear, a snow machine doesn’t produce real snow, and you do need some special Snow Fluid to make the magic happen, which costs around £20 for 5 litres of the stuff.

5.  Home Brew Beer Machine

Why not compliment the roast potatoes with a glass of your finest home brew, vintage 2011? Home brew kits are easily accessible, and just by mixing packets of ingredients with water you can call your living room a microbrewery.

The Beer Machine Model 2000 is just £90 with an impressive-looking bar-style tap and pressure gauge to make sure your liquid gold doesn’t explode all over the place.

There are a range of beer mixes to choose from as well so you’re not just stuck with your standard ale. Flavours include Dutch Lager, Canadian Red Lager, Nut Brown Ale and Czech Pilsner.

4. Cocktail Fountain

On the topic of innovative inebriating drinks, this is a chance to combine practicality with a stylish interesting looking centrepiece. This cocktail fountain will let the daiquiris flow from four dispensers to create a lovely water-feature for you to stick your glass under.

It lights up too to create a night-club-esque ambiance which is great for gearing the office party up for the real night clubs afterwards.

At £24, this little gem of a party feature won’t break the bank and leaves you with enough to fill it with your spirit of choice.

3. Game Consoles

How do you tire the kids out when they’ve been cooped up all day? Yes they’ll want to play with their presents for a bit, but what happens when little Johnny steals little Frankie’s transformer pack? You distract them with something to tire them out- like a bit of Wii.

With games for kids and adults alike, a Wii or PS3 is a great idea to have set-up in a corner to get everyone involved. If your work Christmas budget allows for it, a bit of Guitar Hero 5, Dance on Broadway or Just Dance 3 won’t go astray. Or maybe it will but that’s the whole point really.

For PS3 faithfuls, get all of the aunts and uncles around some Family Game Night 4, Truth or Lies or Yoostar 2.

2. Mini Projector

While you may have last used a projector to display your PowerPoint prowess, they are also a good idea for scrolling through funny photos, or for playing a heart warming movie on Christmas bringing families together or something of the like.

You can get pocket projectors for around the £80 mark, but that may not be the right device to sit through the Titanic with, mainly because the battery life just won’t last.

Mini projectors are larger than pocket projectors and some come packaged with a screen. They have better resolution but will still fit into tiny spaces. Expect to spend around  £270 for a decent one.

1. Portable Hot Tub

If the snow machine didn’t do it for you this idea will- banish the Winter chill in your very own affordable portable Hot Tub. This may not be appropriate for every office party, but it will provide a talking point if you and your co-workers decide to go tenths in one.

The Lay-Z-Spa will set you back £330 which includes a water filtration system, Lay-Z massage system, rapid heat adjustment and 12 months warranty in case someone decides to wear stilettos in it. It takes 30 minutes to set-up and will fit back in its little box when you’re done resembling a prune.

Even if you don’t end up using it on Christmas day, what better way to melt away the stresses of having all of your family factions together than by spending all of Boxing Day in your very own hot tub eating turkey sandwiches?

Top 10 Christmas Party Gadgets is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

The service may sound affordable, but it will come with some limitations. While all the songs are up for purchase at e20 Kbps, you should be able to stream most of these songs at 128Kbps speed. Pure will also let you use identification service for free, which means you can use Pure radio or your phone for identifying a particular song. After identification, you can choose to either buy the song or may access it through your regular subscription service. While Pure Music already has an iPhone app, you will have to wait a little for an Android app.

Pure Music is all decked up with usual features like recommendations and playlists. With this service, you would be getting recommendations based on popular choices. You can create your personalized playlists and can search for your favorite songs or bands. Pure Music’s repository of 15 million songs is expected to cater to varied tastes in music. You can choose to croon with Bruno Mars or may go retro with Elvis Presley.

The downside of Pure Music is that it does not let you cache the music for offline access. You can either choose to stream the songs or you can buy them. Pure Music has said that it is working on cache feature. The service will launch in the UK in December.

Looking for Spotify Alternative: Pure Music is here is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

A coalition of ISP providers in the US has decided to punish its offending customers by throttling their internet speeds. In case of repeat offenders, the ISPs may decide to restrict the internet access. However, it would not terminate the internet access.

The coalition, which includes major players such as Time Warner Cable Inc., Verizon Communications and Cablevision Systems Corp., said that it would issue multiple warnings to the users before taking the harsher steps. So, if you tend to acquire your music and movies via questionable source, now be prepared to receive e-mails and pop-up warnings from your ISP.

According to the group, piracy costs about $16 billion to the US economy in the form of lost revenues. The figures for the UK are also expected to be in the vicinity of the US toll. The latest step is meant to educate the online pirates and not to punish them. This seems like a more sensible approach, since ridiculous lawsuits brought about by RIAA have so far failed to curb the music piracy. Clever ISPs are just going to take the easier way out and are going to annoy you so much with their pop-up warnings that a couple of bucks saved just won’t be worth it.

ISPs to Take Tougher Stand Against Online Piracy is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Luckily for us music lovers an unlikely saviour has stepped forward to replicate studio quality audio at home. Hip Hop legend Dr Dre and his team developed an audio system, Beatsaudio which delivered premium sound quality through headphones and laptops, the system has so good HP have taken it and incorporated it into a new range of entertainment centred laptops. The DV7 range uses the latest Intel Core processor in conjunction with Dre’s Beatsaudio to put an end to ruined music.

Following the Hip-Hop theme HP have roped in Plan B to promote their new beatsaudio technology. Focusing on the mantra of ‘hearing music as the artist intended.’ Ben Drew, aka Plan B who burst onto the scene with his critically acclaimed debut album, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words in 2006 is currently enjoy massive success with his Soul album Strickland Banks and if you’ve had the radio on recently you’d have heard hit singe ‘She Said’

Watch the video below and see how Plan B put the track together piece by piece with bass, drums, vocals, brass and strings. Even if you’re not a Plan B fan it’s fascinating to see the progression of two guitar chords into one of last year’s biggest hits. Not only that but it’s in 3D sound which is awesome, so put your cheap and nasty headphones on listen to the video and probably find yourself tempted to head online and splash out on a pair of Dr Dre headphones, I know I’m tempted.

Sponsored Post

HP’s BeatsAudio Gives Us The Music Experience That Was Intended is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Scottish woman Anne Muir has made legal history when after being prosecuted for illegally downloading more than 30,000 files worth nearly £55,000, in a joint operation by police and the British Music Recording Industry.

Rather than chucking the 58-year-old in jail, sympathetic Judge Jack McGowan placed Muir on probation for three years as she had “suffered clinical depression over a number of years”, was a first time offender and did not profit from the downloads.

The official story is that Muir suffers from obsessive, compulsive personality disorder and as a result become obsessed with her road to stardom. Well she’s reached fame now, but for all the wrong reasons. Muir had illegally downloaded 24,243 karaoke files on her computer and 7493 music files in order to aid her singing career.

Tackling full-scale music pirates would surely be of more help to the music industry than dragging a deluded karaoke fan through court, but then £55,000 is a Hell of a lot of money and it must be made clear that digital property is the same as physical property. She’d be treated much more harshly if she’d stolen 50 grand worth of physical CDs from HMV, whether she has OCD or not.

But ultimately it seems the police and record companies are fighting a losing battle when it comes to file sharing and this ‘arrest the big players and make a big song and dance out of it to scare everyone into buying CDs and legal downloads’, is obviously not working.

Karaoke Obsessed Woman Gets Two Years Probation for Illegal Downloads is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

So, does it mean that Apple is tacitly approving your nefarious (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) methods for obtaining music. Well, we are not going to get all judgmental about this and would accept whatever this Cupertino company is going to offer us, *cough cough*

Apple is expected to make formal announcement about its locker service at WWDC event, scheduled for June this year. According to Business Week, Apple will scan your music collection and will mirror it in the cloud, albeit in a higher quality format. This step could well be Apple’s USP against current music cloud services offered by Google and Amazon. These two require their users to upload their collection to the cloud. These services also lack the crucial ‘Label’ support. Despite its best efforts, Google had not been able to strike any deal with any major music label. Amazon service also went down the same path.

Since you do not need to upload your collection, it would mean saving some bandwidth. This is especially useful if you have tiered internet plan. The mirroring service has mainly been made possible due to Apple’s collaboration with three major music labels in the US. Though, reportedly Apple is pretty close to seal the deal with the fourth label Universal Music as well. However, it is not clear whether Apple is looking to offer music subscription service as well. So, there are still some questions, which hopefully would be answered during WWDC.

Apple iCloud Magically Transforms Your Crappy Music to High Quality is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Vevo has made it clear that it fully understands the uniqueness of the UK market and thereby would be customizing its offerings suitably. Though, UK viewers would be able to watch US music videos, interviews and other content, they will be treated with UK specific stuff as well. Well, one this thing is for the sure that Vevo does not need much introduction. Most of the UK music buffs are already acquainted with the site via its YouTube hosted channel. Vevo claims that its subscription base is already bigger than BSkyB, Channel 4 and ITV combined.

Vevo also has an edge over other video media sites, which generally face massive hindrance in their international ventures due to licensing issues. Earlier, Hulu had given it a try but since it had only US rights for most of its content, its overseas projects did not quite take off. Similar problems were faced by Netflix. But Vevo does not have to go through hoops for securing the international rights since the site is founded by Sony Music and Universal Music, which owns the content shown on the site.

Vevo is planning to feature Tom Vek and Tinchy Strider videos on its UK site. Also look out for Jessie J., Adele and James Blake interviews. Vevo is also launching its iOS and Android Apps.

Vevo Arrives in the UK: Tune in for Music Videos and Interviews is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com