There is nothing here but marketing, I don't know why people would be engrossed in an advertisement for something basic. Anyone can put together speakers and a battery with parts from amazon or aliexpress.
OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#142One of my dream projects is a high quality open source, syncable, low latency bluetooth/wireless speaker system, like the JBL speakers except that you can bring your own amp and drivers and software and stuff.
Culturally, this kind of thing could be revolutionary. Outdoor music events with dispersed speaker arrays would be much less noisy than ones with giant central arrays, but everyone would be able to hear the music much better and with much less damage to the ears. You could probably get away with having pretty large gatherings without any noise permits.
One of the things I noticed about clubs in Berlin vs. clubs where I'm from is that the sound systems are distributed more evenly throughout the spaces. So you don't need earplugs as badly as you do in my city where the venues all use these massive mono speaker arrays and if you're in the front row you're gonna get tinnitus.
The JBL setup is designed really well, but it's proprietary and different generations aren't backward compatible.
I wanna see an open source hardware alternative. Where do I sign up!
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#143Is HN being subjected to some astroturf marketing techniques here? Seems rather suspicious to see so many commenters enthusiastically salivating over an advert for a very expensive radio. And also for said advert to hit the #1 spot on this site, despite not fitting into the usual categories for a compelling post.
The real explanation might actually be that a lot of people on hacker news are easily taken in by marketing. A new look for something that was popular when people were kids at a 1000% markup should be easy to see through, but stuff like this happens all the time.
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#144£599. Nope.
Quality engineering. But for the average user, it's expensive for a radio.
TE's quality is hit and miss if you talk to people who have used their devices a lot.
You're mostly just paying for the unique features, smaller production runs and look of the device.
I own an OP-Z and luckily haven't had any issues but the forums are full of people who's units are bent or have the dials pop out.
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#145Honest question: So, I get the radio rewind feature, and I really dig the interface, but it kind of feels like it's a feature from some two decades ago? Are there really still that many people regularly listening to FM radio for whom this is a killer feature?
Honest answer: I carry portable FM radios around with me all the time and enjoy my local stations immensely and wish I could rewind to hear a title or composer's name, or some melody or similar, almost daily. I realize I could build something like this myself if I put enough time into it, but I'm pretty sure the pricetag would be excusable for me.
Honest question: Do you have any suggestions for how I can duplicate all of the above (portable, FM, good sound, rolling digital audio cache) for cheaper, and without spending weeks soldering and coding?
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#146Exposed, non-protected woofers looks cool - but I can imagine a butter-side-down Murphy's law event happening to me within a week of getting that thing...
Also, 4-inch woofers? That's pretty small to be attempting to produce any serious amount of bass.
(Source: I made myself a bass amp for my bass guitar when I was a teenager. It had a 12-inch woofer, and needed it. I don't think speakers have broken the laws of physics quite that well in the intervening years.)
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#147Teenage over engineering
This is thought out and useful criticism. Thank you for contributing.
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#148I could find no frequency response nor distortion measurements.
I don't get how this ad made it into the front page.
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#149Teenage Engineering makes cute, fun things, but more often than not they feel like they're very overpriced cute fun things for their functionality, and this is honestly no exception. In a sense they're like the Apple of nerdy products. Their Pocket Operators are the closest thing to a "cheap" product they have and even then, last time I checked, they don't even come with a protective case, which I personally find pre…
"Apple of X" categorization is very apt, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with trying to occupy that part of the market. I also consider Nespresso and Dyson to also be in that category, for example. It's obviously not everyone, and far from being the best value you can get, but I'm glad they exist.
Re: OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker
#150If they add the ability to dump the cache to a local or network drive, I'm sold.