Based on popular demand, I’ve decided to update our classic How To video on creating audio books on iTunes. What’s an audio book, you ask?

It’s a special audio file that is organised separately from your music, and has the ability to automatically bookmark itself so that you can always carry on from where you left off, and the ability for you to control the speed of a speaker without distorting his or her voice. In otherwords, an audio file designed specially for long spoken audio!

Here is the setup.

On my desk, I have setup the 2.1 Altec Lansing 121i. The two speakers right in front, seperated by ~30cms, and the sub-woofer on the side. The EQ was set to the values I generally use for listening, with both Bass and Trebel set to the middle. I placed the X-Minimax on top the Altec Lansing speakers during the test.

I was using my MacBook as the audio source with my output volume set to 50% in the OS X System Prefences.

I placed my Zoom H4, in the center between the two speakers, and ~30 in front. It was pointed directly at the speakers and had it’s sensitivity set to Medium, using the builtin condenser microphones for capturing the sound.

I recorded the following things with this setup.

1. I played back the start of episode 108 of 65Bits through the two speakers and recorded them using the H4.

2. I played back start of the track El Campo by Derek K. Miller through the two speakers and recorded them using the H4.

3. I played back another section of the track El Campo by Derek K. Miller through the X-Minimax, with the volume in OSX set to 90% and recorded it using the H4. This was to test the distortion at high volume on the X-Minimax.

Recordings.

All were compressed as MP3 at 320kbps using LAME.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, the X-Minimax does much better than expected compared to the Altec Lansing 121is. The low frequencies are obviously missing, but that’s comparing a Sub Woofer with the X-Minimaxs. But you can see the high end and the clarity captured very well by the X-Minimax. The stereophonic image helps a lot in that. Also you can see that even with the output is very high, the X-minimax doesn’t distort even a little bit.

Overall, I wouldn’t say that the X-Minimax is a replacement for your desktop speakers, or anything close to a great pair of headphones. But if you are someone who travels a lot, and would like to share your audio with people around you (with their consent ofcourse), or just listen without headphone, this is a great piece of gear. The power and quality it offers at this size and portability is really amazing.

Having said all this I will encourage everyone to not blast out your favourite tunes on these guys, just because they don’t distort, such that everyone in MRT or Bus can hear you!!! It’s your music, and we’d prefer if you keep it to yourself.

Also, do check out Episode 12 of Gear65 where we do a video review of the X-Minimax.

There were a few more details/speculation which floated around the internet. The first was an email update from Creative, which states..

Drawing our inspiration from the intelligence of Mother Nature – who through over a billion years of evolution has designed the basic building block of life: the stem cell – we have created a stem cell-like silicon that is able to grow and multiply into different solutions and ecosystems.

With an investment that spans over 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years, the world is poised to experience a breakthrough that will better lives beyond our imagination.Even in the midst of these turbulent times, you will discover incredible recession-friendly business opportunities that enable you to thrive and prosper.

To find out more about Zii and how it can change your life, visit our booth (booth #30651) at CES 2009, or go to Zii.com from 8 January 2009 for updates.

And the next was a US Trademark Office search for the term “Zii”, which seemed to be registered under Creative for a very generic usage. It listed almost all the various fields which Creative has every dabbled with.

So what is this Zii??

Knowing Creative’s love of playing with words, especially during their “viral marketing” campaigns, I looked at the big picture, to look for more clues with regards to what they were actually doing.

The HW geek in me caught on to “a stem cell-like silicon that is able to grow and multiply into different solutions“. It reminds me of dynamically reconfigurable SoCs or ECAs.

The idea is very simple.. Instead of have 1 super-fast and super-powerful core in a PC.. We can have 1000 not-so-fast and not-so-powerful cores such that, working together the 1000 will be the same at the 1 super core. But, if we can have the connections between them made dynamically reconfigurable; which is, they can be changed by the software, while the software is running; these 1000 cores can be used very efficiently.

Power savings aside (because you can individually turn off any of the 1000 cores), we can now configure (wire up) these small cores to execute the specific logic that we want.. And that suddenly opens up the possibility of many many interesting applications. Our current notions of limitations of speed and performance are totally irrelevant in such architectures.

For eg. let’s say we want to watch a video, we can configure the cores to form a H.264 decoder, and suddenly the H.264 decoding becomes a very fast process, since it’s being done automatically by the HW (Hardware), and not by SW (Software) as it is done in most cases today. If we can drasctically speed up such processor intestive tasks, like Multimedia rendering, and complex calculations, we will start seeing many more interesting advances in computing technology, including the efficiency which Creative has promised.

But why would Creative do something like this?? Which brings me to the part of the email ” 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years“. 10 years is a long time. And something that Creative has been ignoring about the same amount of time is their IC Design business. Yes we’ve had the X-Fi, but that was just one, and it probably was designed much earlier. What else??

And also if Creative has really been doing this for 10 years, they must have taxed the rest of the company by drawing loads of funds and skilled manpower. Which, we have seen happening as Creative has had some financial troubles in the recent years, and also they’ve had a lack-luster product line-up following the X-Fi.

While my analysis is surely not sound, it’s something that would be really be fun to see from Creative. The concept has been looked at by various companies all over the world, but no one has put such a system into commercial applications. With Creative’s reach into the Sound Card market, it might be able to launch this technology into the Commercial market.

Well.. we can never really tell. All we can do is to wait and wander around booth #30651 at CES 2009.

Here are the audio recordings of the panel discussions.

This week, Love is in the air, with the bounties that the various tech leviathans have bestowed upon us: Videos on Flickr, Google’s app engine for FREE computing, The amazing little beauty that is HP’s Mini-Note, and of course more iPhone rumours. We also shower love and beg for the swift return of Streetdirectory.com, for without which we are simply lost in the wilderness of Singapore’s urbanity. With all this love floating around, we’re sure you guys will want to feel safe whilst practicing all this free loving, and such safety comes easily with Gadget Track, software that you can use to track your PC down, when you lose your laptop all you have to do is activate it and the programme will try to phone home. You may also want to keep all those naughty, naked, sprawled out on that carpet pictures of your Macbook safe, with EasySafe. Which is simply a key to all your sensitive files.

With Love and Adoration
Farinelli, That guy you checked out last night, asked for his twitter, gmail, FB, Myspace etc. etc., and realised that he’s too hot for you anyway
NTT, that guy who checked you out last night, and you felt a familiar stirring in your… Thinkpad
Jerrick, You just want him coz he’s that extra special 65th bit
Kai-Yi, You know you want a guy who drives a Lamborghini in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue

Stories this episode :

Flickr Adds Video Capabilities to Service – NO Video on Flickr Petition.

Google App Engine

HP Mini-Note 2133 announced – and previewed in Singapore

Australia to get 3g iPhone unlocked. Singapore implications?

Virtual Map shuts down Streetdirectory.com site after losing suit.

Byte of the Week: YouSwop

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