Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 10 January 2007, 10:18 AM
Yamaha ha ha...
I've always liked Yamaha. Creator of the DX 7 FM synthesiser - Brian Eno's favourite, and a staple of my early 80s electropop phase - and maker of quirky yet solid equipment of all types, the company always did its own thing but never gave in to utter gratuitous technohype.
Until now. It has produced a pair of USB-powered speakers, the NX-U10, which doubtless sound fine and are handy things to have around. But it's gone and ruined the whole thing by claiming it can manage ten watts per channel, due to a "Charged Capacitor Amplifier".
Back to school, Yamaha! A USB port can source just two and a half watts, and it doesn't matter how many capacitors you charge you still won't get any more power out of it than that. Sure, you can squirrel away some power during the quiet bits and lob it out in the loud - but what if there's more loud than quiet? Sooner or later (sooner, I bet) it runs out of puff and it's back to the 2.5 watts - or 1.25 watts per channel.
So unless Yammy plug the speakers into eight USB ports simultaneously, or unless it's managed to rewrite the laws of physics (who knows, perhaps it's got a Steorn machine stashed away in there), it's guilty of the worst sort of 70s style Peak Total Music Power hyperinflationary guff.
And I expect better.
(Oh, and this is a test - Technorati Profile - so move on. Nothing to see here)
Until now. It has produced a pair of USB-powered speakers, the NX-U10, which doubtless sound fine and are handy things to have around. But it's gone and ruined the whole thing by claiming it can manage ten watts per channel, due to a "Charged Capacitor Amplifier".
Back to school, Yamaha! A USB port can source just two and a half watts, and it doesn't matter how many capacitors you charge you still won't get any more power out of it than that. Sure, you can squirrel away some power during the quiet bits and lob it out in the loud - but what if there's more loud than quiet? Sooner or later (sooner, I bet) it runs out of puff and it's back to the 2.5 watts - or 1.25 watts per channel.
So unless Yammy plug the speakers into eight USB ports simultaneously, or unless it's managed to rewrite the laws of physics (who knows, perhaps it's got a Steorn machine stashed away in there), it's guilty of the worst sort of 70s style Peak Total Music Power hyperinflationary guff.
And I expect better.
(Oh, and this is a test - Technorati Profile - so move on. Nothing to see here)
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