Amazon Announces Echo Show ...and It's Not a Speaker!

Amazon announced its latest member of the Alexa voice service hardware family, following the original Echo Dot ($49.99) and Amazon Echo (now $149.99) devices that kick-started the whole Voice Personal Assistant (VPA) trend, motivating every single consumer electronics and mobile devices brand to respond with similar concepts. The only problem is that the new Amazon Echo Show ($229.99) is not so much a speaker but a complete Alexa "videophone" and home automation interface with a camera.

Ahead of the Bluetooth World 2017 meeting (March 28-29 2017), which will bring together more than 1,000 developers, executives, and start-ups on a busy exhibition floor to promote Bluetooth development and applications, we thought it would be appropriate to share part of the interview we had with Mark Powell, Executive Director, Bluetooth SIG, at CES 2017, where we discussed the Bluetooth 5 roadmap.

CanJam NYC 2017 took place on February 4-5, 2017, in the fabulous Broadway Ballroom at the New York Marriott Marquis, right in the heart of Times Square. Over 2000 earphone and headphone fanatics swarmed over the 55 table-top booths (showing about 100 brands). In this brief report we have chosen to highlight some of the products, companies and technologies that caught our attention.

Like every year at this time, the world of telecom and mobile descends upon cosmopolitan Barcelona for another edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) promoted by the GSM Association (GSMA). As we have noted before, MWC is becoming a larger forum for cutting-edge audio technologies than other industry events: anything that's wireless audio, wearables, and IoT, and even small dedicated audio technology providers have taken notice and are attending in full force.

The 2017 edition of the Winter National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Show in Anaheim will be remembered for both the pouring rain that affected all of California during three of the four show days, while also confirming the reasons why it is one of the best and most vibrant events on the audio industry calendar.

Following the announcement made earlier, on December 7, 2016, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) officially adopted Bluetooth 5 as the latest version of the Bluetooth core specification. Key updates to Bluetooth 5 include longer range, faster speed, and larger broadcast message capacity, as well as improved interoperability and coexistence with other wireless technologies.

The 141st Audio Engineering Society (AES) International Convention in Los Angeles, CA, was a great success - maybe not as vibrant as past New York editions, but probably one of the best in terms of content/topics and number of sessions. The exhibition was always well attended and exhibitors were always busy, especially those targeting studio/recording applications - sometimes it even felt a bit like the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Show, with celebrities like Stevie Wonder walking around and some demos pumping the volume a little too much.

The 2016 Audio Engineering Society (AES) International Conference on Headphone Technology took place August 24-26, 2016, in Aalborg, Denmark, at the Nordkraft building - an old power station converted into a mix of community and events center near the city's new music center, Musikkens Hus. Approximately 160 registered participants had the opportunity to attend more than 40 paper and keynote presentations, while 20 companies promoted demonstrations. One of the most successful AES international conferences ever!

Google, the company that makes a business out of anything that’s Open Source, announced its new Omnitone project, a platform that they say “brings spatial audio to the web in order to provide more immersive VR experiences, using only the Web Audio API.” The platform uses all the known spatial audio, ambisonics and binaural techniques, including several existing open source efforts, now released on a set of integrated tools that enable exploring immersive audio or spatial audio directly on a web browser.

Recently I attended the excellent, The Home Entertainment (T.H.E.) Show in Newport, CA. Celebrating its 6th anniversary, and still mourning the tragic loss of its president and founder, Richard Beers, T.H.E. Show Newport exceeded its own 2015 attendance figures, with more than 10,000 attendees. I left with excellent memories of a wonderful organization, a very pleasant location (Irvine), and the motivation to return. Some excellent systems left me with enduring impressions that I thought fit to share in this space.