Drop + THX Announce Panda Wireless Premium Planar Ribbon Headphones

Drop, the company formerly know as Massdrop, now also a product design company targeting enthusiasts, announced its first premium wireless headphones, engineered in collaboration with THX. Combining the acclaimed THX AAA linear amplifier with a planar ribbon driver already tested and proven by Drop, the Drop + THX Panda headphones are able to offer 30+ hours of battery life, and where demonstrated at CES 2020, before being made available in the community-driven commerce platform.

audioXpress December 2019 dives into the latest wireless audio and DSP platforms and solutions in a dedicated Market Update, followed by a review of the latest Audio Precision APx555 B Series audio analyzer. David Logvin shares his experience with the xCORE VocalFusion development platform by XMOS, while Michael Steffes re-confirms a theory that cascaded amplifier + ADC harmonic distortion combine as voltage swings. Christopher Paul explores alternative approaches to the design of a linear current regulator for audio tube amplifiers, Menno van der Veen details an 18 W single-ended valve amplifier using Trans technology, and Richard Honeycutt investigates whether or not swapping out comparable tubes makes any audible difference in a guitar amplifier’s sound. Download your own copy now!

With consumers increasingly aware of active noise cancellation (ANC) technology, more robust Bluetooth wireless connectivity, and fast charging via USB-C, manufacturers are feeling the need to upgrade their existing models. And Bowers & Wilkins decided to do it all at once with two new in-ear, one over-ear, and one on-ear model, adopting the latest available platform and technologies from Qualcomm, including the latest aptX Adaptive Bluetooth transmission.

During the second day of the annual Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm unveiled its newest generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform. This is the world’s first commercial mobile platform supporting multi-gigabit 5G, the latest AI and immersive extended reality (XR) technologies, ready for the next-generation mobile devices in the first half of 2019. The flagship platform also introduces support for the new aptx Adaptive and TWS+ wireless audio experiences.

Qualcomm has launched Qualcomm aptX Adaptive, a next-generation audio codec designed to be dynamically adjustable. The breakthrough audio codec technology combines robustness, premium audio quality, scalability and low-latency designed to provide a single flexible solution for virtually all key wireless audio applications. Effectively, it combines the features of low-latency aptX, aptX, or aptX HD, depending on the content and the connectivity.