This side table is also a powerful 200W high-definition sound system!





It may look like a demure little table for your coffee cups and magazines, but the Cube was designed to pack a punch. Sitting within its spectacular hand-crafted wooden frame is an incredibly powerful 200W speaker system comprising two full-range speakers and a massive double bass reflex woofer with dual aluminum vents. That’s audiophile-speak for “This table knows how to drop the bass”.

Ultimately the Cube is a uniquely expressive piece of furniture that’s more than just a surface for resting your cups. Combining patented audio-technologies into one award-winning piece of furniture, the Cube surprises with how good it sounds for a device that small. Moreover, it eliminates the need for you to even own a separate speaker set because your furniture IS your speaker set. Considering how the Cube could be used by regular people as well as audio-enthusiasts, it comes outfitted to connect to a variety of devices. It has built-in Bluetooth, which means you can hook your phone, tablet, or even laptop to it, while the option of analog RCA connectivity, digital optical input toslink (DAC 24-bit 192Khz), and a 3.5mm input means the Cube could be hooked to a host of external devices like your television or even vinyl player. The Cube’s upper surface is perfect for resting your phone, placing a mini bonsai planter, or just stashing magazines. If you want to use it as a table to keep your coffee, you’d best use a stable cup and a coaster, because the Cube’s control panel sits on the top too, allowing you to play with the volume, bass, and treble. There’s even a shelf below the audio unit, for storing larger piles of magazines and books.

Each Cube comes meticulously hand-crafted in the Spanish and French Basque Country regions, close to La Boite’s company headquarters. Although they come outfitted with spectacular sound-systems, the Cube’s primary role really is to look like high-end furniture too… to that end, the Cube table features a variety of styles including dark and light wood while also using materials like leather trims, metal accents, and even a variant with a Corian counter-top for that faux-marble effect. Given how exquisitely they’re built, the Cube doesn’t come cheap. Each unit retails for €1290 ($1531), and the company goes as far as to offer free shipping in France and the rest of the EU as well as an international 3-year warranty on the entire unit.

Designer: Samuel Accoceberry for La Boite

The BassMe wearable turns your body into a subwoofer.

Your chest is basically an acoustic chamber. If you’ve ever been to a concert and you felt your chest thump along with the kick of a drum, it’s because your thoracic cavity is reverberating with the music. Given that your lungs are always filled with air, your torso is just an acoustic chamber that literally thumps to the loud music you’re listening to, increasing your feelings of euphoria and enjoyment… and while that feeling isn’t quite possible with headphone-based audio (since the audio goes directly into your ears instead of passing through your body), BassMe fills in that gap.

BassMe is a wearable subwoofer that rests conveniently on your shoulder, with the audio-element sitting against your rib-cage. Designed to be worn with headphones or even with a VR kit, BassMe helps you feel the audio, rather than just listen to it. Using state-of-the-art sound-wave and vibration technology, BassMe delivers rich low-end frequencies to you, widening the range of frequencies you experience while listening to music or to any sort of audio. It complements your audio with zero lag, and delivers sound so efficiently that users are often compelled to reduce the volume on their headsets just because they can already hear so well. Made for being worn while listening to music, watching movies, or playing games, BassMe gives you the effect of having a powerful hi-fi speaker unit near you, so the music feels pumpier, movies seem more immersive, and those gunshots and car engines in your games really feel believable!

Designer: Studio Duroy

Samsung’s new soundbars detect what’s on screen to optimize output

Samsung has announced its new soundbar lineup: the Q series, optimized for -- you guessed it -- the company's QLED TVs. The HW-Q70R and HW-Q60R are the latest offerings from Samsung's ongoing collaboration with Harman Kardon, with the premium HW-Q70R...

The Echo Sub brings serious bass to your current Amazon home speaker

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The Echo and Echo Dot have never been truly hi-fi audio devices. Their primary (in fact their only) aim has been to facilitate voice-based interaction and to gather data on users to serve them better using Amazon services. Today, at Amazon’s surprise hardware event, that all changed. The company revealed an add-on Echo Sub unit that could be used alongside the Echo and Echo Dot. Its purpose? To bring the bass!

Colliding head-on with companies like Sonos (or even Apple’s exorbitant Home Pod), the Echo Sub is a 100W down-firing woofer that can pair with existing Echo devices to bring a rich low-end to the music you listen to. The Sub can connect with as many as two Echo devices too, to give you a rather nifty stereo 2.1 setup. The Echo Sub’s up for pre-orders, with shipping beginning as soon as the end of this month!

Designer: Amazon

Click Here to Pre-Order

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Click Here to Pre-Order

Amazon’s Echo Sub adds some much-needed bass to its smart speakers

The Echo is a fine enough smart speaker, but what it's lacking is any sort of oomph in terms of sound quality. That's why Amazon will release the Echo Sub this October. The diminutive bass-maker features 100W of power and a 6-inch downward firing woo...