Ever since Samsung launched Bixby, there have been rumours that it's working on a smart speaker featuring the in-house AI - designed to compete with the likes of the Amazon Echo or Google Home. From the looks of things it's just about the most unanticipated device Samsung has produced, because nobody really likes Bixby, but that isn't stopping the company from trying anyway. Word is the speaker will be arriving at the same time as the Galaxy Note 9. Read More >>

If your smartphone of choice has forced you to upgrade to wireless headphones, you probably hate having to swap them out for a corded pair when you want to play your Nintendo Switch with a little privacy. The portable console doesn’t come with Bluetooth, but a tiny dongle called the Genki does, theoretically making it easy to upgrade your Switch so it plays nice with your wireless headphones. Read More >>

An instructor of mine once compared mixing a song to baking a cake. The various tracks are the ingredients, and once everything is mixed and baked, as with a cake, those ingredients can’t be deconstructed. Or can they? AI researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created an app that can isolate a performance in a video by simply clicking on a specific instrument. Read More >>

A Los Angeles superior court jury has ordered Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young to pay former business partner Steve Lamar just over $25 million (£18.9 million) over royalties on the sales of Beats headphones, Billboard reports. The ruling expands a 2007 settlement granting Lamar royalties for only one pair of headphones, the Beats Studio. Read More >>

Weird old Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood is coming back for a sixth series, don't you know, only it's not going to have quite the same impact as the return of his most famous chum the Doctor; it's an audio production distributed on CD, as was the fifth series of the adventure serial. Read More >>

If you were to chart the history of my audio setup, the timeline would be delineated by one thing: Before Sonos, and After. Read More >>

Cheap soundbars are a lot like cheap headphones. Many of them will do the job. Few of them will do it well. The new TV Mate by Samsung fits firmly in the first category. It will indeed make the audio on your TV louder and better. It will not, however, trick your friends into thinking you have a souped-up home cinema. Read More >>

There are two ways of listening to music: you can shut everything out and focus purely on the tunes, or you can use music to enhance other activities in your life. Headphones and earbuds, especially those of the noise-cancelling variety, are quite good at first; you just put some on, turn up the volume, and let everything else fade away. However, when it comes to the second kind of enjoyment of tunes, earbuds aren’t quite as proficient. Now sometimes that’s a good thing, because I doubt many people like hearing others grunt at the gym or taking a jackhammer to the street. But at the same time, wearing earbuds often means you lose the ability to hear the bell of a bike coming up from behind you, or the chirping of birds on a beautiful day in the park. Read More >>

The internet is always there, vast and accessible, from wherever you happen to be—until it isn’t. Maybe you’ve got a long flight ahead of you and need some reading material, maybe you just want to store something for safe-keeping. Whatever your reason here’s how you can download just about anything you come across on the internet with free tricks and tools. Read More >>

Five years after Sonos delivered the original Playbar, still one of the best soundbars you can get for under £1,000, and easily the best in the £700 range, the company is back with a new and mostly improved model. The Sonos Beam. Read More >>

Ever since Dr. Dre forgot about Monster and walked into the loving arms of Apple, the overpriced cable manufacturer has struggled to keep its head above water. But it’s 2018 and every failing company has one ace up its sleeve when it needs to save itself: Pivot to blockchain. Say hello to “Monster Money.” Read More >>

Ossic, the company developing the Ossic X over-ear headphones designed primarily for virtual reality headsets, has ceased production after failing to deliver pre-orders to crowdfunding backers and is shutting down “effective immediately.” While Ossic blames lack of demand for its niche product (in addition to manufacturing difficulties), the company sure did raise a lot of money with its headphone concept, and to say people are a bit annoyed they aren’t getting their fancy cans anytime soon is an understatement. Read More >>

Today is the day OnePlus launches the OnePlus 6, the latest in its line of budget premium-tier smartphones. It's also got other products in the pipeline, and they've just announced that a new set of wireless earbuds are on the way. But unlike Apple, Samsung, Sony, and countless other companies, OnePlus isn't going down the zero-wire route. Read More >>

Remember when Apple first released Airpods? For about a week everyone scoffed at just how silly wearers looked - and then, inevitably, we tried them for themselves and they became wildly successful. Read More >>

Work ceased for several minutes at Gizmodo Media this afternoon as everyone stopped to listen to a four-second sound file of someone either saying “laurel” or “yanny.” No one could agree. I heard “laurel.” Read More >>