After announcing new “reference level” televisions, Sony is on another high-end tear. This time it’s audio: A battery-powered player that costs AU$10,000. That’s about $7,300 or £5,600.  The Sony DMP-Z1 features a “top-end stationary class headphone amplifier” and the device will decode all sorts of files including DSD, FLAC and even MQA for those Tidal fans out there. …

Intel has invented a new shape for solid state drives: the “ruler.” It’s a foot-long housing primarily for use in datacenters.  Intel describes its 32TB DC P4500 as “the world’s densest SSD.” By combining 32 of these “rulers” together you can hold up to 1 petabyte of data — that’s a thousand terabytes. The new design is intended to reduce …

Update, Aug. 9: The Galaxy Note 9 is now official, and we’ve gone hands-on. Original story follows. We’re still two days away from the presumed official announcement of Samsung’s next phone, but it seems you can buy cases for it already. Case manufacturer Olixar, as spotted by Sammobile, has made cases available for sale alongside images of what appears to be the …

Samsung has announced mass-production of 4TB consumer SSDs, aimed at improving storage for laptops and other devices.  Samsung hasn’t released official pricing for the in-production drives, but its 4TB 860 Evo is currently selling for over $1,000. By comparison, you can get a 4TB mechanical drive for $100.  The new SSDs are the first to use 4-bit quad-level cell (QLC) …

In a piece of good news for the troubled manufacturer, Essential has announced its PH-1 phone has become the first non-Google phone to receive the latest Android operating system on the day of release. Though this is a welcome development for the Android OS in general, Essential’s own future is uncertain. While the company says that its PH-1 phone will continue to receive updates …

Samsung on Monday unveiled a new memory chip for mobile devices that promises 50 percent speed improvements and 30 percent better battery life.    Samsung says the chip is the world’s first 10-nanometer 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM that it’s 1.5 times as fast as the mobile LPDDR4X DRAM chips used in current flagship mobile devices. The chip will be able to support …

Now that Sonos has added AirPlay 2 connectivity to its range of speakers, it’s time to get on board the Apple train. With AirPlay 2 you can now stream to a Sonos device straight from your iPhone, or ask Siri on an iPhone, iPad or HomePod to control your new Beam sound bar, for example. Unlike most Sonos setups, however, …

Hey Siri, make friends with my Sonos sound system. Sonos has become the first third-party company to support the Apple AirPlay 2 standard, which offers multi-room playback and lets you speak to Siri through a separate device. Sonos has announced that its One, Play:5, Playbase and the recently released Beam now support Apple’s standard. This follows the company demonstrating Siri and Alexa working …

Mac users may be excited by the addition of a dark mode to MacOS Mojave but did you know this is something Windows 10 ($144 at Amazon) could already do? When the Windows 10 Anniversary Update arrived a few years back it brought the ability to put your device into Dark Mode, which offers black windows instead of white ones. Whether you’re …

What’s not to love about slimline receivers? They’re so little! So tiny. Come here little cutie!! Look at you! Marantz has been making half-height AV receivers for many years, and the NR1509 and NR1609 are the latest to slip off the production line. The look is familiar, and the features are more or less the same. Now that everyone is …