Speaker Pioneer Sonos Fighting Google in 'Golden Age of Audio' (bloomberg.com) 86
Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music long before technology titans such as Alphabet''s Google entered the market with cheaper, internet-connected models. Now Sonos is hoping a U.S. trade judge finds Friday that its partner turned foe, Google, infringed its patents for multiroom audio systems. From a report: Sonos is asking U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Charles Bullock to support its bid to block imports of Google's Home and Chromecast systems and Pixel phones and laptops, which are made in China. "Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos' valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in an earnings call Wednesday.
The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.
The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.
Yay patent invalidation (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like a great place for some overly broad patents to become invalidated. Patents are on implementations, not ideas. They seem to have been preparing to be patent trolls for literal decades if you look at how many filings they have.
Re:Yay patent invalidation (Score:5, Interesting)
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Improvement patents are valid under current law. One could argue that transmitting the data digitally is an improvement over the previous analog design.
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It's probably an improvement, but you cannot patent inventions that are taught by existing art, and "do this digitally" is even less specific than the kind of "do this on a computer" patent that the Supreme Court rejected in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank [supremecourt.gov].
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Improvement patents are valid under current law. One could argue that transmitting the data digitally is an improvement over the previous analog design.
Transmitting data digitally is indeed an improvement over analog. But if having speakers in different rooms is a pre-existing technology, and transmitting data digitally is a pre-existing technology, I would say that transmitting data digitally to speakers in different rooms is an obvious application of pre-existing technology, and therefore not patentable.
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For one, clocks handle that. I don't think there's anything non-obvious about that.
But also, you get weird echoey sound anyway depending on where you stand between the two rooms because the speed of sound causes your position relative to the two rooms to matter.
If you're alone in the house, then location tracking could introduce slight delays (with minimal distortion) to keep the two in sync relative to your ears. But that's a lot of work with very little to gain.
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I bought a SLIMP3 from Slim Devices in 2001 when it was first released. I had ripped a bunch of CDs to my computer, and wanted to be able to play them on my amplified stereo system. I first tried putting the headphone/computer speaker output from my computer into my receiver, with mixed results (hum, had to control from the computer, had to have computer relatively close to receiver). I had purchased and assembled a low-power FM transmitter that would let me wirelessly transmit from my computer to my rec
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Well, then I can make an improvement patent over their patent, right?
Like using an open protocol and doing away with literally criminal lock-in and DRM aswell.
Or how about the improvement that I already see advertised: "100% app-less! Can be used with anything!"
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Well, then I can make an improvement patent over their patent, right?
Actually yes. That is indeed how it works. Happy filing! :)
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"A utility patent is a patent that covers the creation of a new or improved—and useful—product, process, or machine. "
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
Maybe someone disagrees that digital is an improvement over analog and another-someone agrees that it is. The courts will oversee a decision/compromise/something-else.
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Duh (Score:2)
The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful
Where have these fuckers been. Of course they have too much power. You would think that the people running the government never bothered to learn how to use a computer and prolly still use snail mail.
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Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the world's most valuable company at 2 TRILLION DOLLARS Apple, aren't monopolies.
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Government entities use any means of communication that does not leave a trail for someone to follow. Computers are inherently bad for government folks who don't want to be transparent. It's not that they don't want to use computers, they can't if they want to protect themselves from saying pretty much anything that isn't sanitized by some communications team.
'Golden Age of Audio' (Score:2)
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And their recordings were not of the greatest quality. They were referring to audio, not music. But honestly, pre-digital audio just doesn't sound great unless you really had money to spend. Unless you're just comparing it to what came before.
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About 2 years ago I decided I wanted a component stereo system again. I am also a cheap bastard. So I decided I would buy all of it from local thrift shops, with no part costing more than $20. Bit of a random challenge. It took me a few months and the parts don't visually match, but the sound is unbelievable. Total cost around $160, and it will blow away any consumer grade audio system you will find anywhere.
Of course ignoring the audiophile stuff, as it doesn't even ex
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Yup. Old Pioneer, Marantz, Digital Research, Sansui, Yamaha, Technics, even Denon, Rotel, Onkyo, Harman Kardon, Scott, were sensational.
You have to splash out for modern speakers, that old paper does fail after a few decades, and I'm reluctant to buy 1/4" tape recorders, the bulk tape business is awful. Digital recording means paying a bit more for lossless. CDs I have a bunch of, and still buy at yard sales, these I OWN.
Now to find a Technics SL-1200...
Those were the days, huh?
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Paper? ;)
*laughs in Bowers & Wilkins kevlar & aluminium membranes*
(Yeah, that was snobish of me.)
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Yup. Old Pioneer, Marantz, Digital Research, Sansui, Yamaha, Technics, even Denon, Rotel, Onkyo, Harman Kardon, Scott, were sensational.
Lots of info on the net on these old amps as well.
Pick up a 90's Denon PMA-560 for about $100 and clean it a bit, it'll blow you away: https://www.pma560.com/ [pma560.com]
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Golden Age? (Score:2)
Unless Sonos has some black magic (neural network?) in their hardware to make streaming audio sound good, it's not the "golden age of audio".
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Decades ago, we were presented with multi channel high definition digital audio. People went for mp3 players and earbuds instead.
The market has spoken People want convenience, not quality.
This is frustrating, since storage has grown to the point where we could just use FLAC for everything and have both.
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320Kbps AAC is fine, too. Most of the problem is no transparency on what codecs are being used to transmit audio wirelessly. Whether casting over WiFi or playing over Bluetooth headphones, the quality is usually reduced when there's no good reason.
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I don't know what you're talking about. Bad compression is most noticeable in white-noisy instruments like cymbals. And cheap, tinny headphones either reproduce those frequencies fine or make even uncompressed audio sound like overcompressed audio.
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I think you might be talking about the state of audio streaming a decade or more ago; or maybe cars are simply behind everything else (for various reasons)? About 3 years ago I bought a weird proprietary thing which has turned out to be pretty inconvenient (and untrustworthy, though I haven't caught it doing anything nefarious), but its performance leaves nothing to be desired. A Chromecast Audio can stream FLAC straight from mpd (at homeassistant's direction), with no compression artifacts unless they were
How Many Here Not Surprised By This? (Score:2)
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I suspect "Oh great, another bullshit patent retarding progress" was just as common.
This is not the 'Golden Age of Audio' (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the 70s.
Excellent amplifiers, receivers, and turntables.
- Virtually distortion-free amps, even in receivers.
- Turntables, tonearms, cartridges reaching unprecedented levels of performance,
- Even 1/4" tape exceeding all previous capabilities.
- Multitrack studio recording gave artists incredible options.
- Studio fidelity also vastly improving.
Today?
- Audio compression leaves most popular playback platforms stuck with reduced fidelity, by design.
- It's almost impossible to own your music. Even when you 'buy' it, in a few years or a decade you find out the rights have lapsed. Or the playback platform changed, or worse.
- Full-range speakers today are barely equivalent to 70s designs. What's the equal of an AR 3a, or a JBL L100? Nothing SONOS makes approaches even the bookshelf options from the 70s. You have to go out to the audiophile market, and neither SONOS nor Google are part of that. No, they are not.
- Today's claimed top of the line hardly even bother to come with default stereo options. Ya got to buy two of what they were expecting you to buy one of. Your headphones are the only option.
- And your Bluetooth headphones are inadequate, by design. AptX is barely adequate, and of course nothing that hangs from your ears is high fidelity. If I wanted on-ear headphones, I would take my old Pro4AA set back, though a decent set of Grados costs less. Going wired is defeating portable music options, since phones are our default players, and most are losing jacks. Oh, and with headphones, cost is no indicator of quality.
Nope, this is the golden age of accessibility, but not quality.
Re:This is not the 'Golden Age of Audio' (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the 70s.
Excellent amplifiers, receivers, and turntables.
Compared to what came before, absolutely true. Compared to what came immediately after, not so much.
- Virtually distortion-free amps, even in receivers.
The early transistor designs were OK. They were finnicky depending on what load you were driving. You didn't have really stable, very-low distortion designs until the high power Carver and Threshold amps in the 80s, and when McIntosh came out with their Autoformers that fixed impedance matching problems with complex crossover loads.
Turntables, tonearms, cartridges reaching unprecedented levels of performance,
Again, most were much better than what came before, until the Sota, Micro-Seki and VPI designs bettered them in the 80s.
Audio compression leaves most popular playback platforms stuck with reduced fidelity, by design.
Nearly every streaming service now offers lossless, unless you are claiming that lossless compression has an effect on the sound, which is insane.
- It's almost impossible to own your music. Even when you 'buy' it, in a few years or a decade you find out the rights have lapsed. Or the playback platform changed, or worse.
I can still play CDs I bought in the 80's and 90's. I can still buy CDs of new music. I can still play the AAC versions of songs I bought in iTunes 15 years ago. Not sure what you are getting at here. It takes about two minutes to buy a CD on Amazon and have it delivered to my front door in a day or two. I'm buying vinyl custom-pressed in England, it takes about a month to turn those discs around. Those come with download codes for the lossless versions of the album. You've, literally, never had more options to buy and own music.
- Full-range speakers today are barely equivalent to 70s designs. What's the equal of an AR 3a, or a JBL L100?
What's the modern equivalent of simple mid-range 3-way ported speaker? ELAC, Harbeth, Tekton, KEF, Paradigm, Dynaudio, McIntosh, Klipsch, B&W, NHT, Mission, Focal... heck I could go on for paragraphs. And they wouldn't be equivalent. The new speakers would be cheaper in adjusted dollars and have much better high-end response, as they started chinsing out on the magnets used in tweeters in the 70's, switching to ferrite magnets from Alinco used in the better 60's speakers. Decent modern speakers use rare-earth magnets which perform much closer to Alincos, allowing for much lighter voice coils and cones.
Nothing SONOS makes approaches even the bookshelf options from the 70s. You have to go out to the audiophile market, and neither SONOS nor Google are part of that. No, they are not.
So you're comparing $500 all-in-one Sonos speakers to audiophile speakers? That doesn't make *any* sense.
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Just one point - what is an 'all-in-one' speaker? 'Full-range'? This is what's claimed as evidence of a golden age of audio?
I'm probably ignoring the early 80s just from memory, true, but that era was one of rapid change.
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Frankly, for mere streaming, NO. YOU. CANNOT. TELL. THE. DIFFERENCE. TO. >=128kb/s AAC OR VORBIS OR OPUS.
There are professional audio engineers with $1500 headphones (and not 1500 Apple dollars, but 1500 actual engineering skill dollars), doing professional ABX tests, and they cannot tell the difference.
Lossless is for when you want to process the audio further. Like audio production etc. Which, nudge nudge, wink wink, *is lossy too by definition!*
The key things you need, is just a decent damn set of two
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Totally agree with you Mr. FO0t.
If the transport path to a speaker is bluetooth and you want better audio then you might as well buy 'oxygen free' speaker wire and titanium coated 3d goggles.
There have been MANY experiments doing A:B:C blind comparisons to see if experts can tell the difference, and as you stated it is subjective/mythical.
----
All that aside, mys CARVER receiver preamp, amp (around 300 watt RMS per channel) and those 9 foot tall speaker is a joy to listen to.
Absolutely blows away anything I
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Frankly, for mere streaming, NO. YOU. CANNOT. TELL. THE. DIFFERENCE. TO. >=128kb/s AAC OR VORBIS OR OPUS.
You need to listen to the right thing if you want to hear a difference. My torture test is the first few seconds of Royal Oil by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It's a very quiet snare roll that gets louder and louder. At low bitrates most codecs think the first few seconds are noise and smash it down into gibberish. It's usually pretty terrible under 128kb/s, but still audible at 128kb/s. At 160kb/s it usually sounds OK, but I've heard a difference doing ABX, depending on the codec. Weirdly enough the compara
Re: This is not the 'Golden Age of Audio' (Score:2)
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Sonos speakers are junk, but if you're looking at those, you're not even looking in the right market segment. Anything branded as "audiophile" is pretty much guaranteed to be a rip-off. Similar to PC peripherals/components getting branded as "gaming". It's a guarantee that you're overpaying, versus something that has the right specs but doesn't have that branding.
These labels work as a marketing ploy because people don't understand the specs. And in the case of audio, people don't know how to listen. Especi
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I suspect that when he's talking about compression, he's talking about dynamic range compression which is more about mastering music for crappy speakers (to be listened to on phones and such). The "loudness war" these days isn't what it used to be twenty years ago, though.
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Hate to tell ya, but you never owned any music. Maybe you should have actually read those license agreements. ;)
In reality, owning information literally contradicts causality, and the so-called industry knows it too.
All you got, was a contract that allowed you "limited access", provided that you kept the information you got a secret.
Which of course, is completely delusional, and even less verifiable, let alone enforceable.
And a medium on which that information was.
I agree that compression (as in ZIP, aswell
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Hate to tell ya, but you never owned any music. Maybe you should have actually read those license agreements. ;)
In reality, owning information literally contradicts causality, and the so-called industry knows it too.
All you got, was a contract that allowed you "limited access", provided that you kept the information you got a secret.
I own the records, CDs and tapes I have. No, I do not own the copyright to the music on them, but I own the recordings. There will not be a time when some service shuts down and the recordings disappear. I also do not have to continuously pay for the recordings. I paid once and that's it.
I can even sell the recording to another person.
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I would give you a mod-point, but then I couldn't reply.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post and sentiment.
I bought and sent back a Sonos speaker system, as I found the audio quality ... not so good. Maybe it's my ears?
I ended up going a little bit bargain basement with an Onkyo A-9110 - nuts and bolts basic - and a couple of Dali Zensors.
Bluetooth? No. Wifi enabled. nope. Ethernet? nada.
But the sound, for an overall outlay that cost less, it kicks the Sonos systems ass big time - and that's for a cheap "r
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I should add, my cheap-ass "retro" system is hooked up to a decent audio interface on my Mac - an Audient iD14.
I purchase lossless formats - flac.
I also invested in some PreSonus studio monitors, which are used for music production as well as learning and confirming the quality of the music I purchase.
They are unforgiving and a great deal of music sounds pretty tonk on them, as either it has been recorded badly, is not a high quality digital conversion or has been mixed to suit consumer level gear, which se
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I bought and sent back a Sonos speaker system, as I found the audio quality ... not so good. Maybe it's my ears?
It depends a lot on what you get and what you play. Sure, a Sonos One playswell for being the tiny thing that it is - but physics has its limitations. My parent's paired set of Play:5 (which I think is pretty much identical to the current "Five" ) sound amazing. If you added their subwoofer, I'm sure it would be even better. BTW, remember to tune it for the room - you can do that with a cell phone. It also depends on the audio source - are you using CDs or a lossless service, a high bit-rate service or ju
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The 70s was the golden age of audio quality, we are in the golden age of audio convenience.
I'd say that in the 70s, audio quality reached a level where it stopped mattering, except for a small portion of the population. Pretty much all progress in the consumer market after that was about making things more convenient, more efficient, more affordable.
Now, people have access to decent sound quality and plenty of power by just putting a small box anywhere in the room, before that, you either had to dedicate a
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You have insanely rose coloured glasses on when looking at the past. There's literally nothing produced in the 70s which isn't bested by something today. Not even "outdated" technology such as turntables.
Receivers weren't distortion free, not even in the high range. They were a leap above what came before but absolutely pale in comparison to designs available today. Not only are they able to produce distortion curves *actually* below hearing threshold but are able to do that with output impedance that don't
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What are you talking about? You can still buy CDs. And if you buy music digitally, practically every platform is DRM free. If you are worried about not being able to play MP3s or AACs in the future, you can burn them to CDs. Or convert them to PCM format files. or FLAC.
If you want to own the music, you can, it's not hard. If you're ref
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That was great in the 70s, but now houses are tiny and rooms are awkward shapes. These days people need room compensation more than anything else, because their listening environment is extremely sub-optional.
Meh (Score:1)
I wouldn't want their speaker. Have to use a fancy app, that you more than likely need to sign up for. Since they needs another revenue stream.
There has been stories of them bricking their devices because a new model came out, and only offered a $10 coupon.
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Sonos might not be as bad as Google, that is because they are smaller. I wouldn't want their speaker. Have to use a fancy app, that you more than likely need to sign up for. Since they needs another revenue stream. There has been stories of them bricking their devices because a new model came out, and only offered a $10 coupon.
This is completely misunderstood.
What happened was that Sonos was releasing a new "major" version of the software - S2. Their old one was rebranded S1. The oldest of their existing hardware - some of it which was 15 year old - would not get the new version of the software, but stay with S1. What Sonos did then was to offer a 30% trade-in discount on old hardware - you traded in your eligble old Sonos hardware (the models that didn't get S2), and got 30% discount on new hardware.
However, since Sonos doesn
Audiophiles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't it more for the audio challenged, who doesn't know any better?
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Audiophools.
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Someone better let all the luxury brands know they're fools for making expensive items then. Bentley, Lamborghini, Louis Vuitton, etc.
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Luxury brands are usually luxury, Sonos is not. It is just another spy speaker, producing low quality audio.
Prior Art (Score:2)
Nothing here is new. Slim Devices [wikipedia.org] was doing this over 20 years ago. They had their own software and hardware which allowed for multi-room playback of music streamed from a server. Hardware and software transitioned to Logitech [wikipedia.org] and eventually Logitech dropped it. LMS [mysqueezebox.com] it is still an active open source project and can be run on common hardware such as Raspberry Pi. I have run the ecosystem for years and it's great.
Yes, patent laws have shifted from first to create to first to file over this time period. I don'
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How amusing (Score:5, Funny)
Using the terms 'audiophile' and 'streaming music' together gave me the chuckle I needed - thanks!
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Well considering nearly every streaming service now provides lossless high res content (Spotify is advertising it as coming shortly in their app) I don't see why you should chuckle.
On the other hand the term 'audiophile' combined with the brand Sonos made my spit coffee all over my screen.
Good Grief (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sonos", "audiophile", and "streaming music" should never appear in the same sentence without a generous supply of pejorative and derogatory adjectives.
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All three are insults to people who think they are great for being associated with it. :) :)
That's why they hate when somebody mixes those words, while everybody else has a laugh.
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Nothing wrong with "streaming music". Apple, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, all provide lossless and high res lossless content. Spotify-HD is due to come out and expand that list next month.
Sonos on the other hand...
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Sums your comment up nicely. https://i.pinimg.com/originals... [pinimg.com]
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It is not the fact that people buy shit stuff that bothers me, it is the fact that the shit-hawkers complain when people show they are hawking shit.
Lock-in pioneer, you mean. (Score:1, Insightful)
Speaker pioneer? Like they added *anything* but lock-in, which is functionally equivalent to the crime called monopolism, to speakers...
In a sane world, they'd rot in prison or as outlaws in a cave.
What is the frame here? (Score:1)
"A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children.""
I think I see the point about the legal battles being simply wasteful, however there seems to be another angle in which actors interested in pressing the antitrust issue are viewing tech companies as a wealth of tax revenue (or antitrust fines) to be
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There are people who would like to take other people's money and spend it in a way that they deem more appropriate, without having to do the work of amassing the money themselves in the first place. I think they fail to realize that the people who amassed the money would not have done so if they thought it would just be taken away and spent by someone else.
I earn money so that I can spend it the way that I choose to spend it. I accept that I am taxed on my income and those taxes are spent on public polic
Suing Google, but not Amazon? (Score:2)
Multi-room audio on Echos has been around for a number of years now:
https://www.the-ambient.com/ho... [the-ambient.com]
More like "wireless speaker pioneer". (Score:2)
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Technology has only existed for 20-25 years, tops. Before that we were writing our school lessons with burnt sticks on the backs of shovels.
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Technology has only existed for 20-25 years, tops. Before that we were writing our school lessons with burnt sticks on the backs of shovels.
You had burn't sticks? Lucky.
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You think you are old school because you spin vinyl? I am so old school I spin Shellac.
I inherited an acoustic crank-wound Victrola. When I was young there were still some intact (and some shattered) glass records, and cactus needle styli that were said to be from WW2 metals rationing.
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I inherited an acoustic crank-wound Victrola. When I was young there were still some intact (and some shattered) glass records, and cactus needle styli that were said to be from WW2 metals rationing.
I have a similar machine. The sound is amazing, even if all the music I have is a tad dated. :)
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You had burn't sticks? Lucky./quote
You probably don't know how they put out the burning sticks....
Audiophiles???? (Score:2)
Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music
Audiophiles? What the fuck is wrong with your head, msmash?
These are crappy sounding mono speakers made for internet radio.
Audiophiles wouldn't touch these with a 10 foot pole.