Virgin Media bumps its top broadband speed up to 200Mbps

With a £3 billion investment in its network, Virgin Media is looking to connect homes up and down Britain to its network for the first time. But that doesn’t mean it’s not thinking about the people it already calls customers. Today, the company launched Vivid, a new name for ultrafast broadband packages that have been given a welcome speed boost. Customers have been able to choose from 50Mbps, 100Mbps and 152Mbps speeds in the past, but with Vivid, they’ll be upgraded to 70Mbps, Vivid 150Mbps and Vivid 200Mbps.

Virgin Media says it has begun contacting all 4.6 million of its broadband customers in order to let them sign up for the new speeds ahead of the October 1st launch. By utilising DOCSIS 3 technology, it hopes to roll out improved speeds to 90 percent of subscribers by the end of the year. It should come as no surprise: Virgin Media has tested 300Mbps connectivity for around a year, but the company hasn’t said whether we can expect downloads to get even faster in the future. The best news about the upgrades? They’ll come at no extra cost, meaning subscribers on its lowest tier will enjoy similar speeds to those on BT’s top packages.

Source: Virgin Media (Businesswire)

Adobe explains how space images are Photoshopped

It’s not exactly a secret that those glorious space images NASA and other space agencies release go through extensive “Photoshopping,” just like magazines and billboard ads. Now, Adobe has explained what exactly happens during the post-processing stage in its latest blog post. First of all, the person who does the retouching can’t be an ordinary graphic designer: it usually has to be an astronomer. That’s because he has to be able to interpret raw data and differentiate image artifacts that need to be erased from vague planets and cloudy nebulae, among other celestial bodies.

One of these astronomers is Robert Hurt from Caltech, who explains that his work begins with “raw grayscale data from different parts of the infrared spectrum.” He amps up the contrast to bring out the most interesting features and gets rid of any artifact that shouldn’t be there. After that, he translates “infrared colors,” which are invisible to the naked eye into colors we can actually see. He also layers photos and data from different telescopes (such as Hubble and Spitzer) sometimes to create a more vivid and accurate image. Take for example, his work on the Orion Nebula below:

The Andromeda galaxy panorama at the top of this post also went through the same process, and so did the numerous Mars photos captured by Curiosity. Its cameras are optimized to take photos of the landscape and apparently can’t capture Martian skies. Someone like Hurt smooths out the jagged edges of the stitched photos the rover sends back and adds the reddish sky we typically associate with the red planet.

[Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler / NASA, JPL-Caltech, UCLA]

Source: Adobe

The new Play:5 is Sonos’ best speaker ever

The Sonos Play:5 is the wireless speaker that started it all. Sure, the Santa Barbara, California-based company had made products before it, but the Play:5 (known then as the S5) was its first all-in-one solution for home audio, and it was a hit. It’s since been joined by a family of products, including the Play:3 and the diminutive Play:1. Now, Sonos has gone back to its beginnings, creating an all-new $499 speaker to replace its aging flagship. This is the Play:5. It’s Sonos, reborn. Slideshow-323133

The first thing you’ll notice about the new Sonos is the way it looks. The original isn’t exactly an ugly piece of tech, but Sonos’ design language has moved on since its 2009 release, and the old Play:5 now looks complicated when compared to the rest of the family. The new model has a similarly utilitarian casing to its more-recent speakers — the first description that came to mind when I saw it was “elegantly oversized Play:3” — but there are a few nice additions to the established formula here. The best is a new capacitive control panel, which relies on gestures and taps rather than physical buttons for controls. It sounds like a small change, but this enables three things. First, you get a cleaner, sleeker-looking speaker. Second, you can change tracks directly from your Sonos for the first time. Third, the controls are not orientation dependent. That means skipping tracks and turning the volume up or down work as you’d expect no matter the speaker’s orientation.

The keen-eyed among you will have noted Sonos’ switch to a new color scheme (black and white, rather than gray), which was first introduced with its Boost hub. This change makes a bigger difference than you’d imagine. The matte all-black version will fade into the background of any home, while the white-and-black edition is the polar opposite. The white is really white, and the black is really black, which creates a punchy contrast and makes the Play:5 a rather striking statement piece. There are also some really nice touches, such as the centered Sonos logo, which looks good in any orientation thanks to its palindromic nature, and simple, flush plastic grille.

Inside is a trio of mid-woofers, as well as a central tweeter and two side-firing tweeters. Around the back is a large, ink-filled Sonos logo, and a selection of ports that’ll be familiar to existing users. There’s a flush power cord, a 3.5mm line-in (the Play:5 remains the only Sonos product to have such an input), and a single Ethernet port. If you’re looking to replace your existing Play:5, that might be an issue, as the original model has dual ports and acts as an Ethernet pass-through, but given the advances that Sonos has made with WiFi connections, it doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me.

This is the first Sonos speaker that sounds more expensive than it is.

Okay, enough about the looks. How does it actually sound? Judging audio quality, at least by ear, is always going to be subjective, but I can safely say the Play:5 punches well above its pricing, with a balanced, crisp sound across the range. That’s a high compliment, and something I’ve not been able to say about any Sonos before. Of course, all Sonos speakers sound good, but the reason I, and many others, have been willing to pay so much for the company’s equipment is more to do with the software experience than audio quality. The Play:5 changes that, big time. I was able to pick out the sort of subtle details that get lost when I’m listening on the two Play:3s I use in my home office. I’m talking about quirks of track mastering and tonal shifts that I hear all the time when listening on my (very balanced) AKG K702 headphones, but typically get lost with cheaper equipment.

As mentioned, the Play:5 can be arranged in three orientations — horizontally, or vertically on either side. When placed vertically, the pair delivers stereo audio that’s more focused, while horizontally they create a wider “room-filling” range. Thanks to orientation sensors inside the speakers, the inside-facing tweeters are disabled when two speakers are paired horizontally, which prevents the channels from being muddled.

The new speaker array has a lot to do with that quality bump, but what’s in front of it helps as well. The “simple” plastic grille I mentioned previously is in fact ridiculously intricate. There are some 60,000 individually drilled holes across its front, supported by a honeycomb structure that helps spread sound evenly beneath. Although you’d never know it, it’s a big change from, for example, the Play:3’s grille, which is simply a piece of plastic. Continuing the theme, even the solid-looking Sonos logo is deceptive — there are hundreds of even smaller holes drilled in there that prevent the logo from blocking sound from the central tweeter.

The overall sound experience is aided by Trueplay, a new dynamic tuning system that’s coming to the entire Sonos speaker range, minus the Playbar. You can read our full impressions on Trueplay in another article, but to briefly explain, it uses the microphones in an iOS device to calibrate the speakers automatically. The high concept is that you can put your speakers anywhere you like, and the Sonos controller app will adjust the power to various frequencies to compensate for the room’s acoustic deficiencies. It’s a simple system for an owner to set up, and helps balance the speakers considerably.

There are limits to what Trueplay can do, of course. One demo had a pair of speakers hidden behind heavy curtains, outputting some pretty horribly bassy and echoey audio. At the end of the Trueplay setup, the music was totally listenable, but some bass channels were very light. In less extreme examples, you’ll get a better end result. One interesting thing about the Play:5 is a pair of microphones, which at launch will be deactivated. There’s the potential they could be used to automatically tune the speakers with a future update, but whether that will happen is an unknown. It’s interesting that Sonos is future-proofing its speakers in this way, even if it’s unsure of the future that it’s proofing against.

Stereo separation isn’t perfect when you’re listening to one speaker.

If I have one complaint about the Play:5, it’s stereo separation. There’s a new speaker alignment inside, which is supposed to create a far better single-speaker experience. The company’s “sound experience leader” Giles Martin was keen to highlight the improved separation, but to me the channels just weren’t far enough apart. To be clear, this is something all single-box “stereo” speakers suffer from, and Sonos’ attempts here are definitely better than average. Perhaps I was looking for a miracle. Martin explained that they could artificially widen them farther, but it wouldn’t sound natural. Instead of software trickery, the separation you hear from the Play:5 comes from the placement of the side-firing tweeters.

When you have two Play:5s configured as a stereo pair, though, the experience is jaw-dropping. At $998 for two, you’d expect them to, I guess, but the quality here is light-years ahead of anything Sonos has done before. I don’t think we’ll see music professionals using these in place of monitor speakers, but even audio enthusiasts are going to struggle to not be impressed with the quality on offer for what, at this price, are still “consumer-level” speakers.

Still, even a $499 speaker is a tough sell to most, let alone a $998 pair. It’s likely that the new Play:5s will be more tempting to existing Sonos users (like me) who are looking to expand their system, rather than newcomers. That’s probably not such a bad thing. At $199 the Play:1 is a great-sounding “budget” speaker that will win over a far larger crowd than this ever will. The Play:3 is a good mid-way option at $299, especially when you have two in a stereo-pair, and the Play:5 is the all-out option at $499.

With two Play:5s, you get very close to pro-level sound.

In fact, more than a product, the Play:5 is a statement of intent. It’s Sonos saying it can compete with a “pro” setup for less than $1,000, and give you all the benefits of a WiFi music-streaming system at the same time. Although it falls a little short of that lofty goal, the Play:5 gets close enough that anyone looking to invest in a quality home audio setup owes it to themselves to check it out.

Why Sonos thinks you’re ready for a $500 speaker in your home

Sonos faces a unique challenge on the eve of launching the most important products it has developed in years. The company’s mission statement is simple to sum up: It wants to make it easy to listen to high-quality music anywhere in your home. And it believes its new products, the flagship Play:5 speaker and new software called Trueplay, move that goal forward. But there’s one part of that mission — “in the home” — that speaks to perhaps the toughest problem facing the company: How do you convince people who’ve grown up listening to music with their iconic iPod headphones to spend hundreds of dollars on an expensive home audio setup?

Slideshow-323178 “To your generation, the component stereo system was irrelevant,” Sonos CEO John MacFarlane tells this 30-something reporter during a visit to the company’s Santa Barbara, California, home base. “It’s not that younger people don’t like quality; it’s just that the breadth [of music available] outweighed the quality.” That’s been the case since Napster and the iPod kick-started the “good enough” music revolution: There are more passionate music fans than ever before, but so many of them listen on white earbuds, tinny laptops or mediocre Bluetooth speakers. How do you make people who don’t know what they’re missing spend $500 on the new Sonos gear?

All of the executives I spoke with gave a variation on the same answer to that question: Make a high-quality product, and users will come. “The promise we make to our customers is to try and deliver the ultimate home music experience,” says MacFarlane, “and if you keep moving that bar significantly, I think you’re in good shape.”

Fortunately for Sonos, the Play:5 and Trueplay both appear to be excellent new products. The new Play:5 replaces the six-year-old speaker of the same name, but it’s far more than an iterative update: It’s entirely redesigned, in terms of both how it looks as well as how it performs. Like Sonos’ other speakers, its main feature is that it connects to the internet and streams music from a wide variety of services. From there, you can use the Play:5 on its own or buy two and make a stereo pair; you can also link them up with any other Sonos speakers anywhere in your home. This time, though, Sonos has also added a host of intelligent features, including capacitive touch controls and built-in accelerometers that allow the speaker to be placed in three different orientations.

The speaker sounds wonderful — but Trueplay might be the more unexpected innovation. Put simply, it’s a tuning system found in the Sonos app that lets you optimize the sound coming from the speakers. It works by emitting a tone that your iPhone’s or iPad’s microphone reads. Then, as you move around the room with your device, slowly raising and lowering it, Trueplay is able to figure out what frequencies are being lost or over-emphasized, and it adjusts the output accordingly. It takes all of two minutes, and makes the sound quality from your speakers dramatically better. And it works not just on the new Play:5, but on all the company’s speakers (save for the more home theater-centric Playbar).

Sonos “sound leader” Giles Martin (son of the famed Beatles producer George Martin and a Grammy-winning producer in his own right) says that the goal of Trueplay is to get your speaker sounding as good as it does when Sonos is testing it in the ideal acoustic setting, regardless of where that speaker sits in your home. “The first thing you have to do is get really, really happy with the speaker,” says Martin. And that’s a big part of his job. Sonos aims for its speakers to reproduce music as the artist or producer or sound masterer intended when a record is finalized; that’s why the company works with people like Martin or Rick Rubin. From there, Martin says, “Trueplay gets us to the point where you’re really, really happy with the speaker anywhere you put the speaker.”

Trueplay promises to make every speaker Sonos ships sound better.

That’s not to imply that Sonos has been shipping speakers that don’t sound good outside of the perfect listening environment; it’s just that the company knows it can’t account for the endless number of environmental factors that affect the clarity and sound reproduction. “It’s really easy to say we can’t control for where people put their speakers,’” says Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten. “Well, what if we said we could?”

Of course, the idea of tuning a speaker is not new, but Martin says that Sonos endeavored to make it simple for the user while disguising how complex the process really is. Typically, getting a speaker professionally tuned means that it’ll sound perfect in one “sweet spot” where the speaker’s sound is converging — but it might not sound great everywhere else. Trueplay takes a whole host of readings around your room and attempts to make the speaker sound uniformly great, regardless of where you are sitting. “That’s much more complicated,” Martin says. “It adds lots of variables, but we do it in a way that is actually simpler for the listener.” And Trueplay needs a quiet room to work correctly during the setup process, but it is smart enough to know it should ignore some background sounds. For example, the Trueplay test tone emitted from the speaker during setup tends to make dogs bark, so the software knows not to take into account the sound of riled-up canines when you’re setting up your speakers.

The real test will be once this is out in consumers’ hands, because Sonos can’t afford to have the system mess up. If someone gets a new speaker, tunes it with Trueplay and ends up making it sound worse — or even if the process is just too complicated or not easily explained — then the whole concept goes out the window. In my testing experience, Trueplay worked well and setup was easy, but I had the benefit of having it explained to me by Sonos employees. Most consumers will have to rely on the app’s directions and how-to video, something the company said it intends to get right to avoid any setup problems.

When it comes to the new Play:5 speaker, the goal was simple: to make a speaker so good that people will notice details in the music they’ve never heard before. In practice, the Play:5 achieves that goal and then some. In a stereo pair, you really do get that sense you’re experiencing the music in a way you haven’t previously, with details that otherwise would get lost on lesser devices. MacFarlane is right: Many people my age haven’t heard music that sounds this good. Even as a single speaker, the stereo separation and wide soundstage is readily apparent, although most people spending $500 on a speaker will probably want a stereo pair, something that puts these speakers out of reach for many people.

Still, for that investment, Sonos is promising a 10-year lifespan for the Play:5. As a builder of speakers, it’s the kind of promise it needs to make; after all, most other high-quality speakers also claim to last that long. But it’s trickier for Sonos, a company that builds a lot of technology into its devices: Who even knows how we’ll be listening to music five years from now, let alone in a decade? But Sonos owners should feel assured that the company will continue to support its products down the line. Trueplay coming to the old Play:5 is a perfect example of that.

“You want to make your passionate owners happier and happier,” says MacFarlane. “Of course we could have made the choice that old Play:5s were abandoned, but it’s much better not to.” Even though much of the consumer electronics business is pushing fairly disposable devices that get upgraded every few years with new features, Sonos doesn’t think that’s a strategy worth pursuing. “We want you to fill your home with Sonos,” MacFarlane says. “If we ask you to replace it every year or every other year, that’s not cool.” And in a move that’s becoming more common, there’s technology in the new Play:5 (like a pair of microphones) that it can’t even use yet. But future software updates might make it able to optimize itself, for example, without needing to do the Trueplay setup with an iPad as an external mic.

“If we ask you to replace [your speakers] every year or every other year, that’s not cool.”

Of course, none of this matters if Sonos can’t convince people that consumers will get big benefits out of investing in its ecosystem. It appears the company is doing well so far: It has offices in six countries and is hiring aggressively to grow to its 1,200-employee workforce. There’s also the $199 Play:1 speaker, which company execs seemed to suggest has been a gateway drug of sorts to win over more customers. And the belief is that continuing to offer a connected home music experience that merges both hardware and software will continue to expand Sonos’ audience.

But despite Sonos’ strengths, there’s no question that cheaper and more portable Bluetooth speakers are rapidly becoming the go-to choice for many consumers who want to play music in their home. There are legitimately good-sounding speakers like the Logitech UE Boom 2 that come with the added benefit of being small enough to throw in your bag. Bluetooth speakers also work natively with the apps you already use on your phone, while Sonos requires you to use its own app to control its speakers.

That’s because Sonos streams music directly from the internet to its speakers, rather than streaming from your phone or tablet to the speaker. Yes, the Sonos way offers better sound quality and avoids some of the annoyances of Bluetooth — like a relatively short range and the potential for notifications to interrupt your listening experience. But Bluetooth speakers let you stick with the apps you use every day when you’re out and about, rather than forcing you into an entirely new app and interface.

As far as Sonos is concerned, however, it’s not even playing in the same market as Bluetooth devices. “There’s not a Bluetooth speaker out there that’s anywhere close to [the Play:5],” Martin says. And while he says those speakers do have a place, the Sonos experience extends beyond just audio quality.

MacFarlane agrees, saying that the quality you get from a Play:1 with Trueplay is so good that “five years ago you couldn’t have spent $20,000 and achieved that. It’s getting better and better, and no Bluetooth speaker on the planet can touch a Play:1 with Trueplay.” That’s a rather hyperbolic statement, but there’s no doubt even the company’s entry-level speaker is a potent performer. As for trying to convince people of what they’re missing out on, it’s not a group MacFarlane feels the need to chase. “I’m not a big believer of trying to convince people of things they don’t need,” he says.

Sonos isn’t going to convert those Bluetooth speaker buyers and iPod headphone wearers overnight — and that’s OK.

Product officer Whitten takes a bit more of a pragmatic view when discussing the challenges Sonos faces. “It’s a question of how do we do a better job of showing people that experience. … It’s something we’ll keep working on, and we work on that through how we talk about Sonos in our advertising, how it appears when you go into a retail store, all those kinds of things.” But it all comes back to the experience, which is why Whitten believes the company’s happy customers are probably the best marketing he can find. “The best possible introduction to Sonos that anyone can get is at a friend’s house,” he says.

Ultimately, even with a solid lineup of products and plenty of happy customers, Sonos isn’t going to convert those Bluetooth speaker buyers and iPod headphone wearers overnight — but that doesn’t mean the company is failing. It’ll likely continue on in a similar trajectory to what brought it here today; music fanatics who are serious about home listening will be delighted, while everyone else will continue with the good-enough devices they currently use. It’s a market that has served Sonos well thus far; with a broader and better product portfolio, the company should continue to find success with that somewhat niche group. And as streaming continues to get more and more mainstream (and as 20-somethings hit their 30s and have more disposable income), Sonos could be in a prime position to capitalize on the next generation of music lovers. It just needs to play the long game to get there.