Forty years ago, folkie supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were in their prime – and on tour. Now, Graham Nash and gone back to the archives and given the recordings a modern tech update.
Nash spent years finding and finessing the best cuts from that seminal tour, when the band would play in front of as many as 80,000 fans at a single show. Then recently, in light of bandmate Neil Young’s high-resolution Pono music player project, he scrapped all that work and did it over again in the super-high resolution 192/24 HD audio format.
The result, according to an interview he just did with Digital Trends music contributor Mike Mettler, is a listening experience that nearly puts you on stage with the band. Go here for the rest of Mike’s revealing interview with this icon of American music.
For people who can’t see, finding a braille version of a book can be a chore, and forget about braille versions of menus or other stuff.
But scientists at MIT may be riding to the rescue with a small, finger-mounted device that converts text to spoken words in real time. The device itself is made with a 3D printer and while it’s still in prototype stage, the developers say the ultimate goal is to pair it with a smartphone so the vision-impaired can essentially read pretty much any document, form or even a computer screen.
There’s no specific timetable for a commercial product, but the MIT crew says another goal is to make the device very affordable.
And finally, you may remember a Kickstarter project called “The Coolest” that we featured last winter. Well, the uber-cooler project fell just short of its goal – but that was no deterrent to Portland, Oregon inventor Ryan Grepper.
He’s back with version 2 of the Coolest Cooler and we gotta say, it’s cooler than ever. In case you forgot, the Coolest is the Swiss Army Knife of summertime cooler tech. It features a waterproof Bluetooth sound system, interior LED lights, a clever center divider, a stash of picnic plates, a ceramic knife, charging ports for your gadgets, tiedown straps, fat wheels, a bottle opener and the coup de grace: a high-powered blender! Plus, you know, it’s a cooler as well.
Grepper is only looking for $50,000 this time around and a quick check of Kickstarter page shows he’s almost there [Update: he’s totally blown through the goal] so the timing looks right for The Coolest. If you want an early release, pledge $165 bucks and be The Man – or The Woman – at your next outing.
Your host today is Caleb Denison.
