Apple Recalls Beats Pill XL Speakers As Fire Risk

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has released a voluntary recall announcement for the Beats Pill XL range of speakers, advising customers that the rechargeable device is a fire risk, and advising them to stop using the devices immediately. Apple bought the manufacturers out in 2014 after the successful release of the XL speaker range in November 2013. The announcement reads in part: "Because customer safety is the company’s top priority, Apple is asking customers to stop using their Beats Pill XL speakers. Customers who purchased a Beats Pill XL speaker should visit www.apple.com/support/beats-pillxl-recall for details about how to return their product to Apple, and how to receive an Apple Store credit or electronic payment of $325."

Comments

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[Anonymous Coward]

Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses
lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for
each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps,
assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on
SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much
worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started
collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I
downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just
sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrangewell don’t get me
started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps.
FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t
stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you
may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll
be glad you did.