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

Already been burnt by the price

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who pays $325 for a pair of speakers has already been burnt enough

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[jandrese]

They're crappy speakers in a tube. $325 was a ripoff.

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[HornWumpus]

At least half of 'audiophiles' are just morons trying to impress each other with how much money they spend on garbage.

I won't use the term anymore. 'Audiophiles' think LPs sound good, 4k$ is a reasonable price for a power cord and ceramic speaker wire hangers make the sound better.

We need a new term for 'cluefull audiophile'.

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.

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[DigiShaman]

Bit rot occurs when the physical media holding the files is unable to recover from a CRC. This is far more common to occur with CDR media, not so much with HDD in comparison. Should a file become corrupted, it can be heard as an audible "blip" or skipping sound. MP3 and FLAC is not immune to a hardware level bit rot issue. Lossless and lossy only pertains to data compression. And assuming no media failure, both the MP3 and FLAC files will be the same till the ends of time.

If you're really paranoid, you can always run a MD5 or SHA1 checksum against your entire library of files and keep the results in a txt document for future reference. Should you suspect a corrupted files, re-run the check. If the checksum is the same, no loss occurred. If it's different, yeah, corrupted file.

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[Megane]

Really! You can't even buy a good audiophile volume knob for less than $500!

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[sound vision]

There doesn't need to be a term for it, you can just be someone that appreciates good playback equipment and production in music. The word "audiophile" is now thoroughly linked with the kind of idiots you described. That kind of stench can never be thoroughly erased.

The incredulous claims about vinyl and cabling have been around for a long time, but more recently computers have opened up a whole new level of foolery. There are programs out there that supposedly "keep your audio data in the CPU cache" instead of RAM and have some BS rationale as to why that improves audio quality. Then there's the high-res music stuff that's been gaining particular traction in recent years (not to be confused with lossless compression which has gained traction around the same period) especially as "respected" musicians have come to launch placebo-based product lines for people who want their music oversampled to several times beyond the limit of human hearing. I keep this link handy as a particularly thorough rebuttal to the claims they make:
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo...
The other nice thing about this link is it's from xiph.org - you know the guys who developed FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, etc.? They know more about audio reproduction, particularly digital audio reproduction, than Neil Young will ever know. He lacks either the will or the mental capacity to educate himself on the shit that's coming out of his own mouth when he gets up on his "digital music is terrible" soapbox. It's like, even if they accept that etched PVC disks aren't the pinnacle of audio reproduction (welcome to 1940), they have to invent some convoluted, cumbersome, expensive way to do digital audio so that their playback system is esoteric enough to please the Gods of Rock. I think Neil takes a particular shine to the "expensive" aspect, since he stands to profit from it all. But hey I'm sure he's a renown philanthropist or something, plus remember he wrote a couple decent songs 40 years ago? Fuck Neil Young.

Re:Already been burnt by the price

[AmiMoJo]

Actually the vinyl thing is real, because of the loudness war. Long story short CDs can be a lot louder than vinyl. If you tried to put a typical 90s/2000s rock/pop CD mix onto vinyl the manufacturer would either tell you they couldn't make it or the needle would jump out of the tracks when you played it. It's a physical limitation of the medium.

So the mix on vinyl versions of albums has to be less loud, i.e. better mixed than the CD release. Okay, you add some noise, but at least the master isn't horribly distorted and full of clipping. It's a good compromise until they release the "remastered" CD a decade or two later.

Good news everyone!

[SeaFox]

Apple has a replacement product: The Beats Suppository XS.

Laying it on thick aren't they?

[pecosdave]

FTR: Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world

Yeah, I admit their hardware is pretty good, and it's certainly up near the top in design and reliability, but damn, saying it that way sure does look like a conflict of interest.

three hundred dollars for a desktop speaker??

[ihtoit]

ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS??

Re:three hundred dollars for a desktop speaker??

[danomac]

Which cost about $10 to make. No wait, less than that, as they obviously took shortcuts somewhere. Otherwise they wouldn't be catching fire.