ultimate

This week, we check out your thoughts on self-driving cars, why humans can't drive well in the best of conditions, the ultimate car security system, and the price of diesel is tough all over.

Your navigation app may show you the fastest or most fuel-efficient way to get where you are going, but does it show you the most fun route?

BMW's Ultimate Drive app for Android and iPhone lets users search for, create, and share their favorite drive routes. The navigation app is less about how to get where you're going, and more like a travel guide for Sunday drives.

Using the free app, you can search for routes by location or sort them by length, newness, and user rating. As of today, there are a handful of submitted drive stretches for each location I searched. That may be because the app is only a day old, but it could also be because it's a little difficult to enter routes.

The app lets users create their own drives using Google Maps, but at least in the iPhone app, it doesn't have the benefit of letting users manually enter addresses or drag around route guides. You have to visually place the starting point, waypoints, and end point.

If you need to enter granular driving directions, which many secret stashes require, the app could get tedious. But once a stretch has been submitted, you can add comments, share the route via e-mail or Facebook, or send it to your GPS device. In the app, other users are free to add their comments and rate the route on traffic, scenic quality, fun, and amount of twisties. … Read more

UPDATE July 12, 2011: This offer has now ended.

Problem: I can't get the videos I took on my digital camera to play on my iPhone and other devices. Is there an easy way to do this and how?

Solution: There are many apps out there that will solve this problem for you, but here is one that allows you to convert your files of all popular formats, so you can play your home videos or audio files on your iPhones, iPads, Android phones, or game consoles like the XBox or PlayStation. And it's 75 percent off for … Read more

I've been a fan of Musical Fidelity from its beginnings in the early 1980s. The British company's original 30-watt-per-channel stereo A1 integrated amplifier was a hit with budget-minded audiophiles back in the day, and it also offered seriously expensive gear.

Musical Fidelity started making headphone amplifiers long before the current headphones craze started. The model we're looking at today is Musical Fidelity's pure Class A M1 HPA headphone amp ($799).

The HPA has very low output impedance (below 1 ohm), so Musical Fidelity claims it can "drive" any headphones with ease. The circuit is a fully discrete Class A design, with no op-amps in the audio path, so it's built like a small high-end power amp. The HPA has two inputs--line and USB--and there's a variable output, so the HPA can be used as a stereo preamplifier in a hi-fi system. It has two 6.3mm headphone jacks on the front panel.

Some previous generations of Musical Fidelity's styling were a little over the top for my taste, but the M1 HPA is understated and very classy. … Read more

Back in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, one of the favorite destinations for kids after school and on weekends was the local video arcade. Many readers will probably remember changing dollars for tokens, stacking up tokens and quarters on machines to indicate you "had next," and how quickly you could blow your money by playing game after game. Sadly, arcades slowly died out as home gaming consoles improved and stand-up arcade cabinets--for the most part--became a thing of the past.

When iOS devices and the iTunes App Store came along years later, the developers of those old games (… Read more

Developer Dave's Ultimate Football Results is a free Google Chrome extension that fetches results from the most popular soccer leagues from multiple BBC Sport pages and displays them in one page in Chrome. It's the fastest way to check the latest results for your team, league, or association.

Ultimate Football Results is compact and, like most Chrome extensions, installs almost instantaneously. It placed a soccer ball icon in Chrome's address bar; we clicked it to access the extension's setup options. This involved selecting feeds for four tabs, each with four separate frames containing a drop-down list … Read more

For most people bass quality and quantity loom large when judging headphone performance. Bass supplies the music's weight and power, so bass-shy headphones can sound thin and tinny.

Sure, the same argument could be made about speakers, but their bass is perceived in very different ways than headphone bass. Speaker bass is literally visceral, your whole body feels it, and you hear it filling the room you are in. Subwoofer bass is even more visceral, and there's no headphone equivalent for that.

So while a decent set of headphones can play low-bass frequencies that are in subwoofer territory, … Read more

I've reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed some of the very best custom in-ear headphones on the market, including the JH Audio 13 Pro headphones and the Ultimate Ears Reference Monitors, so I thought it was about time to check out an entry-level custom in-ear. The Ultimate Ears UE 4 Pro model retails for $399, and looks much like the company's other custom models. No surprise there; they all come from impressions made from the customer's ear canals, hence the "custom" part of custom in-ear headphones, from UE or other manufacturers. Each one is a unique, hand-built … Read more

It took a long time for me to work up any enthusiasm for the original digital consumer format, the CD. Coming from an all-analog perspective, first-generation CDs and CD players in the early 1980s didn't light my fire. The problem wasn't that they sounded "bad," it was that CDs robbed music of its soul and emotional connections. LPs' sound engaged you; the CD's sound was too easy to ignore. People put music on, and started reading, talking, working, anything but actually listening to music.

That's why I waited six years to buy my first … Read more