towers

Definitive Technology's BP-8060ST ($999 each) is a big, but not too big tower speaker. A little more than 44 inches tall and just slightly over 5 inches wide, it doesn't dominate a room, until you listen. The BP-8060ST's gravitas and poise, even when cranked up loud, are truly impressive.

The market trend to smaller and smaller speakers gets me down. Yes, little speakers can sound fine--as long as you don't compare them to something more substantial, like the BP-8060ST. If you've never heard what a big speaker can do, you'll never notice how little speakers miniaturize the scale of the music or home theater experience. Right, size still matters.

The BP-8060ST is a bipolar design, meaning it projects sound forward and off the wall behind the speaker. The rear midrange and tweeter's output is exactly the same timbre (tonal balance) as the front's dual 4.5-inch midrange/1-inch tweeter speaker array (check out the picture to get a better idea of what this looks like). The bipolar radiation pattern produces a bigger, more spacious sound field than a conventional front-firing speaker would.

The built-in 300-watt power amplifier drives a 10-inch subwoofer, and the woofer's bass output is augmented with a pair of 10-inch bass radiators. No wonder this svelte speaker sounds so well endowed.

So the BP-8060ST eliminates the need for a separate subwoofer, and the advantages of using two subwoofers in the room instead of just one go beyond more bass output: the two speakers' bass is more evenly distributed throughout the room than a single sub's would be. Of course, the blend between the BP-8060ST's sub and its midrange drivers are part of the design, but it's easy to tweak the bass balance to taste with the subwoofer volume control on the speaker's rear panel. … Read more

Summer may seem like it's a long way off, but over here at Geek Gestalt, it already feels like it's just around the corner.

That's in large part because I'm already deep in the planning for Road Trip 2011, which will be my sixth annual journey in search of some of the best destinations around for technology, military, architecture, science, nature, and so on.

For the past five years, the project has been in the United States, and I've had the opportunity to visit the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, the Southeast, the Rocky Mountain region, … Read more

Back in the days before home theater, only the most devoted bass fanatics used subwoofers. It's not that people didn't like bass, just that they bought speakers large enough to satisfy their bass cravings. Then again, the bass response required to play music isn't as demanding as movie soundtracks, so even fairly small speakers with 4- or 5-inch woofers could produce satisfying bass.

The best of today's small- to medium-size speakers produce much better-sounding bass than speakers did 10 years ago, so if you're primarily interested in listening to music and your speakers have 4-inch … Read more

Wind data provider Onsemble announced today that it's completed a sensor network capable of tracking the wind data near 95 percent of the wind farms in Texas.

The Onsemble Network sensors, which collect data on wind speed, direction, and temperature, were placed on cell phone towers between 80 meters and 120 meters above the ground. As with other wind data sensor systems, the data is relayed back to a central hub and analyzed by a computer program to predict future behavior.

In the case of wind forecasting, Onsemble says collecting wind speeds at such heights, close to the height … Read more

Navy Patrol: Advanced Premium is the paid version of Navy Patrol, a naval-themed tower-defense game with several innovative features but a surprising number of missteps for such an expensive and mature app.

For the most part, Navy Patrol is a traditional open-map tower-defense game, in which you place defensive towers in a strategic pattern to defeat incoming waves of enemies before they reach your base. Fans of tower defense will find a lot to like here, with a handful of different upgradable tower types and some cool extras like tower-specific targeting controls (for tracking fast, strong, or weak enemies), optional … Read more

Several months ago I downloaded the AT&T iPhone app Mark the Spot, which has now been updated to version 2.0. Cell phone service isn't too bad in my New York apartment, but every time I had a dropped call, I'd fire up the app and register my complaint.

Now, the area where I live is in one of the denser residential areas in the city, so I don't think I was alone in registering my complaints. But just a couple of days ago, I received a text message from AT&T telling me … Read more

While these giants could creep you out while driving solo across the bleak countryside, anything that beautifies the landscape gets my vote. Here, Brookline, Mass., architecture firm Choi+Shine struts its stuff, literally, by taking ubiquitous electrical pylon and creating transmission towers that resemble a sculpture park of electrifying statues with heads, torsos, forearms, and legs.

While the Land of Giants project was originally submitted to a Icelandic contest aimed at obtaining new ideas and looks for high-voltage towers and lines, it could easily cross borders. Several versions exist, so take a gander at the designs here, which won an … Read more

With its hilly terrain, dense urban population, and plenty of government red tape, San Francisco already is a difficult place for cell phone carriers to build new antennas. But that process could become even more complicated if the city approves new aesthetics restrictions for antenna installation on public property.

Under the Personal Wireless Service Facility Site Permits Ordinance (PDF), introduced Tuesday by SF Supervisor John Avalos, antenna applicants would have to consider the visual impact of any new installations. The city could also reject applications based on that factor alone.

Jonas Ionin, senior planner for the San Francisco Planning Department, … Read more

Trenches is a fun and challenging World War I-themed trench-warfare arcade game with strong elements of real-time strategy and unit and resource management.

With its killer combination of winning art direction, well-designed gameplay, and a shallow but steady learning curve, Trenches is hard to put down. You control British troops advancing from trench to trench, left to right, across a long, scrolling map (which you can tilt to scroll, or touch and drag the skyline to move). You touch and drag units to determine their path, and you can use a two-finger motion to direct all onscreen units to retreat, … Read more