Pono Competitor Geek Wave Crowdfunds Over $1.3 Million For High Quality Music Player
LH Labs, a part of Light Harmonics, successfully completed an Indiegogo campaign to fund their Geek Wave "high-performance portable music player." Their campaign goal of $38,000 was dramatically surpassed closing Saturday with $1,323,073 in pleges. Geek Wave can be viewed as a competitor with the PonoPlayer but seems to be of interest to a different crowd than Pono's drawing.
The Geek Wave campaign page describes the player as a "high performance music player you can take with you on the go, made for discerning ears." They state:
"We've taken the best ideas from the hundreds of different players on the market, and combined them with the high-performance features that we're known for, to create a no-compromise, high-performance portable music player."
Geek Wave Indiegogo Pitch
The "we" in question is LH Labs which is a part of Light Harmonic.
Apparently they have a reputation that allowed them to outperform in a music hardware crowdfunding campaign that came after a large wave of such projects most notably the PonoMusic player.
Here's are some of the specs:
The highest resolution audio available – 32 bit/384 kHz PCM capable.
Drag and drop music management with expandable storage – Easy to manage from computer hard drives.
An intuitive user interface – offers a standalone player and allow the user to control it with a smartphone.
Ten Processor Cores – Uses both a dual core MIPS32 MPU from Microchip Technology and an eight core 500MIPS CPU from XMOS.
A large, interchangeable battery – user-accessible. After the expected two year lifespan of the rechargeable lithium ion battery, the user can easily swap in a new one.
Congratulations to LH Labs on a great job. I look forward to seeing future reviews of Geek Wave.
More:
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) also blogs at DanceLand. Send news about music tech startups and services, DIY music biz and music marketing to: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
…but rather than having its own file format, Geek Wave is designed to handle as wide a range of audio files as possible…
Pono is not creating its own file format.
It does support multiple formats.
You should work harder.
You’re right, they’re actually focused on using the FLAC format but will play other files.
The way they originally described it in their Kickstarter made it sound like they were doing something more and since I don’t really care about hardware or digital file quality (and have no intention of covering it in depth), I didn’t pick up on that.
Since you’re linking to a journalism site I should inform you that I’m not a journalist, I’ve never been a journalist and I generally find journalists’ somewhat insufferable when they get on their high horse.