audio

The TCL A65K Soundbar is a compact, powerful audio solution for small spaces, featuring Dolby Atmos and AI room adaptation, but lacks immersive surround sound and can sound muddy on certain music. Priced at $499, it offers a solid balance of size and performance.

This paper proposes a continual learning approach to integrate disfluency tokens into pretrained ASR models, addressing catastrophic forgetting and improving recognition of disfluent speech.

A technique for handling sound from irregularly shaped audio sources in game development using point clouds to avoid direction switching issues.

Simon Willison updates his OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session tool to support the new GPT-Realtime-2 model and adds document context for conversational audio discussions.

This paper introduces MAD2, a new benchmark for multimodal claim verification in spoken dialogues, and proposes a calibrated fusion of audio and text models that leverages conversational context to improve verification accuracy.

A veteran audio reviewer shares their three go-to earbuds, with the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro praised for excellent call quality and noise cancellation, despite a default sound profile needing adjustment.

Google DeepMind announces Gemma 4 12B, a novel encoder-free multimodal AI model that integrates vision and audio directly into the LLM backbone, delivering advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities on laptops with 16GB of RAM, released under Apache 2.0 license.

Teenage Engineering announces APC-2, a professional audio disc recording system for cutting vinyl records in real time, built in collaboration with SUPERSENSE.

The article explains how the loudness war, typically a digital phenomenon, degrades vinyl record quality when compressed digital masters are used for vinyl cutting, using Prince's Purple Rain as an example.

A recap of an extraordinary week in open AI, featuring over 25 open-weight model releases across LLMs, image generation, audio/speech, vision, and video/3D, with notable contributions from NVIDIA, Google, and others.

Texas Instruments has released new 5532 chips that differ from the classic versions used for decades, potentially impacting audio applications.

Wired reviews four best Alexa speakers and smart displays for 2026, highlighting the Echo Show 11 as the top smart display and the Echo Show 8 (3rd gen) as the best affordable option, with mentions of ads and speaker quality trade-offs.

Xiaomi announces Sound Play, a compact portable speaker with 18W output, colorful lighting, 14-hour battery, and IP68 durability.

Xiaomi announces the Buds 6, featuring a comfortable semi-in-ear fit, richer sound, clearer calls, and smarter everyday convenience.

ChildVox presents a comprehensive benchmark for analyzing children's acoustic communication across developmental stages, integrating over 20 sub-tasks from 17 child-centered audio and speech datasets.

The Cearvol Wave Lite earbuds offer moderate hearing assistance but fall short in audio quality, especially for conversation and movie-watching, though they are reasonably priced for the hearing aid market.

Audiomass is a free, open-source multitrack audio editor that runs entirely in the web browser.

A blog post detailing the debugging of a recurring XF86AudioPlay key event in Emacs, traced to a headphone device driver using libinput and evtest.

Marshall announces the Milton A.N.C., a new pair of on-ear wireless headphones with active noise cancellation, available for $229.99. It offers up to 80 hours of playtime without ANC, Bluetooth 6.0, spatial audio, and a replaceable battery.

loopmaster is an IDE for livecoding music, enabling real-time algorithmic music composition.