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TECHNOLOGY

Swedish design firm makes big noise in Vegas

Swedish product design company Teenage Engineering made a splash at the CES fair in Las Vegas this week after presenting its latest innovation - the world's first 'cloud speaker'.

Swedish design firm makes big noise in Vegas

The OD – 11 Cloud Speaker allows users to stream music from cloud services without the need for a computer.

The retro-style cube-shaped speaker is based on a 1974 design by Swedish audio engineer Stig Carlsson, who challenged the audio industry in the 1960s and 1970s by designing loudspeakers for realistic home contexts, as opposed to the common practice of developing speakers for perfectly damped rooms.

Carlsson's original OD – 11 HiFi speaker was the most affordable of its time, with 10,000 pairs sold in Sweden alone.

Teenage Engineering has worked closely with the Stig Carlsson Foundation to fulfill his mission of creating great natural sound, the company said.

The speaker features an angled tweeter and woofer, with sound coming out from the top of the speaker.

The idea is that the speaker 'throws' the sound into the room so that it surrounds the listener.

The OD-11 is controlled by a knob-shaped remote, which can be pushed and rotated to adjust the volume or to skip tracks. It has a magnetic bottom so it can be attached to a fridge or to the speaker itself.

The speaker comes with several remotes in different colours so that each family member can have their own and can 'battle' for control over the music from different rooms in a home.

Teenage Engineering is a new and small company, set up in 2010 by Jesper Kouthoofd, who also co-founded Acne International and has been a consultant for several high-profile design and technology projects, including Ikea's camera Knäppa.

The company is based in Stockholm and employs 13 people who are either musicians or have worked with music production.

Teenage Engineering generated a great deal of interest at CES show, with tech magazine The Verge praising its “innovative, weird, wildly creative products”.

Along with the OD – 11 Cloud Speaker, Teenage Engineering also brought samples of its first product – a miniature synthesizer – to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. It has only been on the market for one year but 5,000 have been sold already.

The OD – 11 Cloud Speaker will be available in the summer of 2013 for the high-end home audio market.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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