Spotted on the CES show floor: The ROCK-IT from OrigAudio. It looks like a small square case to stash headphones. But really, it’s a way to turn any empty cardboard box, hollow Tupperware or other object into a speaker for your iPod or MP3 player.

A small round ‘speaker’ pops out of the case and attaches to a cardboard box. Sound vibrations running through the device are amplified through the hollow box, just like a larger speaker. Alone, the device sounds like music from headphones you’re not wearing.

But attached to the box and it sounds like a portable speaker. The sound quality is what you’d expect from a portable speaker, but it’s a handy device if you’re traveling and don’t want to lug a sound system around.

Pre-orders are being taken at origaudio.com for $49.99. The gadget starts shipping on Jan. 18. More pics (click to enlarge):

For more CES 2010 coverage, visit the Gadgetress CES page at gadgetress.freedomblogging.com/ces2010.
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If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on a gadget that softens overly loud commercials, now’s your chance to get one for free — just tell your annoyingly loud TV commercial story in 500 words or less.

The contest is sponsored by Santa Ana-based SRS Labs, which I wrote about earlier this month. Its TruVolume technology has popped up in a few TVs and sound systems. It automatically lowers the volume of TV commercials. Read about my experience and watch the video at “SRS Labs’ gadget could end annoyingly loud TV commercials.”

For long-time readers, you may remember that I used to offer a round-up of contests that awarded geeky prizes. This is definitely one of them. Plus, since it takes some effort, there could be few entries. Hmm… should I bring this feature back?

Ian Hamilton, who writes for the Irvine Business blog has the  contest scoop in his recent post, “Hate loud commercials? Write a story about it and win.” The prize is Vizio’s new sound bar, a $199 $350 speaker with TruVolume built in. SRS has three of them up for grabs.

For even less time and effort, you could win a Samsung HDTV with TruVolume. Just watch a silly commercial and vote at www.srslabs.com/truvolume. SRS is giving away a 22-inch, 32-inch and 40-inch Samsung HDTV to the lucky voters.

Good luck!

**UPDATE: Added official comments from Logitech and Ultimate Ears.  See below.**

Irvine’s Ultimate Ears announced it is being acquired by Logitech in Fremont for $34 million.

The union may seem strange — Ultimate Ears makes custom-fit earphones for rock stars and non-celebs willing to pay $1,000 or more. It also has a universal-fit line that starts below $100, plus it just introduced a children’s line, starting at $40.

Logitech is best known for computer mice, keyboards and web cams (although it too offers some nice, higher-priced mice). But Logitech has also been expanding its audio line of speakers and headphones and earphones.

Says the press release:

The acquisition of Ultimate Ears allows Logitech to expand its portfolio of digital audio products, providing more options for portable music listening. The company already offers a line of digital music speaker systems for in the home and on the go. Logitech is also a leading worldwide provider of speakers and headphones for PCs. And the company recently introduced a portable wireless speaker product for listening to music stored on Bluetooth mobile phones.

So far, the nearly 40 people at Ultimate Ears will remain intact in Irvine with Bob Allison still in charge. Employees found out today but someone at Logitech apparently knew a while ago –UE earphones are already listed on Logitech’s site:

**UPDATE:** I just spoke to Allison and he said that he and UE founder Mindy Harvey had both been eyeing the mainstream retail market to get the UE brand out there. A few years back, the company took its audio technnology and created universal earphones in the $100 to $300 range.  But as a small company, it needed a bigger partner to help get product out there.

“This certainly gives us a chance to bring our brand to the world,” Allison said. “Mindy and I have have this passion to deliver solutions to emerging bands as well as to mass markets. But building that scale was something we realized was difficult to do by ourselves.”

Enter Logitech, a multi-billion-dollar company. Logitech already has an audio line and even sells a set of $100 wireless headphones, which was built in-house thanks to its 2001 acquisition of Labtech in Vancouver, Wash. It’s a group that has grown from 40 to 130 people. But Logitech is constantly seeking ways to improve and grow every product line, said Gerald P. Quindlen, Logitech’s president and CEO, who was on the same call I had with Allison.

Logitech’s past acquisitions included Harmony Remote, Slim Devices and WiLife. All of these brands had suprior technology so Logitech scooped them up and put them out before a larger audience. Quindlen believes he can build the UE into a global brand.

“If we didn’t see a retail play (with UE), it wouldn’t make sense for us to buy them,” Quindlen said. “We do have a headphones line but frankly, the technology we’re getting with UE is far suprior. We do not hesitate to kill some of our own (pre-existing) products.”

So, the UE brand is not going away anytime soon. However, we may see something like “Ultimate Ears by Logitech.” As for the link to the rock-star world?

“We think of that more as a prize we got as part of buying this company,” Quindlen said.

For a brief history of Ultimate Ears, here’s an earlier story I wrote: “Ultimate Ears making its earmark.”

Related:

My Ultimate headphone experience (Gadgetress, June 6, 2006)

Musicians love their custom-fit Ultimate Ears headphones, or monitors as they are called in professional circles. But who can afford the $1,000-plus price tag?

While Ultimate Ears has offered lower priced models, the Irvine company just launched the LoudEnough earphones for just $39.99.

These appear to be decent earphones, if you don’t mind that they are geared for kids.

And by ‘for kids,’ I mean they are colorful (available in mint, blueberry and plum), include extra small silicon ear tips and have a mechanism inside to cap the volume by 20 decibels to protect those delicate little ear drums.

“You’re almost chopping the volume in half,” said Paul Manfrini, who’s in charge of product development. “If we limit it so there’s a cap on the loudness, we’re going to help protect their ears.”

Ultimate Ears utilized technology it already offered in its Airline Attenuator, a small gadget that plugs into a user’s headphones and an airplane’s headphone jack. The attenuator levels volume so your ears aren’t suddenly irked when the pilot starts talking on the PA system. Ultimate Ears built an attenuator inside the LoudEnough earphones and that is what puts a ceiling on the volume by 20 dB.

“If you listen to something at more than 100 dB for more than 5 minutes, you start to damage your ears. This will drop volume down by 20 dB so if you’re around 80, you can listen for 3 to 4 hours,” he said.

“It’s not an end-all though because we don’t know if kids are going to crank up their parent’s stereo,” he said. “Parents still need to watch their kids.”

LoudEnough isn’t the only headphone out there for kids. I also spotted the AirDrives for kids and  the iHearSafe earbuds for kids (currently 3 for $49.99 on the Ingemi Corp. site).

More photos:

Related:

• My Ultimate headphone experience (Gadgetress, June 6, 2006)
• Ultimate Ears making its Earmark (OC Register, June 2006)

Irvine’s Ultimate Ears announced today its first voice-integrated product, earphones designed to work with the iPhone.

The$149.99 super.fi 4 vi earphones in “gunmetal silver” (at left) can be used, like all other earphones designed for the iPhone, to answer a call with music fading in and out just for the phone call. A pause button on the phones also allows users to pause media programs like YouTube and iTunes, skip through songs and answer or end calls.

Another Irvine company, Iophase Inc., this week announced a new version of its e-mail security product, Advanced Email Scrubbing 2.0. The program works to keep spam and viruses away from users and the update includes an updated interface and the ability to automatically find and quarantine spam that the user can still choose to retrieve. The program is priced on a domain basis, with $22.95 per domain and 20 cents for each user.

And the third Irvine company to release news this week was Atlus, USA, which announced Thursday a new game, Drone Tactics, for the Nintendo DS coming out March 25. Players create and command an army of drones fighting against the Black Swarm army.

The final O.C. gadget this week is from BenQ, with United States headquarters in Irvine. They announced Monday a new class of laptops — the dual-screened Joybook Q41. The laptop is the first to offer VoIP (voice over internet protocol) functionality — allowing users to make calls over the Internet right from an auxiliary display. The laptop also has a 14.1-inch UltraVivid widescreen, a 2.5-inch auxiliary display, a Intel Core2 Duo processor and Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.

Sick of the weak stereo in your car?

Santa Ana’s SRS Labs managed to get its Circle Surround Auto technology inside a car, the 2008 Subaru Impreza. This is the first vehicle to sign on with SRS’s new CS Auto technology, which, like other SRS products, makes audio from all sorts of devices sound better. Check out SRS’ demo on its home page HERE.

What’s the big deal? Circle Surround Auto elevates sound to ear level even if sound is coming from the lower speakers in the door or under the dashboard.

It also creates a ‘phantom center speaker’ to focus on vocals from the audio track and includes a channel-mixing feature. And for those who need a thumping bass but can’t afford a sweet system, the technology includes SRS Labs’ bass enhancement system to create a virtual subwoofer.

Let’s hope more cars will add the technology, especially for us cheapskates who don’t want to buy a better system for our cars.

Two things I learned after reviewing today’s gadget announcement from Anaheim’s Targus Inc.:

First, the Targus SoundUP  sound enhancer adds back data from the original recording that was lost in compression. And second, Santa Ana’s SRS Labs and Huntington Beach’s BBE Sound have a competitor, Phantom Technologies in St. Paul, Minn.

I’m not sure I believe the first part. Says Targus, SoundUP “enhances sound quality by up to 20-25 percent, revealing instruments and voices from original recordings that are typically lost during compression.”

If the MP3 file cut out the voices for compression’s sake, how can it recapture something that is no longer there? Enhance higher and lower sounds, yes. But recapture the original recording? Hmm…

SoundUP is a high-definition sound enhancer. Plug it into an iPod or MP3 player and it should make the music sound much better.

It’s slightly smaller than an iPod nano, uses 1 AAA battery and weighs less than 2 ounces. It also has an audio-out splitter lets two headphones share a headphone jack. Price $29.99.

The higher-end audio company Bang & Olufsen is launching some new products tonight at its showroom on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. This may be a hike for OC audiophiles but expect all the swank of a VIP party to introduce its “most highly anticipated product to ever be build in the United States in 35 years,” says the press invite, which I’m told is open to the public.

One new product: a loudspeaker that “performs just as a musician does in live format…” To demonstrate the new technology, Benni Chawes, a Danish musician who has opened for Ray Charles, will be performing so you can compare the live performance with the recording.

::event details::
When: Today, May 3, 2007 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Where: Bang & Olufsen Rodeo Drive, 369 North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, 90210

** Updated Sept. 22, 6:50 p.m.: A response from SRS Labs. See blow**

If you value the movie-theater experience where you hear sounds coming from behind you, you should check out the new lineup of software from SRS Labs in Santa Ana. New software launched today at the ongoing CTIA Wireless Show in Los Angeles (for more coverage, see previous posts).

Known for enhancing the sound within Windows Media Player with SRS WOW software, the company now has software to make headphones sound better, iPod video sound better and well, anything PC-related sound better.

SRS Audio Sandbox is the company’s collection of all the sound-improving software. A quick round up:

• SRS WOW HD – Improves sound of compressed audio files
• SRS TruSurround XT - If you’re listening to a surround-sound DVD or CD but only have two speakers (ie: stereo), this translates the surround sound into stereo without losing that surround sound experience.
• SRS Headphone 360: Lets you hear surround sound on headphones.

At CTIA yesterday, SRS folks had me listen to parts of the movie Dragonslayer on a iPod cell phone. In the movie theater, when you would hear the dragon’s heavy breathing behind you before the creature appears on the big screen, I could definitely hear some noise. But heavy breathing? I couldn’t distinguish it until it was pointed out to me. I probably had to be caught in the moment of watching the movie to notice it was the dragon.

Maybe I’ll try again, which I can do for a free 14-day trial. Try it yourself and post a comment below.

** Update Sept. 22 ** Says Benjamin Grier, SRS’s Product Marketing Manager: **

What you heard was one of our technologies, Headphone 360, using a higher end cell phone. As a suggestion, you might want to hear the SRS Audio Sandbox on your PC. If you try the SRS Audio Sandbox free trial (at http://www.srslabs.com/sas ) with any movie content (and choose our movie settings), you will get a much better idea of the end user experience with the SRS Audio Sandbox.

Good tip, Benjamin. I’ll check it out…

Just two years ago, I would have stared blankly at you if you asked me what a subwoofer was. But now, I want a set of $1,000 headphones.

That’s about how much Irvine’s Ultimate Ears charges for its custom, in-ear pieces it builds for The Strokes, Foo Fighters, Cake and whoever else will pay that much for them. The blue ones pictured were designed for Air Supply. (Air Supply? They’re still around?). While the pink ones with sparklies were designed for AFI for the MTV awards.

Actually, the highest-end models start at $900 and for a bit extra, UE employee & tattoo artist Adam Roberts will paint whatever you want on them. Why do they charge so much? Besides the cool designs and custom fit, the headphones have three speakers inside, each producing high or low tones — the high-pitched tweets and the rumbling woofs.

My story about Ultimate Ears is in today’s paper and linked HERE. But not everything fit. So read on if you’re curious about my own experience with UE, what UE is doing for the up-and-coming musician and why we may be hearing about this small, 20-person company in the future.

I stopped by UE’s offices last week and marketing guy Mike Dias and others gave the full tour. So full, they insisted I sit down and feel what it’s like to get a set of custom headphones made for me. So I did, biting into a piece of Styrofoam to keep my jaw open and my ear canal propped up. Not a pretty picture, eh?

Part of the reason why musicians love these headphones (a.k.a. personal monitors, in-ear headphones or inserts), they block unwanted loud noises on stage (shrill fans, booming speakers) so musicians can hear what they need to hear — one another, the sound guy in the back, themselves. Technically, its passive noise cancellation blocks 26 decibels of unwanted noise.

As Noy Soudaly squeezed blue goop (liquid silicon) into my ear, it felt like someone was sticking a squishy finger into my ear. Yes, that creepy. But Noy seemed like a good guy, plus he’s worked with a lot of big names. From the bluish silicon, which now looks like a chewed-up wad of gum, it would get scanned as a 3D image into a computer and then sent to a lab in Minnesota to create a hard shell.

It gets shipped back to Irvine, where Ultimate Ears adds its technology (two to three speakers), adds some color and then Adam draws something cool on each piece and, if you beg, the metal case the headphones come in. That’s about it.

Another reason for the high price? These headphones provide nearly the full range of sounds a human can hear. A human typically hears sounds between 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz, while the custom UEs range from 20 Hertz to 16 kilohertz. If you’re wondering about the 17 to 20 KH, most adults can’t hear those anymore because a person’s hearing degrades over time. I found a nifty chart on this from a story in last week’s New York Times. Remember the story about ringtones that only children can hear? The ringtone is at 17 kilohertz, which is a level of sound many adults can no longer hear. Try it yourself and see if you can hear this annoying buzz.

Of course for those of you who aren’t about to blow $1,000 on headphones, Ultimate Ears launched some lower-priced, universal-fit headphones two years ago. With prices between $100 to $250, these are still kind of high for some people. But they also get rave reviews from everyone, including Register headphone geek Matt Degen, who helped me test the UE Super-Fi headphones last year.

UE is doing pretty well in the universal market, which now brings in more revenues than its custom market. Both are still growing but the Super-Fi headphones are growing a “few hundred percent’ each year, says Bob Allison, the private investor in Irvine who helped fund the effort and is sticking with UE as it expands into bigger markets.

One way it hopes to grow is by reaching musicians before they hit it big…

UE has begun to market itself by attending big music events like Lollapalooza and putting its products in, for example, Super Bowl gift bags (hence the list of athletes that also love UE’s headphones). It also offers a software-based music player from TastyAudio that is different from other players I’ve seen. It just plays songs from yet-to-be-discovered musicians. Don’t like a song? Just skip forward? Love it? Hit “Remember” or “Share with a friend.” A simple way to learn about what’s new. UE also encourages artists to upload their own songs.

Photos of myself and the inside of the UE custom headphone were taken by Register photographer Mark Rightmire.