New Music Gear Monday: Marshall Stanmore iPhone Speaker

This is just about the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. It's the Stanmore speaker by Marshall Headphones (yes, that Marshall of guitar amp fame). The Stanmore is an extension amp/speaker system for your Bluetooth phone, but it also has 1/8th inch, optical and RCA inputs as well.

Powered by a Class D amp (I can't find a real power stat anywhere), the Stanmore is stereo with two 3/4 inch dome tweeters and a 5 1/4 inch woofer in the middle. The unit has the standard Marshall amp setup of volume, bass and treble, two standby modes to save power, two push buttons for source and Bluetooth pairing, and the same on/off switch found on their guitar amps.

It's available in black or cream color, and retails for $400, which also includes a coiled 1/8th inch input cable as well. Why settle for just any Bluetooth speaker setup when you can have a Marshall and be cool?

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The Studio In Your iPhone

Who says that the iPhone isn't a recording tool? Here's a pretty cool example of what can be done with a few apps and a good song, as One Like Son shows how they did it. Among the iPhone apps and accessories that I spotted were:

A Sonoma Wire Works Guitarjack audio interface
Apps
The Pocket Organ
AmpKit+
Multitrack DAW (which looks very cool for 10 bucks)
AC Core Mini
ThumbJam

I'd like to find out how the drums were done since it sure sounds like a real drummer. Regardless if they're real or programmed, this song just goes to show what's possible with your phone these days.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

NAMM 2011 Report Part 3

Here we go with Part 3 of my Winter NAMM 2011 report. Once again, the order is totally random depending upon how the pictures came up.


OK, we've tried every other material for a guitar body, how about glass? That's just what this guitar is made out of. I'd be really afraid to drop it. Looked good though.

This was the year of the iPad and iPhone accessory as they were everywhere. While iRig seemed to get all the publicity, there were probably a couple of dozen similar devices like this one from Sonoma WireWorks, although you can plug a mic simultaneously with a guitar in to it.

For you guitar players who can't get enough of fingering practice, here's a mini-neck that you can take everywhere you go.

And speaking of mini, for you bass players that just have to have that SVT sound, here's an Ampeg Micro-SVT amp and cabinet. It's small but packs a wallop with 200 watts into two 10 inch speakers.

This isn't a product, but I thought it was pretty cool. It's all 4 players of a band, each on their own individual display. It was so much more compelling than watching them all together on the same screen for some reason.

Paul Reed Smith came out with their own amp line, which sounded great in the demo. They also had one pulled apart on a bench in the their demo room. Take notice that it's point to point wiring, just the way the old Fenders and the like were made.

Tascam came out with their version of their groundbreaking Portastudio (complete with cassette tape) for the iPad. I wonder if it sounds as bad as the original?

The pickguards on these guitars change design and color about every 5 seconds. Unfortunately, the video that I took didn't come out too well. I wonder how distracting that would be for the player or the audience?

This is actually a musical device. The Reactable is a new way to make electronic music by placing different sound and control blocks on the table. It gives you instant visual feedback, but I have no idea how long it would take to really be able to make music with it.


The last part of my report will be tomorrow, and it will contain at least one significant product that I previously overlooked.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating the music business.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

The End Of iTunes?

Apple has recently approved the new Spotify app for the iPhone, which may have implications that go way beyond that of a normal phone app.

For those of you who don't know about Spotify, it's a Swedish streaming music service that has taken Europe by storm. In fact, England alone now has over 1 million subscribers, which is pretty incredible considering that there's only 60 million people in the country!

What people like about Spotify is it's iTunes-like simplicity and the fact that you have access to over 6 million songs (almost as many as iTunes). But unlike iTunes, Spotify is a subscription service, costing about £10 a month (about $16 US).

Industry pundits have been saying for some time that the future of the music business is in subscription, and of course, the record labels love it since they'd be getting a set amount of money every month (just like your cable company). In fact, they like it so much that all the majors have invested in Spotify, which puts them even more at odds with their artists, who are all pretty sure that they won't be seeing too much of the income given the "interesting" accounting the labels use.

To give you an example of the money we're talking here - if you have 10 million subscribers at just $10 a month, that's $100 million dollars! And that's projected from the US alone. It's great for the labels because it's a consistent income stream. It's great for the subscriber because he can access 6 million songs for $10 or so a month rather than getting only 10 songs from iTunes. But no one knows how that income will be shared with the artist, and that's what they're scared about.

But there's more. Why would Apple approve an iPhone app that would make the iTunes store potentially obsolete? Would it rather sell iPhones and iPods than downloads? Probably.

But don't be too shocked if Apple has a surprise up their sleeves, like a subscription service of their own. Could we be seeing such a September surprise at their "Let's Rock" announcement next Tuesday?