A wireless speaker in every room? Yes please. Power-bricks, cables and Wi-Fi dongles cluttering up the place? No thanks. What about a speaker with built-in LED lamps that screws into your existing lighting fixtures and receives music wirelessly from almost any source. Tell me more!
MusicLites are a joint venture between Osram, the lightbulb people, and Artison, maker of satellite speakers, subwoofers and soundbars. Inside the large package you'll find the LEDs, a 70mm 25-watt speaker, an amplifier and a 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver (operating on its own network, not your Wi-Fi).
The signals come from either a USB dongle, a 30-pin iPhone dock dongle or an analog RCA adapter plugged into the sound-source. The genius is that everything is neatly packaged and can sit unnoticed in a ceiling socket whilst still providing the light of a 65-watt incandescent bulb. In theory, these units should use less power than a standard bulb.
If the price is right when these go on sale in the fall, I'm totally sold. I hate cables and I like sound in every room. The only problem I can see is that you'd need to have the light on to listen to music, and a bright overhead bulb is hardly the thing for romantic evenings in. And even if there is a switch inside the unit for killing the lights, the midget market will be immediately excluded.
While you wait for the MusicLites to go on sale, check out the pricey but effective Klipsch LightSpeakers, which Wired recently reviewed.
Artison MusicLites [Osram via Oh Gizmo]
OSRAM SYLVANIA and ARTISON Launch MusicLites [PR Newswire]
