Palo Alto Cubik HD Speakers
- Connects via USB to your smartphone, tablet, PC, etc.
- Lossless audio spoils you for regular old portable speakers
- Your poor 3.5mm jack will get lonely
- Makes it even harder to live without your phone
- The sonic limitations of low-bitrate MP3s are even more apparent
What is the shape of sound, man?
Wires are wires. Speaker cones are speaker cones. Improving on those basics is really hard. So to make their products stand out, today’s speaker purveyors are all about shapes. Orbs. Pills. Bars. Prisms. Wedges. Tall & skinny, short & fat, rounded or cornered. Any minute now somebody’s gonna go full Frank Gehry and make a speaker cabinet shaped like a crumbled wad of paper or a severed tongue.
Palo Alto’s actually good at the non-gimmicky aspects of speaker design, so they don’t have to go quite as nuts. In a nod to sculptural marketing, they have mounted their Cubik HD USB speakers on one corner, and snipped the tips of the corners off. But basically they’re just regular old cubes like you’d use to roll d6 or give your soup that rich bouillon flavor.
With that out of the way, they turned their attention to the guts inside. Here’s why, when you use it with your smartphone, tablet, or PC, the Cubik HD sounds better than speakers you plug into the headphone jack: because those speakers have to convert your computer’s digital signal into analog. With its USB sound card, digital signal processor, and digital audio amplifier, the Cubik HD keeps the sound digital and lossless all the way. Low and high frequencies alike come through undiminished, and the conversion noise is gone.
It’s as easy as that. Just plug your smartphone’s USB cable into the Cubik HD, and lossless audio shall be yours. (Or your tablet, or your MP3, or your laptop. You get it.)
Now, will you actually be able to hear all this? Will it make your music more emotionally and physically moving? We think so. But the important thing is that you believe it will. In a world where audio obsessives mount speakers on impact-absorbing gelatin platforms, certainly many of you will hear a difference between these and standard cheapo PC speakers. Even if they are shaped like plain old cubes.
